Episode 174: Managing a Stellar Stud Dog: Middle Age Through Senior Years

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT continues the conversation on raising a stellar stud dog. This part focuses on how to effectively manage the breeding of an aging stud dog, including mitigating fertility issues, using reproductive supplements, and more.

Starting at middle age around 5 years old, stud dogs may begin to have health concerns that can impact their breeding soundness. Physical health also can affect a stud dog’s libido. This episode focuses on how to effectively manage the breeding of an aging stud dog. A review of changes in semen quality, its impact on fertility and how frequently semen should be evaluated will be discussed. Ways to mitigate fertility issues and the use of reproductive supplements also will be reviewed.

Watch the video version of this presentation here.

Transcript

Nicole Engelman  00:00

Welcome to the Good Dog Pod. Join us every other Wednesday when we discuss all things dogs, from health and veterinary care to training and behavior science, as well as the ins and outs of Good Dog and how our platform can help you successfully run your breeding program. Follow us and join Good Dog’s mission to build a better world for our dogs and the people who love them. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. We are going to be presenting today on managing a stellar stud dog, middle through senior years, with our guest, Dr. Cheryl Lopate, who is returning to join us again for part two of this presentation. So just sharing a quick overview of what we're going to be focusing on today: so starting at middle age, around five years old, stud dogs may begin to have health concerns that can impact their breeding soundness. Physical health can also affect a stud dog's libido. And part two is going to focus on, how do you effectively manage the breeding of an aging stud dog? So I know we focused a lot in part one of the beginning of the life of the stud dog. So this is going to be a follow up to that, and we're going to do a review of changes in semen quality, its impact on fertility and how frequently semen should be evaluated. We're going to talk all about that today, and then ways to mitigate fertility issues. And the use of reproductive supplements is also going to be a topic that we cover. So I know that's filling a lot of questions that our community has. I saw some of the previously submitted ones already, and it sounds like this is going to address a lot of those. So, very excited to get into all of that. Like I mentioned, this is part two, and we're focusing on middle age through senior years. We're really excited, of course, to partner with Purina to bring you this webinar. This is a topic that is hugely requested by our community always, and we're excited that we can finally cover it, not only now, but so in depth witha two-part series. So please, as always, just continue sharing suggestions, sending them our way, or emailing them to us at breederteam@gooddog.com, because they are just always so helpful. And like I mentioned, we got a lot of previously submitted questions, so we're going to prioritize those first. And for anyone who is joining us that's new, just want to share a little bit more about Good Dog and how to join our community. Good Dog is on a mission to build a better world for our dogs and the people who love them, by advocating for dog breeders like yourselves, educating the public and promoting canine health and responsible dog ownership through events just like this. We use the power of technology to help Good Breeders run every aspect of their breeding program from start to finish, with tools like our best-in-class software to post your available litters, collect payments securely and connect with great and amazing Good Dog applicants from across the country. So if you're not yet a member of our community, we would love to have you join us, and you can do so by applying at Good Dog.com/join, which we will drop in the chat as well. And I want to share a little bit more about Dr. Lopate before I pass things over to her for the presentation. Dr. Lopate completed a master's degree in reproductive physiology and her veterinary degree at The Ohio State University. After a residency in comparative theriogenology at Purdue University, Dr. Lopate became a diplomat of the American College of theriogenologists. She continued at Purdue as a clinical instructor for two and a half years. During this time, she spent six months on sabbatical in Queensland, Australia, working at an equine and small animal referral practice. Dr. Lopate opened her Reproductive Revolutions referral practice in Portland, Oregon in 2003, and merged the practice with a general companion animal practice in 2011. She has a special interest in ultrasonography during pregnancy, high risk pregnancy, and male infertility. Dr. Lopate lives on a hobby farm with a Pembroke Welsh Corgi and an Australian Shepherd, a small flock of sheep for dogs to herd, the Cleveland Bay Gelding, two donkeys and a barn cat. I think that would make the most amazing children's book plot—just all of those animals. But that's an aside, maybe for another time. We are so excited to have you back here to finish up this amazing two part series. So Dr. Lopate, I'm going to pass it over to you to get the presentation started.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  04:06

I'm not sure that anything that happens on my property would be good in a children's book, but thank you for inviting me to do this series of talks, and I'm happy to do it. Male dog infertility is one of my great interests, and I think one of the most difficult things that we manage in a reproductive practice. So there's a lot to it. Okay, so today we're going to continue with our discussion of how to manage the older stud dog: middle age through senior years. So a dog's peak fertility, for most males, is going to happen between about four and six years of age. It may be a little bit later for the large and giant breeds, because they tend to mature a little bit later, but generally speaking, somewhere in that four to six year range is when we're going to have the greatest testicular mass, and that is going to equate directly to the number of sperm that that dog is producing. So assuming that the semen quality is good, he'll have the best sperm numbers between four and six years of age. And then, generally speaking, there is a gradual decline over time. Just because they'll have the most sperm then does not necessarily mean that they're going to have normal sperm or that they have modal sperm, but it really is just talking about the peak of their total sperm numbers, which is based on the density or the gram mass of the testicles. The larger the testicle, the greater the number of sperm. So there's a lot of negative impacts on fertility, and these things can impact our younger males as well as our older males, but over time, we'll see greater impacts on our older males, just because these things can be cumulative. So heat, which is one of the most common negative factors affecting fertility, can be environmental. So just the temperature outside, how much time the dog is spending outside versus how much time he's spending air conditioned, and then what the impact of their coat type is on that. So a short coated dog in 90 degrees is not going to be near as hot as a double coated long haired breed in 90 degrees, especially if their coat color is black. So those dogs are going to be significantly warmer. And so those are things to think about. If you have dogs that are heavy coated breeds, and it's in the middle of the summertime, trying to keep them out of the heat and in a cool environment is going to help them maintain a better body temperature, and indirectly, that makes their scrotal temperature better. And then we have direct heat, which probably in our show dogs, is impacted most by grooming. So we bathe our dogs, and then the coated breeds are going to get blown out, and they may have a heater directed at them, and if they happen to be sitting with their hind end towards the cage door, then the heat may be directed directly at their testicles. Or if they're in a metal cage, that metal cage may translate that heat to the scrotum. So things to think about, especially in coated breeds, when you're blowing them out, is to not get them too warm, or try to make sure that they can't get their hind end towards the dryer. Any type of illness can negatively impact fertility, whether it's something with a fever or it's a type of metabolic disease causing chronic stress to an endocrine disease like Addison's or Cushing's disease, diabetes; any of those things will negatively impact the dog's fertility. Chronic stress is one of those things that can definitely have a long term and slow but steady negative effect on fertility. Cortisol, which is the stress hormone, is released in a pulsatile manner in response to stress. So if they have an event that is stressful, they may have a surge of cortisol, and then it's going to go back to baseline. But dogs that are under chronic stress, they have constant pulses of cortisol, and those pulses of cortisol affect the other hormones, the testicular hormones and the gonadotropins. So dogs that live in large kennel situations where there's lots of barking and interaction, dogs are in kennels a great part of their day. Those dogs are going to have stress. Dogs that are out on the show circuit—even though they may be enjoying being out on the show circuit—it's still a stress to change locations all the time, to meet and greet new dogs, to be moved from one facility to another facility to another facility. So these things will definitely act as chronic stressors on dogs, and then our working dogs that are herding dogs and our police dogs, are under a tremendous degree of stress while they're working. And so these things will, over time, negatively impact their fertility. We have nutritional stressors, and that can be either too much nutrition, which ends up in obesity and then causes scrotal insulation, or dogs that are working hard and are having trouble maintaining their body condition, even though they're being fed a lot of high quality food, if they're in negative energy balance, a lot of the time they will have less nutrients for the seminiferous epithelium of the testicle, in the testicles where the germ cells are growing. And then there can be any type of nutritional stress or toxin from phytoestrogens or endocrine imbalance or endocrine imbalancers, which we'll talk about a little bit later here in this talk. So these types of nutritional stress can definitely impact the quality of the semen. We have toxins which can be environmental or ingested toxins, and some of them may be purposeful toxins in the form of supplements. And while we don't think of supplements necessarily as toxins, a lot of the supplements touted for helping reproduction are actually reproductive toxins. Like there are a few brands out there that have cottonseed meal as the number one ingredient. Cottonseed meal is a known toxin for sperm production, and there are some supplements out there that are to improve stud dog fertility that have cottonseed as the first ingredient. So you're thinking that you're helping your dog by giving him this reproduction supplement, but you're actually feeding him a sperm toxin. And then there's, you know, aerosolized toxins. They may be pesticides that are being sprayed in your area, there could be toxins in the water sources, heavy metals, coliforms, things like that, that dogs are ingesting if they're drinking well water, that can all affect fertility. And then aging itself is a negative impact on fertility. So we just know that degeneration of the epithelium in the testicle in terms of sperm production starts to not function as well as dogs age, and so we start to see problems with local hormonal environment as well as the nurse cells that are there to help the sperm develop.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  11:39

Alright, so how often should we be looking at our male dogs? And I think that doing routine semen evaluations for breeding dogs is something that should be done regularly, even if males are not being used for breeding or we don't have an intention to use them for breeding. Because a lot of times what we find is that, you know, out of the blue, somebody calls and says, “Hey, I'd like to use your dog for this breeding to my female.” And well, we haven't collected him for two or three years, and then you're in a scramble. “Oh, let's get him collected, see if he looks okay.” And then we find out, “Oh, he doesn't actually look okay!” And if we had been checking them frequently and regularly, we might have picked up on the drop in fertility and have been in front of the treatment of it, rather than trying to backpedal and then try to use a subfertile male to accomplish a breeding. So I think as a minimum, dogs should have a semen evaluation done at least once a year. That should include a physical exam and a prostate exam for any dog over four years of age. We'll talk about the prostate exam a bit later. So I'm not going to get into a lot of detail here, but we start to see prostate disease with regularity between four and five years of age, and so we really should be evaluating dogs starting at four years to determine if they have any evidence of prostate disease. If we have dogs that are getting used more frequently, then they should have more frequent semen evaluations. Semen quality can change on a dime. I've seen dogs where we did a collection at the start of a heat cycle for a bitch, and we had, you know, 70% normal sperm, and then two weeks later, when that bitch is ready to be bred, we have 40% normal sperm. So in two weeks time, some insult that happened to that dog six weeks previously is just starting to show up in the spermiogram in the evaluation that we're doing. So if dogs are being used infrequently, then minimally, they should be checked as soon as you know that that bitch is in season. And especially for my older males, I really like to check them once the bitch is in heat, just because we know that semen quality can change so rapidly. One of the things we'll talk about later is proximal droplets, and we can see a change in proximal droplets over just a few weeks time. And so in an older male, I don't like to check them, you know, two months before the breeding, and then assume that they are still going to look just the same in two months, because that's not always a very good assumption. Brucellosis testing should be done at a minimum annually, even in males that are not being bred because they can have exposure to brucellosis by aerosol contact, and that actually happens as much, or maybe more than venereal transmission does, so at least annually, minimally for dogs that are getting used frequently, every two months, because most of the tests that we use are screening tests, and so they're designed to pick up any possible positive. And so we have some false positives with these tests that require confirmatory testing, but we should minimally be testing with screening tests every two months. And if they're getting used more than once a year, but not more than a few times, then we should be checking them no more than every two months between breedings. So if I checked him in January, I shouldn't need to check him again until March. That's the next time that a screening test is going to come positive if he had an exposure at the time of the breeding. So no more than every two months or just prior to a breeding, if the dogs are not getting used frequently. So things that we should expect to happen in every single dog as they get older: we should expect that almost 100% of dogs are going to have prostate disease. Almost all dogs are going to have some degree of testicular degeneration, and most dogs—not all, but most—are going to have some type of mobility issue that may impact their ability to particularly breed naturally. May not affect artificial insemination, but may affect natural breedings. And we're going to talk about all of those things here as we go on, so ways that we can mitigate fertility issues: we have a dog that's older that maybe doesn't have the greatest quality semen. What can we do to help manage those breedings to be more successful? So the first thing is to use good ovulation timing. This means an accurate form of progesterone testing, and for the most part, there are a few in house machines that we consider to be accurate, but there are many that we don't consider to be very accurate. So making sure that, if we're using ovulation timing, that we're using a format that we believe indicates when ovulation happens with a degree of accuracy. And this becomes more and more important, the greater the fertility problem that the male has. So if you have a young dog and we're off by 48 hours on when we think ovulation began, that sperm is going to live for a long time in the bitches track. That's probably not going to be a problem for him. But if you have a dog that is supposed to have 500 million sperm, and he only has 100 million sperm, and there's only 50% of those that are normal, and it's 50% modal, we need to put that sperm in when those eggs are going to be most fertile and ready to be fertilized. So we need good, accurate ovulation timing. So check with your veterinarian about what machine they're using and what the degree of accuracy that we think that is. If you have questions about the machines, check with a reproductive specialist; they're probably going to have a better sense than a lot of the general practitioners who may not understand the different testing methodologies. The second way that we can mitigate fertility issues is getting that sperm into the bitches uterus, and that is going to be using either trans cervical insemination or surgical insemination, if your veterinarian doesn't do trans cervicals. And it has become very clear that we get better pregnancy rates with trans cervical insemination than we do with surgical for any type of semen that we're using: fresh, chilled or frozen. As long as your veterinarian is qualified and trained to do trans cervical inseminations, our pregnancy rates are anywhere from 15 to 20% higher with TCI. So the shift has been for more and more practices and veterinarians to use trans cervical insemination, and I think you should feel comfortable doing that when your veterinarian recommends it. But we want to get that sperm into the uterus and natural breedings, while theoretically we believe that's a sort of intrauterine insemination, it really depends on the length of the tie and the amount of prostatic fluid that that dog produces during the tie, whether the sperm are going to all get forced up out of the vaginal canal and into the uterus. So if we have a dog that has prostate disease and that prostatic fluid is bloody, then that may not be the best environment for those sperm to be suspended in, getting pushed up into the uterus. So in an older male doing a natural breeding, that may not be the best choice, and that's a discussion they have with your veterinarian. With dogs that have low sperm numbers or poor quality semen, we want to try to minimize the number of breedings so that we maximize the number of sperm for each breeding. And what I mean by that is we don't want to breed a dog that has a fertility problem five days in a row, because by the third day, he has no sperm left. And so the last two breedings, which are at the most fertile time of the bitch, the end of the fertile period is the most fertile time for eggs to be fertilized. If we've already depleted all of his sperm stores by the time those last two breedings come about, then we are not maximizing his fertility, so we shouldn't want to be breeding more than two times during the fertile period. And in some cases, if a dog has really little sperm numbers, we may only want to breed once during the fertile period right at the tail end, and get all that sperm into the bitch’s uterus. And then, of course, if we're collecting, using an estrus teaser to do the collection is ideal. The dog's libido is going to be better, which means you're going to get more complete ejaculation if you have an estrus teaser. Sometimes we don't have an estrus teaser, we might have to use swabs that we've saved or pads that have been saved and frozen. And that's less than ideal, but it's better than using nothing. Dogs being collected with no teaser at all are going to give us a much lower number of sperm in the ejaculate than if we have an estrus teaser. So always try to find one if you can.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  20:52

In terms of supplements to facilitate or improve sperm quality, there are no supplements that have been tested in dogs. We don't have any studies showing that any of these impact semen quality in dogs, but we have studies in multiple other species (swine, stallions, humans, bulls) that show that we will improve motility and morphology by supplementing these five supplements. And so really, I think that these are the five supplements that you should be concentrating on if you have a dog that has a fertility problem, and not the supplement that is out there that is designated as the one for stud dogs or the one that's going to help improve semen quality. If it doesn't contain these things, then it's just somebody saying, “Well, I think this is going to help his sperm quality,” but not having anything to back it up. So omega three fatty acid supplements have been shown to improve both motility and morphology. You want to always be sure that they are both mercury free and Xylitol free. Human fish oil is required to have mercury status on the label, because mercury is embryo toxic, and so fish oil supplements are very commonly used in humans and women. So the government requires mercury status, so the veterinary formulations may or may not be tested, but if you have a veterinary formulation, and it's not written on the label, it has not been tested, because any company that is going to spend the money to test for mercury is going to put that on their label. And then, in humans, the fish oil, you know, gives people that kind of that funny aftertaste, and so there's a lot of xylitol that's been added to it now to improve the flavoring. So just be sure, if you're using a human brand, that it does not have Xylitol in it, because Xylitol is liver toxic for dogs. And then a glucosamine supplement has been shown again to improve motility and morphology in multiple other species. DHA, which is found in the Perna mussel, has been shown to improve morphology. And when we're giving a DHA supplement, if it is in the form of Perna mussel, you want to be sure that they are arsenic free. So there are some mussels raised in some parts of the ocean where there is a lot of arsenic in the water, and arsenic is sperm toxic. So we just want to be sure that if we're giving them a supplement, that we're not feeding them a toxin at the same time. Vitamin E, zinc, and l'carnitine have all been shown to help with the environment in the testicle, sperm membrane integrity, and free radical scavenging, so kind of picking up the toxins that reside in the cellular environment. So these six supplements are the ones that you should concentrate on if your dog is having a fertility problem. Things that we don't want to feed, there's a very, very long, long list of estrogenic foods, almost all either grains, fruits, or vegetables. And so lots of things that we think of as healthy foods may also contain phytoestrogens, and we want to avoid those. We want to avoid any non esterified oils, such as flax, which is probably the most common one that's fed to dogs as a coat supplement. So if we have a dog that's having a fertility problem, we don't want them to be getting those types of phytoestrogens. Any type of pituitary extract—and there's a group of supplements that are made by standard process, which are perfectly fine supplements, but they are made of pituitary extract. And for our breeding animals, we don't really know what the impact is on the gonadotropins, so the hormones that come from the brain are by giving these supplements, so they're not ones that I recommend having our breeding males on, or our pregnant bitches. And then again, that word of caution, just because the supplement has the word stud in it, or fertile or sperm, does not mean that it's necessarily good for that purpose. So always, if you're going to use the supplement, check with a reproductive specialist, and I do encourage you to find a reproductive specialist rather than a general practitioner who's interested in reproduction, because the training that the specialists get in terms of these nutritional toxins is different than what a lot of general practitioners have. And that's not to say that there are not general practitioners out there that know which supplements are good and which are bad, but in general, if you're going to add a new supplement to your dog's regimen, best to check with a reproductive specialist. I always caution people about using herbal supplements that have multiple ingredients. Each ingredient by itself may be safe, but in combination, there's usually no testing. And so it becomes a little bit more concerning. When we have a dog that has a fertility problem and they're getting multiple herbal supplements, we don't know what the impact might be, and there's really no way to kind of discern those things. And just remembering again that there's no FDA monitoring or guidance on supplements at all. So nobody does any quality control on companies that produce supplements. They can say what they want to say, they can produce what they want to produce, and as long as it's not causing an overt health problem that somebody reports, that supplement’s going to be out there. So now we're going to kind of get into the nitty gritty of it. Changes in the spermiogram are what semen looks like. So as dogs age, we expect that sperm numbers are going to decline, generally speaking, and that is probably true of almost all dogs. Some dogs may have higher sperm numbers at peak fertility, and so when they start to decline, the numbers may not get low enough that they will impact anything. But if they had average sperm numbers, by the time they get to be a 10 or 11 or a 12 year old dog, they may be in a range of sperm numbers that is going to not be adequate to produce a viable pregnancy.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  27:23

We may see some dogs that will have such a decline that they become azoospermic, or they have no sperm, and generally speaking, these dogs are going to have some type of autoimmune disease affecting the testicle, or epididymis, the storage system in the testicle. Or they have developed sperm granulomas, which happen because of autoantibodies that are produced against the sperm themselves. So it causes the sperm to agglutinate together and form little plugs, either in the testicle or in the epididymis. Semen morphology may or may not decrease over time. We see some older dogs with phenomenal semen evals, and then we see middle aged dogs that have really, really poor semen evals. So it may or may not decrease, but one of the things that we really worry about a lot in our older males are proximal droplets. And so proximal droplets—that's this little white ball that you see right behind the head of the sperm, and what this is—that little ball—is the sperm cell, when it forms in the testicle, starts out as a round cell, and it has a nucleus and a lot of organelles in it that help it develop and then as it turns into the sperm cell, the organelles all get kind of condensed into this little ball. And when the sperm forms its tail, those organelles, they form into this little ball, and they're going to travel down the mid piece, and then off the tail, and then in the tail of the epididymis, right before they get ejaculated, that little droplet is going to fall off and it's going to be hanging out in the fluid. So normally, we see these little white droplets in the middle of the fluid, in the secretions, not still attached to the sperm itself. And so we see these droplets. There's a few situations where we see droplets. We see them in immature, young dogs, preputable dogs, because they don't have mature sperm being produced yet. We see them in dogs that are being overused because they're kicking out sperm faster than the storage time that is supposed to happen. So they're supposed to have 13 days in the epididymis if you're breeding the dog a lot, and he's used up all of his sperm, then the sperm, we're just kind of flying through that epididymis faster than that 13 days, and that droplet doesn't have time to fall off. In those situations, we don't think that there's any effect on fertility, but in an older dog that has a lot of droplets, here, the belief is that there is an underlying midpiece defect, and it is the motor apparatus to the sperm. And we think that there is some abnormality in the midpiece, or the attachment of that midpiece to the head that causes that droplet to stick. And so it can't fall off. It physically can't. And so it's not necessarily the droplet that's the problem. It's the underlying midpiece, but the droplet is the signal that we might have a problem. And so in these dogs, we find that once we have 70% of the sperm that have these droplets, the dog's fertility rapidly declines to the point where you might not get a pregnancy, or if you do get a pregnancy, it's going to be small litter size, and so anytime we collect a dog that has a lot of droplets, that's something that we want to have a discussion with the owner about. We might not get a pregnancy if we use the semen. We may not want to freeze the semen. But that said, there's a lot of reasons why they can have droplets, and some of those might not be defects that will definitively cause a problem with fertilization, and so a dog might have a midpiece defect that doesn't preclude fertilization, and in those situations, their fertility might be okay. So my recommendation, typically is, if we have a dog that has a lot of droplets, before we freeze semen on him and spend a lot of money freezing and storing semen, that we breed him and see if he can get a bitch pregnant with the droplets. And if he can, then go ahead and freeze him and don't worry about them. But if he can't get a bitch pregnant live, don't freeze him and store that semen and then go through the entire process of timing a bitch for a frozen breeding and end up with nothing. Motility may decline if there is a drop in morphology, so if all of a sudden something has happened to the way the sperm are being produced, or sometimes it may decline if the dog has prostate disease, so the fluid that the sperm are being released into has got a poor pH or a bad osmolality, or there's infection that may affect the motility of the ejaculate. So normal semen: we consider motility anything over 70% progressively modal. And we don't really care about total modal. We really care about the progressively modal sperm. So the sperm that are swimming in a straight line forward: 70% modal with a speed of greater than three out of five. That dog should have at least 10 million sperm per pound of body weight. So a 20 pound dog should have a minimum of 200 million sperm, and that's the bare minimum. Most dogs, especially dogs at their peak fertility, are going to have numbers that far, far exceed this 10 million. But to get a bitch pregnant, a 20 pound dog should have 200 million sperm. The morphology should be at least 70% normal. And I think one of the things that we see a lot when we get semen evaluations is morphology evaluations where there's 98% normal sperm, 99% normal sperm, even 95% normal sperm, these types of ejaculates, they just really don't exist. And it just means that we're probably missing defects when we're doing the evaluation. So the reason that there are a billion sperm and 12 eggs is because a lot of the sperm get lost in the process of travel transport, and a lot of the sperm are abnormal. So there's nothing wrong with having a dog that has 78% or 72% normal sperm. A lot of my clients will come in and we'll give them a semen eval and we'll tell them, “Oh, he's 74% normal.” And they will be distraught, because he's always had 95% normal sperm when he's been collected before. And I tell people 74% normal is a good ejaculate. We should not be upset about that. And he probably never had 98% normal sperm. They just weren't looking for the defects properly. And then daily sperm output: so how much sperm can a dog produce when he's being used every single day long term is not the same as the total number of sperm and the ejaculate. So a lot of times we'll collect a dog that hasn't been collected for a year, or he's never been collected before, and we get that first ejaculate, and let's say there'll be 2 billion sperm, right? And it's a way larger number than we would ever expect for a dog of that size. Say he's a 40 pound dog, and he gives us 2 billion sperm in that first collection, and then you collect him again in two weeks, and he gives you 400 million sperm. And you think, “Well, gosh, what happened? Something must have happened in the last two weeks!” But that's just because he has not been emptying the storage tubules out on a regular basis. He's not emptying a lot of sperm on a daily basis. And so that first ejaculate that you get has all that sperm that has been sitting in the epididymis for a really long time. And then the next collection is a much more realistic number for him. So always be aware that for that first collection, you may get a lot more sperm than what you will get when you collect him more frequently.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  35:15

So when we're doing this, our semen evaluations, we want to be sure we get a full semen evaluation with a stained morphology. We want to be sure that the person doing the evaluation has been properly trained to do an accurate evaluation, and then motility should be assessed to look for individual sperm motility. And this means, generally, that we need to dilute the semen, both semen, assuming that we're not collecting large volumes. Because most of the time when we collect semen, we kind of discard fraction one, we collect the sperm rich fraction, and then as soon as that is done, that's when we stop collecting. So we don't collect a lot of prostatic fluid. And so our volumes are not very high. And so we have pretty dense samples, and we need to be able to look at the individual sperm as they are moving. There's different methods to look at motility. We can look at bright field. So here you can kind of see the sperm, or when we use bright field, not quite as visible when we use phase contrast, it kind of highlights the sperm with a kind of a bright field behind them. So it makes looking at those individual sperm a little bit easier, and then with differential interference contrast, again, these sperm are highlighted in a little bit better format to evaluate motility. You can also do your morphology slides using DIC. You have to kill the sperm first and then look at it with DIC. Some people will do that, and that's not necessarily a stained morphology, but an accurate way to do morphology, as long as you are physically killing the sperm first and then looking at individual sperm under high power. Morphology should be done with a stain that is going to detect most of the major abnormalities. And so in veterinary medicine, we use eosin-nigrosin most. It gives this purple background. The live sperm is stained white, and it stands out really, really well against the background. So you can see the head, you can see the acrosome, you can see the midpiece. You can see the end of the midpiece right here, and then you can see the tail. It'll pick up on droplets, and it picks up on most of the acrosome defects. The one thing that it doesn't tell you a lot about is the nuclear content, the DNA. It tells you a little bit about that, but usually you need to do additional testing if you're looking at DNA issues. So methylene blue is used in humans for their morphology stains, and it can be used in animals too. It's just not used as frequently in veterinary medicine. And then Diff Quik, which is a stain that almost every veterinarian has in their clinic, will pick up some of the sperm defects, but you can't see droplets at all (proximal droplets or distal droplets) and a lot of the acrosome defects, you can't see it all. And so a lot of times you'll have a very modal population with sperm, and it looks good, but they have proximal droplets, and if you stain them with Diff Quik, then the evaluation says that the sperm were normal, but the bitch didn't get pregnant, and so we don't know why, and sometimes that's just because of the staining technique. So issues with fertility: these are the types of problems that we can see just in basic groups. And then the areas that we want to look at, if we have a dog that's having a fertility problem and has this type of semen. So we have the dogs that have normal sperm. They have normal sperm numbers, they have normal morphology, they have normal motility, but yet, they either are not getting bitches pregnant, they're missing or they are getting small litter size, despite having good breeding management and using intrauterine insemination. Okay, so these dogs may have prostate disease. They may have some type of chromosomal or genetic issue that is individual to that dog. They may have some type of acrosomal abnormality so the sperm can get to the eggs, but they can't complete the fertilization process. They may have some problem with their DNA packaging so they can fertilize the egg, but they can't join the chromosomes from the male and female together because the male chromosomes are abnormal. And then there's breeding management. So we're simply not breeding these dogs at the right time, or the machine that we're using is not accurate. We're not interpreting our numbers properly. We're not using breeding management. We're just breeding the dogs based on receptive behavior, and we're missing for those reasons. Then we have our dogs that have low motility. This is called asthenozoospermia. And with these dogs, we need to look at the prostate. They could have prostate disease. They can have testicular degeneration. Or they can have some type of infection or inflammation in the prostate or the testicles. They may have exposure to some drug or toxin. They may have a thermal injury or insult. They could have cancer. They can have ciliary dyskinesia. This is a problem of the cilia or the tails not functioning properly. And in these dogs, there's usually a history of some chronic respiratory disease, so they get chronic pneumonias, they've had a lot of problems with respiratory disease or rhinitis, sinus infections. And then we do a semen evaluation on them, we find that their sperm are immodal as well. It can be due to poor handling. So some type of contamination that we have from the point where we collected the dog, there's something on his coat that got into our sleeve and contaminated our sample; something on our equipment that we're using; we're not using a slide warmer, those types of things. And then there's fucosidosis, which is a genetic condition where the sugars are not metabolized properly, and so the sperm don't have the energy to move. So then the next category of fertility issues are dogs with low morphology. This is called teratospermia. And these dogs, we want to investigate their prostates. We want to check them for testicular degeneration, signs of infection or inflammation, exposure to drugs or toxins, thermal injury or overheating, cancer. Dogs that have not been collected in a long time, may have abnormal sperm just because they've been sitting in the epididymis for too long. Overuse: and so these guys will have more droplets. And then again, this fucosidosis, where we have this improper sugar usage, and it causes bent and coiled tails. And then we have dogs with low sperm numbers. It's called oligospermia. These dogs we want to investigate their prostates, cancer, seasonal issues, and are breeds that are seasonal breeders like the Basenji. Testicular degeneration, infection or inflammation in the reproductive tract, exposure to drugs or toxins, overheats, fear or anxiety, can result in partial ejaculation, neurologic disease, overuse (so we just depleted all their sperm stores), retrograde ejaculation (which is where they ejaculate all or part of the ejaculate into the bladder), hormonal abnormalities, and then partial blockages, so part of one testicle is blocked, but the other one isn't. And then we have dogs with no sperm. They're called azoospermic, and this can be due to anxiety or fear. Dogs that haven't been collected before, dogs that are timid, a complete blockage, hypo or aplasia of the epididymis (so there's a piece missing in the tubular tract, or there's a narrowing of the tubular tract). Testicular degeneration, infection or inflammation, exposure to drugs or toxins, overheats, again, retrograde ejaculation, hormonal abnormalities, neurologic disease, chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. And then in some dogs that have delayed descent, cryptorchidism can be a cause where there's no sperm. The testicle has been overheated for long enough that no sperm are being produced. So when do we want to look at a dog that's having a fertility problem? So if you have a dog that has less than 75% pregnancy rates with fresh or chilled semen, or a dog that has less than 60% pregnancy rates with frozen semen, we would consider that to be an infertility and should be worked up. Anytime you have a sudden change in litter size or pregnancy rate—so your dog's been doing great, been having normal litter size, gets every bitch pregnant—and then all of a sudden, 50% of the bitches are pregnant, and they all have two puppies in their litter. That's a problem. Any dog that has a history of infertility or subfertility, any dog that's had fever or a malaise in the last two months that has a planned breeding coming up because, you know, overheats are things that can severely affect semen quality, and we want to be in front of those rather than behind them. Sometimes, getting those dogs on supplements early may get them back into a usable state by the time we need to breed them. Any dog that's painful during breeding or when he's being collected and is ejaculating, any dog that has bloody penile or preputial discharge, so preputial drippings in the house, blood in the ejaculate, blood in their urine, they need to be looked at. And then anytime that we have a dog that we have a suspicion that they may have had performance enhancing drugs—this we see, probably most commonly in sight hounds coming off of the track. And some of these dogs go into a breeding program, and it may take them years to get their semen quality back.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  45:15

So changes in mobility and libido, we see, of course, arthritis and muscle wasting as dogs age, and both of these things may impact a dog's ability to breed naturally and to be able to mount a bitch, to be able to penetrate and then to maintain a tie. We see that with both of these conditions, we may see pain or discomfort with natural breeding. But in most cases, these dogs can be collected manually, although some dogs with prostate disease will be painful and we can't collect them manually either. Obesity can make natural breedings difficult. Just more weight to have to get up on top of the bitch, more weight for the bitch to have to hold up while the breeding is happening, and that those can cause problems. It's best to keep dogs lean and active, to try to decrease or to slow down the progression of arthritic change. And the leaner they are, the less problems they'll have with arthritis, because less weight to have to carry around. As we see dogs get up into their older years and hormone levels start to drop, the dog's libido or his interest in the females may also start to decrease. We can counteract this a lot of times with using gonadotropins and also use of estrus teasers, so having a bitch in season in front of them, rather than no bitch at all or just a pad or a swab. So we don't have time to get into all the different many, many causes of infertility, but they fall into these categories, and we're going to talk about a few of them that are more common. So there's infectious or inflammatory conditions, which can affect either the prostate or the testicles, epididymis. Musculoskeletal disease, which usually prevents breeding or makes breeding more difficult. Autoimmune disease, which can cause testicular degeneration. There's a whole host of hormonal issues that can affect fertility in many different ways. Behavioral problems that can be driven by anxiety or fear. Dominance behavior. And then just physical problems, so anatomic issues or diseases that animals have developed that affect their physical well being. Toxins, again, that are in the environment or inhaled or consumed. Some types of trauma can occur. Hit by cars with a fracture of the OS penis will affect a dog's ability to breed naturally, but not necessarily to be used for artificial insemination. Pelvic fractures, things like that. Cranial cruciate ruptures, where dogs can't breed because they don't have the use of a hind limb. Neurologic disease, so spinal issues can affect the ability to ejaculate or copulate. And then cancer, which can affect the testicles or the prostate, although less common in the prostate for in our intact males. So we're going to cover prostate here, because it's so common in our male dogs, and it's often a misdiagnosis. Benign prostatic hyperplasia. There's four conditions that we see in the prostate. Benign prostatic hyperplasia is the most common, and then we have prostatitis, which can be acute or chronic, and then we can see prostatic cysts, which often happens with benign prostatic hyperplasia, but we can also see them as paraprostatic, which is a separate disease entity, and then cancer, which is more common in neutered males. So benign prostatic hyperplasia is extremely common. In fact, it's so common that almost every intact male dog, if he lives long enough, will develop this disease. By five years of age, 50% of intact males have some degree of BPH. By seven years of age, 90% of them do. And the disease can show up as early as six months. So they don't have to be old to have BPH. It's due to a continued and persistent exposure of the prostate to testosterone. So we see an earlier onset in dogs that have more exposures to bitches that are in season. So dogs that live in large kennels where there's always a bitch in heat, they can always smell a bitch in heat. Dogs that are spending a lot of time at dog shows where there's almost always a bitch in heat, you may start to see signs in these dogs at a much younger age. Dogs can be symptomatic or asymptomatic, and it's often diagnosed just during a routine semen collection, where we find blood in either the first to the third fraction. So with benign prostatic hyperplasia, we have a symmetrical enlargement of the prostate. It's typically non painful. It may cause some problems if the prostate is large enough, with the dog's ability to urinate, and it may cause flattening of their stools, because the prostate kind of bulges up into the pelvic canal, and the stool gets flattened out as it passes over the prostate. We can see either bloody drippings or blood in the ejaculate, and we can also see digested blood, which is more of a brown color or a port wine color, if there is some fresh and digested blood mixed together. Benign prostatic hyperplasia is not an infection of the prostate, and typically when they have BPH, they do not have prostatitis as well, although it can predispose dogs to develop prostatitis. We can see retention cysts, which are little lakes of fluid in the prostate, little cysts where the glands get kind of choked off because of the pressure of the tissue around it, and so they can't empty, and these little cystic areas may predispose dogs to infection and abscessation. And so this is the typical look of the dog with BPH prostate gland here. This is a sagittal section of the prostate gland, and so we see this very, very bright white echo texture to the prostate. And it's a very classical appearance. Dogs that have BPH will have pH alterations in the ejaculate and blood, and both of these things can reduce sperm longevity. So how well a dog is going to ship chill, how well it will do for a freeze: dogs with blood in the ejaculate don't tend to freeze as well, and dogs with abnormal pH don't freeze as well, and it may affect the morphology of the semen too, causing midpiece and tail defects because of changes in the osmolality of the ejaculate.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  52:04

These dogs are at increased risk for developing prostatitis and prostatic abscessation because they have retention cysts. And so we want to address Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia when it starts, and treat them for it as long as they're intact. And this means that all dogs that are five years old or older need to be screened with ultrasound. It's very, very difficult to diagnose benign prostatic hyperplasia on a rectal exam because the prostate is typically out of our reach, a finger’s reach, in its location in the pelvis. The only dogs that we can generally palpate the entire prostate are the toy breeds. And in those dogs, sometimes when they have BPH, you can't palpate the entire prostate, so you can't get to the cranial edge. If you're putting your hand in the rectum here and you're feeling this little back edge of the prostate, and you're like, “Oh, well, this feels like it's the normal height,” you have no idea how far forward that prostate extends without ultrasounding that dog. So you should not trust a digital rectal exam to determine whether your dog has prostate disease or not. You need an ultrasound. Dogs should be treated even if they're asymptomatic. The most common treatment that we use is finasteride. It is a hormone inhibitor. It blocks the conversion of testosterone to its active metabolite in the prostate gland. So it doesn't change the dog's circulating testosterone. It doesn't change his testosterone levels in his testicle, only in the prostate gland. And so it's a very focused treatment, and dogs should be treated as long as they're intact. So just because the bloody dripping stop does not mean that you stop using the medication. You need to continue on that medication until the dog is neutered. He's never neutered? He's on it for life. Sometimes we'll use a drug called megestrol acetate if we have a dog that has a really, really big prostate and he's having trouble urinating or defecating, and we want to try to get the size of the prostate down more quickly. We might use megestrol acetate for a few weeks and then switch them to finasteride once we get their clinical signs under control. Benign prostatic hyperplasia is commonly misdiagnosed as prostatitis, and antibiotics are not indicated unless we have a diagnosis of prostatitis, so that means there is an increase in white blood cells in the ejaculate and there are signs of prostatitis on ultrasound. Blood by itself, does not mean that there's infection. Prostatitis is uncommon. It's more common chronic than active, but it's misdiagnosed frequently, and with prostatitis, there should be either pus in the ejaculate, so sperm and white blood cells, neutrophils, or pus in the third fraction, which requires semen collection to determine and we always want to check for prostatic abscessation when we do our ultrasounds, because if they have BPH and then develop prostatitis, and they have retention cysts, their risk of abscessation is higher. We treat prostatitis based on the culture of the third fraction. We need to choose our antibiotics carefully based on the dog's pH, or use an antibiotic that is called a zwitterion, which means it doesn't really care about the pH to be effective. And those are generally like the fluoroquinolones, enrofloxacin, ciprofloxacin, marbofloxacin. We usually treat for a minimum of four weeks, and often we need eight to 12 weeks or longer for chronic prostatitis. Sometimes acute prostatitis doesn't need to be treated as long but most chronic prostatitis requires long term treatment, and there's no reason to culture and ejaculate if there's no white blood cells in it. So if you have your dog collected and he has poor semen quality, if there's no increased white blood cells, don't spend the money on a culture, spend the money on a fertility workup. So we can see prostatic cysts, retention cysts. So this is another dog with benign prostatic hyperplasia. This is a transverse view. So one lobe of the prostate here, one lobe of the prostate here, the urethra runs up the middle, and then we see these little, small black holes that are small retention cysts, or they can be a little bit bigger; sometimes they join together, or they can be very, very large. And this is a prosthetic abscess here. It's close to the surface of the prostate in a couple of different locations, and there's greater risk that these are going to rupture into the abdomen and cause a life threatening peritonitis. And then we have periprosthetic cysts, where we have the bladder, which is here, this anechoic structure here, black, and then this other structure here that looks like another bladder, but is actually outside the prostate. The prostate is sitting back here. Paraprostatic cysts are not common, but we do see them occasionally. They sometimes put pressure on other organs, and they just will be removed surgically if they're problematic. Prostatic cancer is really quite uncommon in intact male dogs. It's much more common in neutered males. We typically have an irregular, asymmetrical prostate. There's usually mineralization, these bright spots, and you need to biopsy them to confirm this. We use chemo for treatment, and it's pretty uncommon. Testicular degeneration is something that we see commonly in older males. It's an aging change, and we see it manifest on ultrasound as these bright areas of mineralization inside the testicle. This structure here is normal. It's called the mediastinum test. It’s part of the collecting system. But all these little dots here, these bright white dots, that's a sign of calcification in the testicle. And if we do a cytology of the testicle, this is typically what we see a lot of: the nurse cells, but no sperm cells. Testicular degeneration can be just a plain aging change, so just a senescent change. It can be caused by autoimmune disease. It can be caused by toxins which are either environmental or nutritional and microplastics are kind of the latest area of interest of toxins in the reproductive tract. They have been found in large amounts when the studies that look at testicles, like 100% of the patients that are tested, even young animals, have evidence of microplastics in their reproductive traps. So I think it's an emerging cause of infertility; it certainly has been shown to be in humans. And then there's heavy metals, pesticides and other endocrine disruptors that can all cause testicular degeneration. Testicular cancer is something that's fairly common in older dogs. It usually affects one testicle first, but sometimes it can be seen in both at the same time. Most testicular tumors are benign and hormonally inactive, except for totally cell tumors, which can produce estrogens. Usually what we see is one testicle enlarges and feels firmer and the other one gets smaller. I think that it's best for people that have intact male dogs that they check testicles once a month for any changes in size or tone, and if you're seeing anything at all, then get them into your veterinarian for an evaluation. We typically need to use ultrasound to make a diagnosis. And like in this case here, there's a tumor here on the end of the testicle, and this is a dog that just came in for a fertility exam. He wasn't really having a problem. We just did a semen evaluation. Semen quality was poor. Palpated his testicles. They felt normal. Did an ultrasound and found the mass, right? It's very small, so you can't feel it yet. In a case like this, where you just have one small mass, sometimes you can remove that testicle, and the other testicle will return to normal fertility, and sometimes even better than what it was producing before. It's called compensatory spermatogenesis, when one testicle over-produces because the other testicle is missing. And so to kind of summarize, I think that probably one of the most important things to remember is that the earlier that we make a diagnosis, the greater the chance that we can successfully treat them. So if you have a dog that is collected for whatever reason, by somebody and they tell you that the semen quality is less than ideal, don't waste a lot of time doing things like, “Well, we'll culture the semen,” even though there was no white blood cells. You know, now we're going to treat him with antibiotics for two months. Oh, it's still the same that didn't do anything to fix him. Get to a reproductive specialist for a workup sooner rather than later, because a lot of times we end up seeing these dogs a year or two years from when the initial problem was diagnosed, and by that time, there's just nothing we can do anymore to turn them around, whereas if we would have seen them six months after the diagnosis was made, we might have been able to affect a positive change. Be sure to keep good records and seek out a specialist if you have pregnancy rates that are dropping, or if you have a male that is not getting bitches pregnant. Avoid fad supplements and try to reduce exposure to toxic substances. And remember that fertility can go from normal to very poor quality in a matter of days to weeks. So stay on top of your routine evaluations so that any concerns with their fertility are picked up as early as possible.

Nicole Engelman  1:01:50

Amazing. I love this visual to end on. So great. Okay, we have a few questions. Some of these might be just kind of like summarizing the larger points of this presentation. So for this first one, someone's wondering, what would you say is the proper age to retire and neuter?

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  1:02:11

I don't think that there is an age to retire or neuter. I think it's going to vary from dog to dog. So we have some dogs that are 15 years old and still have great ejaculates and are producing well. We might have to breed them by AI, but they're fine. So I think it just depends on your individual dog. And if a dog is not being used for breeding, then I think we should go, based on our new guidelines that we have been given for the best age to spay and neuter our pets by the Davis group and leave them intact until they hit that age and then neuter them. But if they're being used for breeding, I think that as long as their semen quality is good, there's no reason to neuter them because they hit a specific age.

Nicole Engelman  1:02:58

Got it. And I think our community is just really curious about your thoughts in general, on using older stud dogs, given that they're obviously healthy. Is there an increase in any type of health issues in the resulting puppies? And this is, I guess, related to the previous question: is there an age one should absolutely not use an older stud dog, even if they're healthy?

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  1:03:19

Yeah, I think that as long as semen quality is good, if fertilization failure does not happen, then you would expect that whatever genetic diseases that dog is going to produce, he's going to be producing those from the time that he's six months old until he's, you know, 12 years old. So that's not going to change anything. So it's all really based on what their semen quality is. And, you know, I think that once their semen quality is poor, then the risks of prostate disease start to become higher and higher the older they get. I would much rather neuter a dog, you know, that is seven years old and healthy that's not being used for breeding, than to wait until he has a prostatic abscess and a peritonitis or he can't urinate because his prostate is so big, and then he, you know, gets himself into a renal disease issue, because we've just let him go so long for no reason other than, you know, we just didn't want to do the surgery, or we didn't think about doing the surgery. You know, I think a lot of times those things, especially for male dogs, just get kind of pushed to the side. Oh well, you know, he's not bothering anybody, so we'll just leave him intact until he has the problem.

Nicole Engelman  1:04:37

So going off of that idea of, like, maintaining quality and having that be one of the most important things: what are some of the most important factors to consider when making an effort to maintain a really robust sperm count in an active stud? So are there any protocols that are important and how much does environment and activity really affect the viability of the sperm?

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  1:04:59

Yeah, well, I think definitely environment and nutrition have a huge impact. So you know, making sure you're feeding good quality food, that dogs are healthy, their blood work is good, their coats look good, they have good mobility, they have good health and activity. All those things are really important. And I think that certainly, if you live in an urban environment where there's a lot of pollution, your dog probably is going to be at greater risk for developing a fertility issue because he's exposed to so many more pollutants than if you live out in a rural area where the only thing you have to worry about is your neighbors spraying their trees and what's in your groundwater.

Nicole Engelman  1:05:40

Someone is wondering how often you should collect before a planned breeding comes up. So should you be doing it just for regular maintenance or something else?

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  1:05:49

Yeah, so probably that's the, you know, “do you need a clean out collection?” question. And I think that the vast majority of dogs empty their epididymis on a regular basis. So sperm get pushed up from the epididymis into the vas and then get dropped into the urine on a daily basis. So most dogs don't really benefit from a cleanup collection. Every once in a while we will have a dog that doesn't seem to empty quite as rapidly as most dogs do, and they will benefit. But I think that those dogs are usually picked up on your like, you know, you collect them the first time, and they've got a bunch of detached heads or dead sperm, and then you collect them, you know, two weeks later, and they look much, much better. Then that's a dog that I would say, “Oh, definitely do a couple of cleanup collections if you know you have a breeding coming up.” But in general, I think that the vast majority of dogs don't benefit from cleanups.

Nicole Engelman  1:06:49

Another question someone is wondering is if you think it's worth doing chilled semen, AI with older males?

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  1:06:56

I mean, I think it's worth doing chilled semen for any male, as long as the semen quality is good and he chills. Okay. I don't think being an older dog means you can't do chilled semen or frozen semen, but you just need to know that the older they get, the greater the chance that they're going to have some prostate issues. So you need to be on top of their prostate health and be treating them for BPH if they have it, because if they've got blood in the ejaculate, they're not gonna chill as well, and so you just need to be on top of their health. But I don't think there's any reason that you can't chill or freeze a 15 year old dog if his semen quality is good enough to do it.

Nicole Engelman  1:07:34

Got it. I think we have just one more question left. Are there any supplements you'd recommend in general, as the stud dog ages, or, like any specific things to keep in mind on that front?

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT  1:07:46

Yeah, I think that the six supplements that I listed are the supplements that I always recommend. So if I get a dog that maybe has starting to have some deterioration in semen quality, or I want to prevent him from having deterioration in semen quality, those six supplements that were provided in the presentation are the ones that I recommend. I find that the vast majority of supplements that my clients bring to me and say, “My dog is on this,” and when I look at the ingredients, I say, “Take him off of that!” Just because it says it's for a stud dog does not mean that it's actually for a stud dog.

Nicole Engelman  1:08:25

Awesome. I think that was the last question we had. But thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Lopate. This was an awesome presentation. I think our community got so much out of it, and we're just so happy to have you again to finish up this little series.

Dr. Cheryl Lopate, MS, DVM, DACT 1:08:43

Great, thanks for having me!

Nicole Engelman  1:08:45

Of course. And thank you to our community for joining us. Thank you, Dr. Lopate, for such an amazing two part presentation. Bye, everyone. Thank you for listening to the Good Dog Pod. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode, so be sure to subscribe to the Good Dog Pod on your favorite podcast platform.