personal hygiene

Subtitled: Don't eat while you're reading this!

This post should appear as if by magic while Keskiyo & I are away at the Bournemouth dog show. This is strictly for those interested in the grubbier side of breeding a litter of puppies and it ain't cute (well, mostly).

It seems the days of Neka's uncontrollable projectile liquid poos are far behind us (phew, that's a relief, let me tell you!) I think that lasted about 4 days. That was followed by fairly liquid poos, but not quite so frequent. Still, she needed 2 or 3 trips out during the night and a dozen during the day.

After a week, she has settled down to something looking quite normal and only needs to go out once during the night. I think we've even had one night that she made it all the way through. Hurrah!

When the puppies were a couple of days old Neka was starting to smell really bad. All the dried gunk (& no, I won't go into details, you'll be pleased to hear) in her knickers and tail had to go. So she had a very gentle scrub in the bath - that area only - and after that I felt much better about the babies snuggling under her tail. Before the quick sponge-down I didn't like to think about it! The smell is much better, although there is still quite a bit of dark red discharge each day. I expect that will start to decrease over the next week or so.

We're gonna be needing the carpet in the whelping room cleaned...

I did put down a "carpet" of cardboard before we started and I cover it each day with fresh newspaper but with all her digging and scratching and tearing the paper, she's managed to shift some of the cardboard to expose carpet here and there. And of course that is where she chooses to sit and lie when she's not in the box with the puppies. Yep, we're definitely gonna be needing the carpet cleaned.

The whelping box (now the temporary puppy pen) is fairly easy to keep clean. There's a thick layer of newspaper on the bottom and around the perimeter on which sits the polyester fur mat. Both the mats and the box came from Newdog. If you're planning a litter, I can't recommend these highly enough. Toni recommended them to me, and the fur mats have been great. My only complaint is that the outer mat shrinks somewhat in washing & drying so that the inner liner doesn't fit properly. However, that was easily fixed by SuperJay with his Stanley knife. Still, if Newdog would just either pre-shrink the polyester fur before making the mats or make the liners a few centimetres smaller all around, the Stanley knife treatment wouldn't be necessary.


So, each morning while Neka is tucking into her eggs, I transfer the puppies into their "holding pen" (a small box I used to keep them warm while the litter was being born). They're very quickly growing out of this box now, though, and I think I'll need a replacement before many more days pass!

Out comes the mat & the newspaper, in goes fresh newspaper and clean mat. Out comes liner from mat and is cleaned with Parvovirucide (great stuff, recommended by my friend Shelley, another seasoned doggie person). The polyester bit goes into the washing machine with normal detergent and another splash of Parvovirucide and then is hung up to dry for next change. With the use of the tumble dryer you could get away with only 2 mats, but I have 3 going most of the time.

What happens to all the puppy leavings? Well, Neka cleans them all up, for the most part. You know that horrible poo-eating habit of hers? It's my theory that it's related to her maternal instinct, as bitches lick their puppies to stimulate them to eliminate and cleans them up as they do. Nature is amazing. Some of the urine, however, seem to drain through the mat and run to the edges where it's soaked up in the newspaper. All in all, it's not difficult to keep it all clean.

The cleaning fun will really begin when the puppies move downstairs into their pen where I have to collect all their leavings before any little paws step in it. But I'll spare you that description.