458 — Dog Breeding: Back to Basics with Dr. Marty Greer

Dog Breeding: Back to Basics with Dr. Marty Greer Dr. Marty Greer joins host Laura Reeves for a review of breeding basics for our bitches. How old? How often? How many Csections? What about an oops? We start with these basic questions and detour into deep dives on critical micronutrients, breed specific cysts, what dog bodies are most difficult for abdominal surgeries and much more of the fascinating exploration of knowledge with one of the country’s pre-eminent canine reproductive specialists. At what age should I breed my bitch for the first time? That depends on the breed. If it's a breed that needs to have hips X rayed after the age of two, then after the age of two is appropriate. A lot of people want to wait until the bitches are older, either because they want to see what kind of health problems they have or the bitch may have a career… when we start to see people breeding when (the bitch is) six or seven years old for the first time, we struggle a lot with fertility. So my recommendation is to not wait too long. If you have a breed that you can do hips early on or don't need to do hips or you don't worry about seizures when they are five, then breeding young is fine. I like to breed young bitches with a shiny pink healthy new unused straight off the showroom floor kind of not beat up and bedraggled when she's seven years old and now you want to use this really valuable frozen semen. Please don't do that. The higher the stress of the semen, like frozen and fresh chilled, the younger and more fertile the bitch needs to be. We can't have a subfertile male and a subfertile female and expect to have a good outcome. I don't like breeding on the first heat cycle for a couple of reasons. One is they tend not to be a fertile cycle. Two is the bitch tends not to be mature emotionally or psychologically. And three is she tends not to be physically mature. So I think that pushing to breed on the first heat is not a great idea. That does that mean it doesn't work … plenty of bitches that plan their own breedings with their own stud dogs in their house. That may have been the breeding that you planned to do after she turned 2 and she and he decided that they would preemptively do a strike. What happens if my bitch has an accidental breeding? You know when you get an accidental breeding, statistically it's 62% that get pregnant 38% don't. There are methods to interrupt those, but I generally recommend against them unless it's a really strong reason, like a brother sister or something along those lines. We have a lot of people who are embarrassed in their breed club, they're worried that people are going to drum them out. If someone tells you, and they have males and females that are intact in their homes, and they tell you ‘I have never had that happen to me,’ either they are lying to you or it hasn't happened to them yet. Because at some point the sex drive is strong and males will chew through doors and females will crawl over kennels. There are ways to interrupt pregnancy if it happens. You have three choices if you do have a mating that went better than you wanted it to. Most the time when we have people crying at the ultrasound it’s because their bitch didn't get pregnant. Sometimes it’s because their bitch did. You can either let her have the puppies and teach her to be a good mom. #2 is you can spay her, which of course is the end of her breeding career. #3 is there is a series of injections and oral medications that can be used that are not estrogen. So please, please, please no diethylstilbestrol, no ECP. None of those drugs. They cause bone marrow suppression and can cause your bitch to die. We can see pyometras and we still see people giving those drugs. So basically, we give prostaglandin and another oral medication. If somebody gets herself into a pickle, email me I'll help you out. I'm not going to go through the whole protocol because it's not really the kind of thing that