Saturday 28 November 2009

Haircuts and surgical cuts







I am pleased to say that Oliver has left to join a lovely new family today, a couple and their white toy poodle. I think he has well and truely fallen on his feet and get the impression that he is going to be spoilt rotten. He had a wash and brush up before he left, and looked very cute.

Bella, our working cocker has more than made up for one pup leaving by producing 8 gorgeous babies. It unfortunatly wasn't trouble free. She started showing signs on the start of labour, being restless and a bit huffy puffy, on Thursday evening. So I had a restless night, as did she, setting my alarm every couple of hours to go and check that she wasn't in full labour, Friday morning and she appeared ok so I took the rest of the girls for their walk. At 10:30 Graham phoned to say she was leaking, so I cut the walk short and was back in about 45 minutes. She didn't do anything until 12:30 when out popped a beautiful tri coloured bitch, with apparently very little effort. Brilliant I thought, at last a considerate dog who was going to produce pups easily and at a civilised time - wrong. The next pup didn't arrive until 2:20 but was followed fairly quickly by the 3rd, then nothing. At 6pm we took a very relaxed Bella to the vets with her 3 pups. An xray confirmed therre were at least 3 more to come, one of which was already in the birth canal.
She was given a shot of oxytocin to try and get things moving, half an hour later and she was almost asleep in the back of the car. This was then followed by the vet attempting to pull the pup out, but it was just that bit too far back. At this point the only option was a caeserian. She couldn't have had more attention, there were 3 vets, 2 nurses, Graham and myself, she had timed her visit well :-). The pup who had been stuck in the birth canal was the only one that took a bit of real effort to get going, and my thanks have to go to Emma for reviving him, but within a very short period we had a total of 8 noisy pups. We were on our way home within 15 minutes of the last suture going in, and Bella was feeding her new brood as soon as they were in the whelping box, they are so much more resiliant than us humans!
Mum and pups are thriving and once again it will be nice to see a different breed developing (and no clipping, hooray)

1 comment:

Priestess~Harper said...

So pleased to hear about Oliver ~ you have no idea how close he was to coming to live this side of the Moors! :)