licking bottoms 1

The Poo Story

And I don't mean Winnie.

When a bitch gives birth by Caesarian section, it is said that there can be a little something missing in the instinct to care for her babies.  She can completely reject the puppies and refuse to nurse them or, even worse, try to kill them.  Usually, when she hears them crying, it speaks to something in her instinct and the maternal feelings kick in and then away she goes doing all the stuff she's supposed to do.  Or when the puppies start to suckle, the bitch is flooded with the mummy-hormones.

I didn't find any of this to be precisely true for Taika.  As I've said before, she didn't reject them, as such, she allowed them to nurse and she didn't abandon them.  However, for the first 2 days she also didn't take much notice of them.  When they cried, she ignored them; when they screamed, she just looked at them.  She didn't wash them and she didn't lick them or even poke at them with her nose the way Neka used to.  I wasn't surprised by any of this.  Quite apart from the fact that she just hadn't had the proper opportunity to bond with them, she had had surgery and she was probably feeling pretty rotten at first.

Unfortunately I didn't really notice the lack of vital licking until the second day.  After eating, the single most important function the puppies need taken care of is what is often euphemistically referred to as elimination.  Wee & poo to you & me.  Infant dogs are unable to get rid of their urine and faeces without help and the licking action of the dam stimulates them to eliminate.  She also cleans up all the stuff she produces this way (i.e. she eats it).

Neka, for example, kept all her puppies scrupulously clean.  I had to rush to beat her to cleaning up the tiny poos.  Of course, this attention to detail had it's less fortunate flip side.  Ever after, Neka has been the poo-eating champion of the south west.  Sheep, cows, cats, she's not fussy.  The phrase 'given with one hand, taken away with the other' springs to mind.

So the poor puppies were filling up on milk but for a full day no one was attending to licking their bottoms to empty them out again.  Eventually they started to explode!  There was pale yellow poo everywhere and I suddenly woke up to what was happening - or not happening, as the case may be.  The job became mine.  With cotton wool soaked in warm water, I simulated the motion of the dam's tongue to get them to wee and then poo.  There was a lot of poo.  And I didn't know how often to do it.  In the end I would go to work with the cotton wool when I heard them start to make the distinctive whiny, complaining noises.

But as it turned out, that wasn't often enough and then disaster struck: the puppies started to get diarrhea.  And what happens to anyone with that problem?  Dehydration.  And how fast do you suppose dehydration can kill a newborn puppy?  Exactly.

So I started to 'lick' the bottoms (with my damp cotton, you understand) every hour and I would get the puppy started and then present them to Taika to take over the licking, trying to teach her what to do.  She caught on to that pretty quickly where urine was concerned, but when I presented her with a dirty bottom to clean she looked at it then looked at me as if to say "You have got to be kidding," and turned her face away.  With a bit of patience and determination, I got her to work on both functions equally well.

Within a day I had the poo problem under control except for one puppy, 2 Toes, whose diarrhea continued a bit longer.  Worrying?  Oh, yes.  So out came the Lactol puppy milk and feeding equipment (tiny syringes) so that I could keep her topped up and hydrated.  You can see the effects of that day in her weight which actually dropped from 450g on day 2 to 435g on day 3.  But by day 3 she was getting back to normal as well, so I wasn't in a complete panic.  And I had had experience of hand-feeding a puppy before, so that didn't strike dread in my heart.  Well, not too much.

And then Taika started to really get the hang of things and would instigate the licking herself without any interference from me.  While the puppies were gathered around the milk bar, she would dip her head and push her nose into one after the other looking for likely bottoms to lick.  So what did I do?  I let her get on with it, that's what.

Two days later I regretted it, but that's another story.