The Dream Litter

The Dream litter was born the day after I installed a new computer so I've been between machines, software and files. I finally have enough things on the same computer to get photos posted of our new pups.

Although small in every sense, the Dream litter has been a big challenge from the start. I am not one to typically use a lot of technology to accomplish breedings, believing that the dogs and Mother Nature know best. But, in this case, I really, really wanted to keep Corey's genes alive. She is a fabulous dog with an amazing pedigree. That fact that she doesn't have a lot of pups on the ground is not due to her lack of capabilities. So, I made an exception and used every technological advance that I knew of in order to get her pregnant. And it worked!

Corey whelped three puppies the night of April 8. First born was Miss Raspberry, then Miss Yellow and finally Mr Black. All were small but appeared strong and started nursing within a reasonable time. I thought there might be one more pup since the ultrasound had shown that but there was not.

The pups had a quiet first night and we were off to the vet's in the AM for a check up and to ensure there were no more pups. The pups' first day went smoothly although I noticed they were only nursing on the front nipples. Corey was quite full of milk and the pups were too small to handle the larger teats.

Unfortunately, that night things went downhill. Miss Yellow crashed at 1:30 AM. We revived and stabilized her but it happened again at 6:30 AM. We put her on glucose/electrolytes and thought we could save her but she crashed for the third time at 12:30 PM and there was no bringing her back. She died in my hands and despite Corey's best efforts, she could not be revived. We were heartbroken to lose this little girl but were glad she knew as much love, skill and knowledge as we could give her in the 36 hours she was with us.

While we were struggling to save Miss Yellow, we realized that Corey was verging on mastitis since neither Miss Raspberry nor Mr Black were strong enough to nurse on the larger teats. To solve this problem we borrowed two beautiful yellow Lab puppies to help manage the milk supply. They are the big kids in the photos :-).

More later...