First Time Puppies: Birth Experience
This is the first of our “Experience” series where we try to give you a peek into our process of having a litter of puppies for the first time. This is just our experience, not a recommendation nor how things will work for your dam.
For Zoe, labor was a long process. She appeared to have a false start about a day prior to her actual deliver. Perhaps something like braxton-hicks contractions. She was panting, standing a lot, but eventually calmed down later in the evening and went to sleep as normal for the night.
On the day of her actual deliver she began panting in the evening. She wanted to be in her whelping box starting at about 10PM (she seemed to realize this was the area to deliver in naturally). This began a night’s long process. She would pace, pant, and even shake. We encouraged her to lay down when she would and rest, but she didn’t sleep.
Around midnight she lost her mucus plug. Much like humans, there is a plug of mucus helping to seal off the cervix from the uterus. This looked like a yellow/green discharge that dripped down her legs.
At 4:00AM her “water broke”. This was likely just other liquid coming through her cervix from her uterus as she entered active labor. Each puppy has their own amniotic sack, and the first one was born intact, so it wasn’t likely truly water breaking.
Our dog was clearly unsure of what was happening and confused. That is probably to be expected in a first delivery. At 6:00AM it was clear she was in labor, largely laying down and shaking.
The first puppy was born at 7:15. Its sack was un-ruptured. The dam was clearly startled by the pain and process. She tried to run away from the puppy as it was coming out (obviously confused about the pain she was experiencing). We helped break the sack, rubbed the puppy vigorously with a rag while pointing downward, and got it breathing. We cut the umbilical cord, and helped the dog deliver the placenta and disposed of it.
This was pretty much the process for each deliver, though our dam did calm down and do much better with puppies 2-8. She would lay quietly for each delivery, but did not try to bite the umbilical cord nor eat the placenta, except for the seventh birth. This is the breakdown of deliveries, times, and puppies:
7:15AM Female 13oz
7:56AM Male 17.2oz
8:24AM Male 18.8oz
8:43AM Male 20.1oz
8:53AM Female *Stillborn
9:22AM Female 17.5oz
9:44AM Male 16.3oz
12:00PM Male 17oz
A couple of other notes on the deliveries:
Almost all deliveries were with intact amniotic sacks.
The stillbirth had a major amount of meconium (poo) in the amniotic sack. They were quite fully developed, so it seems they had some sort of trauma during the labor and passed away before delivery. We wonder if our dam’s extra-long labor maybe caused this one to detach earlier and then not be born until later in the rotation, resulting in her passing. Needless to say this was sad and traumatic for our family, but something to be prepared for.
Rubbing to stimulate the puppies to breath was much more vigorous than we thought would be necessary. It seemed most important to have them angled down and help use the rubbing to expel water from their mouth and lungs.
The final male was taken to the vet to help expel extra fluid. This was part of our preparation plan, and since our vet is only .5 miles from our house and it was business hours, this was an easy decision. He seemed to have been stressed by the long break between births, but subsequently did not have any problems other than needing supplementation to keep up in the first week.
In general, we felt like we were prepared for the birthing process, so though it was still chaotic at times and quite fast things went well. We had several people helping (two adults and two-five teenage kids at different times). We swapped off watching throughout the night, and were glad for that decision.
We found that using pee-pads for a base were fairly useless. They bunched up and didn’t contain most of the fluids. We chose instead to use towels and blankets. We were also very thankful for the shop rags that we simply threw away, so we used them generously in cleaning and for each puppy. Definitely a must have!
Like all births, this was messy, stinky, and full of fluids. If you don’t do well with that, breeding may be hard for you.
This was a great experience. Even though there was a stillborn, we feel like what we had read helped us be ready to help in the right ways and our dam seemed to learn as we went and do better.
