black slime, green slime

Oh, I'm sorry - did you think this blog was all about puppy whiskers and waggy tails?  You must be new around here.

Just to make it worth your while clicking on the link, here is the family this morning - just a quick phone pic.

See how she is rucking up the bed out of the way.

And so to the slime.

The day after the puppies are born is the slimy day.  The green slime discharge is still coming from mama at this point.  Luckily, supplementation with raspberry leaf during pregnancy enormously decreases the amount of green slime produced.  When Emmi's mum, Keksi, had her first 2 cream puppies, they were stained green for the first several days of their life.  Ew.

And as for the black slime, well that's even worse, if you can imagine it.  As the puppies are born, mama generally eats all the stuff that comes with the puppy - the bag, the umbilical cord and the placenta.  The placenta is chock full of nutrients and blood, so it's good food for a new mama dog.  However, like ice cream, too much of a good thing is usually not such a good thing.  Too many placentas generally = the most foul black, tarry diarrhea.

(Bet you never thought you would have ice cream compared to placenta and black slime.  Have I put you off your porridge yet?)

I usually try to stop bitches from devouring all the placentas, if I can.  Believe me, I learned my lesson with Neka's 9 puppies and the resulting scary diarhhea.  However, Emmi was so on the ball that I didn't so much as see a placenta, let alone get the opportunity to rescue it from her greedy chops.

Yet, today, not even 48 hours after giving birth, I'm delighted to report that normal poos have resumed.  Halle-flipping-lujah for raspberry leaf, I say.

And as a reward for getting through the black & green slime, here are some 2-day-old puppies jostling for a good spot on mum's milk bar.




I don't know how they're supposed to get a good grip with their little paws on newspaper or - even worse - bare plastic.  But Emmi is quite certain she no longer wants them to be sweating it out on the vet bed and she keeps shoving it away.  It does create puppy chaos occasionally when one finds himself caught up in the vetbed, far far away from Emmi's belly. This bunch will end up with strong back legs.

green stuff & black stuff

Contented mum & growing babies













Remember when the 2 cream puppies of the last litter turned green?  I don't think I ever got around to blogging about why that happened.  Amazing, really, considering the gory detail I usually savour on this topic.  The green thing seems to happen to every litter, but it only becomes apparent on light coloured puppies.

For a couple of days after the puppies are born, bitches have a dark greeny-black discharge.  It's related to the placenta juice, to be blunt about it.  Eeuw is what I have to say to that.  I've had a couple of new experiences with this litter, one of which was my very first glimpse of a placenta.  Keksi was nursing her brood and dozing after delivering the 7th when I saw a slimy black mass under her tail.  I managed to scoop it up and get rid of it before she gobbled it up. 

And so, all that's left as evidence of the placentas is a couple of days of the sticky green stuff that stains everything it touches.  Most of it stays in Keksi's very furry tail and when the puppies burrow under her tail, they get greened with it.  I'm pleased to say that Hopea doesn't appear to be a tail-burrower as she has managed to stay more or less white - apart from the initial newspaper inking, that is. 

Tomorrow I'll give Keksi's back end a quick and gentle bath to get rid of the dried in muck.  It's not a nice thought to have the puppies nestling in there and it must be very uncomfortable for Keksi.  That will help to keep the bedding clean too.  At this stage it gets changed twice a day and gets grubby pretty quickly.

As for the black stuff, well I was pretty impressed with the way Keksi handled the black tarry placenta poos last time. This time?  I'm even more impressed.  Not only did she manage to expel the entire lot in one go, but Jay was the one who took her out to do so.  Result!

Having said that, there was still the - four? five? more? - trips outside during the night last night with squits.  Keksi's, not mine, you understand.  

And because I'm a bit tired from interrupted nights, I can't write much, but lucky you are getting this instead.  Check out the sleepy little brown contortionist as Keksi cleans his bottom.  And then there's the one who cries because she's stuck away from the milk bar but then takes off again after being rescued.  And the paws waving in the air.  Oh, and then there's the little wagging tails as they nurse.  I'm warning you now, it's all just too cute.




And in today's news: the puppies are really motoring around the box now.  I'm amazed by how strong this bunch are.  They're not usually so mobile quite so quickly, are they?  Oh, their lucky, lucky new owners!  But first, my several weeks with their active little legs.

poo day

Contented mum with her skirt of nursing babies this morning












Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will know that I never shy away from describing in graphic and sticky detail the, er, messier side of puppy rearing. You will remember the night of worry I had with Neka and her vomiting and diarrhea in the garden.

For Taika's litter, I had a very different poo story - but again it was such a worry.

Well, today is the day I regale you with tales of poo & placentas for this litter. It's not all puppy cuddles & warm milk, you know.

In the wild - and indeed in the captivity of breeders' whelping rooms - dogs and their relatives eat all the stuff that comes with newborn puppies, including the bag the puppy is delivered in, membranes, umbilical cord and placenta. It's kinda disgusting for us humans to consider, but it is a natural instinct, and in the wild the nutritious blood-filled placentas would be the only food the newly whelped dam would have for several days until she could leave her babies to hunt.

Not only do the placentas offer good nutrition for the dam, but some also believe that eating them encourages good maternal behaviour and the production of milk. So it's a good idea for her to have them. Some will even ask the vet performing a caesarian to return some of the placentas for this purpose.

So, we have adequately established that placentas = good. However, everything in moderation, is a useful tenet in this instance. I've seen it recommended that the breeder try to limit the bitch's consumption of placentas and take some of them away because in addition to all the good stuff, placentas - being so rich and full of blood - also produce thick, black diarrhea. You've seen or - even worse - smelled digested blood? Pretty disgusting. Well, placenta poo is digested blood with bells on.

That's what Neka was struggling with after her 9 puppies (and their 9 placentas) and that's what Keksi had last night.

But drama? Not a bit of it. Four times during the night she woke us and beetled off downstairs to the door. She's still moving very quickly for a lady who has just given birth 7 times, but she does take smaller quick steps! It's clear that she goes to the back garden to do her business at home, as that's where she heads each time. I have to call her back to the front door and the neighbouring park as we no longer have any grass out back thanks to past puppies.

Each time she simply scooted out to the park, relieved herself of a long wee and two great handfuls of black, tarry poo and then turned tail to return to her brood. No hassle, no drama, no accidents.

And this morning, a mere 30 hours after giving birth, no more black poo! Well, whaddeya know. I'm pretty sure I was still dealing with it 4 or 5 days after birth with the litter of 9. So perhaps the moral of this story is to limit the number of placentas eaten by the bitch to 7. That seems an ideal number. On this occasion, anyway. Have you ever heard that no two bitches and no two births are the same? Yeah, well, that. Inconvenient, n'est-ce pas?

There are some humans who even think it's a good idea to eat their own human placentas. But let's not go into that - diarrhea, green slime, black and red slime, vomit, etc, all of it is fair game on this blog, but not even I am willing to go there!

Did I say it's not all puppy cuddles & warm milk? Hell, it's not even mostly puppy cuddles & warm milk. And I haven't even gotten to the green stuff yet. You lucky people have all that to come.

But, first, here is a row of sleeping puppies from last night. You can see where Honey and Marilyn (and probably the rest of them too) have been wiping their green dye off onto the vet bed. It was changed for a clean one no less than 4 times yesterday. And you can see that Marilyn, 3rd from the top, is still sporting the slightest green tinge.



















And so to finish...
Someone asked me how I know that Junior is a domino and not just a brightly coloured black & tan. The answer is this: it's not always going to be easy to tell with puppies, but here was my proof with this puppy. The first indication of the domino pattern is in the white face - particularly the centre of the face where most other patterns are dark - and the very large white 'eyebrows'.
















Then, to look at the colour of the fur on his body; white on his belly and legs, shading gradually up through the sable-y colour you see here to a dark silvery-grey stripe down his back. Striking, no?















As it is with wolf sable puppies, I suspect this coat colour will change and change as time goes on. I'll keep you posted.

another week ...

... another show

The dog shows come fast & furious at this time of year. Last year I didn't go to many at all and with puppies in the house in the spring, I missed all those scheduled then too, including Crufts. Next year I'll be at Crufts to support all the Infindigo team, but my own dogs won't be there because their breeder Toni will be judging. So I'll just get to relax, socialise & watch it all from the sidelines for a change. It's usually such a hectic day that I miss most of what's going on. But for now I'm packing the shows in.

Last weekend Keskiyö was Best of Breed at Newton Abbot & South Devon Canine Society under judge Dave Weller who gave him Best Opposite Sex at Bath a few weeks earlier. Then this past weekend we had the 2nd annual madness that is the breed show and champ show in one day in Warwickshire.

I remembered from last year how very tiring the day was with 2 shows, all the running back & forth, the long drive to the Midlands from Devon. This year I thought I'd get clever & book accommodation somewhere convenient the nights before & after the show so we could have a nice relaxing weekend of it and enjoy the whole thing. After all, a breed show for our rare breed is a special event. Lots of Lappies, some we don't see any other time of year, an expert judge all the way from Finland. Wonderful, right?

Well, relaxing it wasn't. You know when people say 'everything that could go wrong did go wrong'? Yeah, that. It started a few days before the show when I found out that Emma M's entry for Taito in the breed show hadn't made it. After that it was one thing after another: non-existent postcodes leading to satnav disasters (three times - three! - in one trip), dead phone lines, difficult-to-find hotels, missed classes, country walks curtailed by rain, terrible traffic, planned pub lunches derailed.

What else? Oh yes, vomiting and diarrhea. No, not me. Have you seen how fluffy Keskiyö is? Well he ate something he shouldn't the night before the show and when I went to rouse the canines from the car at 6am I had an hour or so work cleaning up the mess in the crate. And the fur. Oh, oh, oh, poor dog! Wait a minute - poor dog? Poor me! Just lucky he prefers to sleep in his crate, I guess.

Anyway, if I do say so myself, I did a great job with limited equipment (water bottle, wet wipes, many towels, one small squirt of Impulse just in case). Toni very kindly agreed to show him for me and didn't he look gorgeous!






































Many thanks to Gareth Thyer for so generously sharing the wonderful photos he took on the day!

I think the judge quite liked Keskiyö, having got him to move & move again. In the end, though, he was only 3rd in his class. Well, the boy is, er, sensitive about having brushes & combs near his nether regions at the best of times. And believe me when I tell you that his nether regions were subject to never-before-experienced levels of attention that morning for the frantic hour before he went into the ring. In the end he was walking as if he was a tad too aware of his bottom and apparently the judge noticed. Oh well! Luckily it's all about the fun, not the winning.

Inko romped to 1st place in her class, being the only entrant (ahem). But she looked very sweet in spite of having just had the first enormous moult of her life. She was the prettiest little bald Lappy in attendance - fact.




















Rauhan? Missed his class for complicated, frustratingly unnecessary reasons. However, Katy did win the junior handling with him for a 2nd year - congratulations Katy!

And so on to the afternoon show where Rauhan won his class (also looking a tiny bit on the un-coated side) and Keskiyö missed his class due to there being not enough wet wipes in all of Warwickshire to deal with a 2nd small attack of the squits. Luckily Toni spotted the body language and got him out of the ring just in time. Phew and phew again. Inko was 3rd in her class and Taito 4th in his.

Was it difficult? Stressful? Oh yes. Was it worth it? Fun? Yup and yup. Roll on next year, at which time I will personally be checking everyone's entry and rationing out the food morsel by morsel the night before.

house training poll

With the last litter, the first puppy clearly asked to go outside for a poo at the age of 5 weeks, 4 days. Today, remarkably, at 5 weeks and 1 day, the first of this litter clearly asked to go out. Usko (Dino) and one other run around squawking when they need to go, but one puppy clearly stood up at the bars of the pen and yapped in the direction of the patio doors and the great outdoors. So, quick poll: who was the first puppy to ask to go outside for a poo?

You have until Thurs night to vote.

I have the puppies' weight update as well as some cute photos and videos which I'll try to get around to sorting out tomorrow, but my to-do list is steadily growing after a very full day today, so you may have to bear with me on that one.

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.