Yes indeed, our guide dog breeder is knocked up. My wife took her for her ultrasound, and there are at least 4 puppies in there, and probably a bunch more. (Her first litter had 8 live births.) The father was a syringe - the sperm coming from a Golden originally from Ireland.
Two puppies from her first litter have graduated and are now guides, and two more are still in training.
We get to play with the puppies before they go off to homes, sometime in June.
As for the mother - she’s giving me that “what did you let them do to me stare” already.
Awwww, that’s wonderful. DO post pics, will you?
Congratulations! I don’t know how breeders of breeds that have big litters manage… I have bred English bulldogs in the past, and I currently breed chihuahuas. Both tend to have smaller litters, very rarely more than 6 pups at a time. We currently have a litter of 5 that just turned 8 weeks old and are headed to their new homes this weekend. They are darling, but I can’t wait for them to go. It is just so much chaos! They squabble with each other, make messes, and insist on sleeping in bed with the rest of us. There isn’t room for people in the bed anymore!
Obligatory picture link.
I agree. I bred pugs, both black and fawn for years, and I was always at the end of my rope and more than ready for the pups to be out of my house. It’s amazing how much carnage five or six tiny blockheaded puppies can cause let loose in the house.
Well, yay and stuff! Golden pups have a really unfair amount of cute going for them and also tend to run to gigantic litters as well. A friend of mine had a litter of ten, ranging in perfect order from palest blond to cinnamon red–if you could’ve made them sit still long enough it would have looked like a paint chip!
We have a school for the blind near Portland and they use the area around my favorite coffee spot for training because of the wide range of surfaces and hazards along the streets and I just love seeing those beautiful and earnest dogs going about their business.
Best of luck, and post pics soonest!
Nice babies, Thinks2Much!
This may be a stupid question - but does a female dog get confused by getting pregnant without having gotten laid first?
I don’t think so - no more so than usual. My bulldogs were always AI (artificially inseminated) and my chihuahuas are always natural. Either way, the females seem like they blame you for their condition. This current litter, I did everything in my power to keep the two of them apart. She had a litter last heat - I wanted to give her a break. But no, they insisted on breaking out and being bad. When caught red handed, Molly had the decency to look sheepish, but Mijo, did nothing but smile proudly at me, hand in the cookie jar and all.
Sometimes they use a chaser - having her get humped by some neutered male, which is supposed to help things happen. I don’t know if that happened here.
The best thing about Guide dog puppies is that you bring your breeder to them a week before she is due, and the birth happens there. They keep her and the babies up there until they are weaned. Then you get to come up, collect your dog (actually officially their dog) and play with the puppies.
I will post pictures. In fact, tonight I’ll get a Flcker acct. and post some from the first batch.
The breeding department is very excited, because this gets new genes into the gene pool. Plus, our dog is famous for her disastrous second pregnancy. She had 11, but got infected somehow (no one knows how) and only had two living pups, one of whom had a lung problem and had to be put down. But since she went into labor a week early - which is usually fatal for a litter - getting even one puppy out was considered miraculous. He’s being raised in San Diego.
Our dog came from a litter of fifteen and were each approximately a pound and a half at birth. Late-term mama roughly approximated a beached whale, and whenever I’m asked if I intend to breed our dog, I produce a photo of the litter at their first solid-food feeding: the entire whelping room, layered in newspaper, is a teeming mass of puppies and a sea of wet food muck liberally covering everything–pups, floor, walls, and furniture. Nothing in this world could possibly compel me to get involved in that mess. 