WHITNEY AND JAMES ISSUE

This was one of the longest labours I’ve ever experienced.  Whitney started to scratch up seriously and would not go out on Thursday morning.  She kept this up right through until she produced the first puppy at 6:30 on Friday evening. She then proceeded to produce one puppy each hour and whence she had had six I I knew that there was at least one other puppy there but it was a couple of hours before that one came and it was the heaviest of the litter.  Unfortunately several hours after that she produced the largest puppy of all, a black male, but his placenta had come away quite some time before he was born and he was therefore dead when she finally got him out.

I have three black girls with varying amounts of white marking.  There are three gold sable boys, the firstborn of these is very much paler than the other two.  The other two are really dark gold sable is with black masks and black legs.  They all have white markings.

Then we have the little gold and white party colour boy.  He is only 95 g (3.5 ounces) but so far seems to be doing well enough.  He is warm and with my health has a full belly.  He was not at all warm after I woke up and I did what I have done before I used a handheld hairdryer to warm him up.  It really works he has not gone cold since and this was five hours ago.  He has also taken the bottle well.  Only time will tell.

My attitude is that I have a litter of three dogs and three bitches with possibly another dog.  I will do my best to that little puppy but he is very small.

My gut feeling about having a very large litter was correct all along and it’s the second litter of eight that I’ve had in less than a year! however this litter is markedly different from the previous litter where all the puppies were undersize and mothers milk failed.  These puppies are vigorously healthy and mother has plenty of milk.

I have learned something from this: I will never leave a coat on a bitch again.  I started to remove Whitney’s coat this morning when she stood up and a puppy was tangled up in the long hair.  Apart from this, I have never had a bitch produce such copious amounts of liquid and her coat was absolutely drenched and I got through a couple of rolls of Plenty soaking it all up.  The puppy being caught within her coat was the last straw and I cut it off.  She is now shorthaired dog but looks rather moth-eaten because of course I haven’t been I would do a proper job!

She is only three.  She has 10 tickets, 6-7 BOB, two Best In Show, one G2 and two G4. She also has about the same number of reserve tickets. Two years from now she will only be five, plenty of time to her coat to grow back if I want to show her some more. 

In the end I did what was right for her and for her puppies.

It just goes to show in this game you never know particularly with Lhasa Apso what colour you will get! Obviously I expected black as it is the dominant colour but I expected that most would be parti-colour and I certainly didn’t expect any dark black masked Sables!

it is going to be very exciting watching these grow up.