Episode 199: Newborns: When Puppies Crash and Burn!

Discover the differences between neonates and adult dogs and why the first few weeks of life are critical. Learn about optimal husbandry, emergent conditions, support of the neonate and when to involve your veterinarian.

Watch the video version of this presentation here.

Transcript:

Nicole Engelman  00:04

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. I want to formally welcome everyone to session three of Good Dog’s fifth annual health symposium. I know I've mentioned this already with our other sessions, but it's really hard to believe that we've been doing this for five years now. So if you are joining us for the very first time for any of our symposium sessions, welcome. I want to share a little bit about what this event is all about in case people are unfamiliar. It's really the highlight of our year here at Good Dog, and it's how we're able to give back to our community by making sure that education and cutting edge canine health and science is accessible to all breeders, no matter where they live. So we're really excited to bring this symposium to you every year, because it's how we all work together to shape a healthier future for our dogs. And these changes are small, and I know the goal of having a healthier future for our dogs seems very big, but sessions like these, participating in these presentations, are really how we help make that goal a reality. So you're all doing that with us just by joining. So thank you so much for being here. For session three of this month-long event, we have Dr. Julie Cecere joining us again to present on Newborns: when puppies crash and burn. I think Dr. Cecere has the best presentation titles out of all of our presenters. This one is no exception. So in this discussion today, Dr. Cecere is going to discuss differences between neonates and adult dogs and why the first few weeks of life are so critical. She's also going to cover optimal husbandry, emergent conditions, support of neonates and ones who involve your vet. So we want to extend a big thank you, of course, to our friends at Purina Pro Plan for bringing this event to life and sponsoring it. And in case you missed our other symposium sessions, we have recordings of those that we will drop in the chat now so you can take a look at session one and two. I will also mention: this is being recorded, so don't worry about taking notes or wanting to rewatch. That will be shared with all of you so you have that, and you can watch it as many times as you'd like. And last thing I'll mention: so in case you're unfamiliar, we are posting quizzes after every health symposium session. They're very short. They're also not very challenging, especially if you watch the symposium, so you can test your knowledge on what you've just learned. And then if you complete all four quizzes by the end of our symposium, you're automatically eligible to win prizes from our partners like Purina, Snuggle Puppy, Revival and more, and we will announce those giveaway winners at the end of the month. So we already have quizzes one and two up in case people haven't taken them and need to do them. And then this session’s quiz will be posted right after this in our private Facebook group as well as in our Friday newsletter. So those are the last housekeeping things that I will mention. I just want to share a little about Good Dog. For anyone who is new here and joining us for the first time, 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, educating the public and promoting canine health and responsible dog ownership. We're a secure online community that is built just for responsible dog breeders to connect with Good Dog buyers from across the country and find forever homes for your puppies. We help breeders run all aspects of their program from start to finish, everything from getting your new litter of puppies listed, accepting payments securely, communicating with buyers, sharing updates with buyers. All of those steps that happen between your puppies being born and going off to their new homes, Good Dog is really here to support breeders with that so they can spend time doing what they do best, which is raising healthy puppies. So if you're not yet a member of our community, we would absolutely love to have you join us, and you can apply to join at GoodDog.com/join. And I promise I will stop talking in just a second. I just want to share a little bit more about Dr. Cecere and her amazing background in canine health. Dr. Cecere completed her veterinary education at the Virginia–Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. She worked in private veterinary practice and commercial settings before returning for a residency in animal reproduction. Dr. Cecere is a diplomat of the American College of Theriogenology, an organization to which she has contributed in several leadership and service roles. She's a clinical associate professor of theriogenology at the Virginia–Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, where she has developed an internationally recognized clinical service for canine reproduction. Dr. Cecere lives in Virginia with her family on a small hobby farm and enjoys upland dog hunting with her children and riding horses in her spare time. So there is no one more qualified to be here today to talk about neonates and caring for puppies at that vulnerable, critical stage of life. So with that, I will pass things over to you, Dr. Cecere, to start our presentation.

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  05:14

Thanks, Nicole. I appreciate it. Hi everyone. I think my titles are cheeky sometimes, because I tend to be too cheeky for my own good. I don't like boring titles. I like things that kind of draw people in. That being said, my goal of this talk is to kind of talk about most of the things that we see as veterinarians that will cause and have caused puppies to crash and burn, and how we can potentially mitigate those and/or recognize things sooner, so that we might actually have a chance of heading off some of those factors. And so in talking about that, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I'm pretty sure that was accredited to Ben Franklin. And when it comes to neonates, there is nothing more that can be said, making sure that we are preparing and making sure that we know exactly the milestones that we're looking for and the things that can go wrong and when they will go wrong, being ready for those and recognizing them early is going to avert disaster better than anything else. This is actually a veterinary textbook, but it is so well written. It's a really good reference for all breeders to have if they're going to have babies. It is something that we use with our veterinary students quite often. I recommend it to all clinics to have on the shelf in case they need something as a quick reference. Dr. Google is going to really get you down a bad road, and Facebook is going to be much, much worse. So just be really careful where you get your information. That being said, keep in mind this quote as we're walking through today. So one of the things I want to start with is talking about just generalized loss. And what are the statistics around loss? What should we expect as we breed, and if you bring one litter a year, or if you're breeding 10 litters a year, depending on what your background is, or even more, biosecurity. Cannot have a neonate talk without talking about biosecurity, and that's going to be really, really important. That's why it's coming second. And then we're going to kind of delve into how neonates are different. And I'm not going to get into a real heavy discussion about drug metabolism and fat metabolism and those types of things, but things that are going to affect the ways that we have to track these animals and what we're going to do with them, and then general husbandry; 80 to 90% of the problems that we see are going to be husbandry related. And that may just be because of the situation. It may be circumstantial. It may be something that was completely out of your control. But that being said, if we can address husbandry, we can address a lot of problems—or at least rule that out as a major cause of whatever is going wrong or what potentially is going to go wrong. And then I'm going to touch on some common neonatal problems. And when you're supposed to involve your veterinary specialist to make sure that you're getting there early so that we can do intervention before it's too late, and that's really, really important. We don't have as much time with our neonates as we do with our adults. They're not quite as resilient as we would like them to be sometimes. 

So when we talk about puppy loss, this is kind of a little bit of a chart, just to kind of give you a visual. So across all litters born in multiple studies, about 20% of litters are going to experience some type of loss. And the sad reality is, is that the reproductive joke that we kind of had, and it's sad, but it explains: we have litters for a reason, and there are multiple babies in that litter, and the loss of one baby in a litter of 12, while tragic, is still you've got 11 other babies, but if you end up with a litter of only two or three, and you're losing one or two out of that litter, it's very, very different. But if you're just looking at all the litters as a whole, 20% of litters are going to experience loss. It's going to happen, and there's going to be multiple reasons for that. But what the nitty gritty is is most loss is going to occur in the first three weeks of their life: 75 to 90% of loss all occurs in the first three weeks of life. Typically, we talk to our owners about, if you get them to 10 to 14 days, you're doing really, really, really well beyond that, most of that is kind of freak accidents that happen, not necessarily anything that's too, too bad. We usually tell our owners, don't tell people how many puppies hit the ground until they're at least seven to 10 days old. You can say they're here. We're evaluating them. We need to get through this peripartum period before we start telling people that they've potentially got a puppy that's on your wait list. And that just saves you from the heartache of having to tell someone who was on your list that they're no longer going to be getting a puppy because of loss. The interesting thing is that early mortality has been attributed to trauma, sepsis, or hypoxia, and so trauma typically is mom sat on them, or somebody picked them up and dropped them. That's something that, you know, again, is outside of, really, the breeder’s control for the most part. Freak accidents do happen, but making sure that we're prepared for that and that we're trying to prevent those losses are really, really important. Sepsis is something where they have an infection. Typically, these puppies acquire this from a dirty environment and/or it was acquired in utero. If the entire litter is affected, it was probably something that happens late term pregnancy, whether it be an ascending infection, or the mom was infected with something. And then hypoxia, which is, you know, inability to actually oxygenate their blood, can come from premature lungs (so prematurity can do that), macroglossia (which means a very large tongue, it actually impedes airflow). And we talk about, you know, kind of our brachiocephalic contingent on whether or not those airways are fully functional that early on in life. And/or, again, if we have more complicated and more rare, if we don't have full insulation of the lungs, which means they don't have that full area to be able to exchange oxygen, and that obviously leads to poor doing and/or death. So again, just kind of as a whole, think that you're going to experience loss. It's normal for you to experience loss, but if you're losing several puppies in one litter, then certainly that's something we should be very, very, very concerned about. 

Okay, so I'm going to get a little bit on my soapbox on this one: Biosecurity is something that everybody should be discussing. And while we talk about it in the veterinary realm a lot, I don't think it gets talked about enough in our canine contingent, our food animal people tend to understand this, because their bottom line is finances, and if they're having and experiencing a lot of loss because of biosecurity issues, it can ruin them for years to come. For small animals, we need to pay attention to it even more so in breeding kennels. You’ve got to remember pregnant dams and their puppies are immunocompromised, so as long as a female is under the influence of progesterone and pregnant, she is immunocompromised, and taking her to dog shows, or having animals going to and from dog shows and coming back to the same kennel where the pregnant mom is is not a great idea. And so making sure that you're planning for those events and that we are—in the horse world, we call it “put the mare on the back 40.” You need to keep her separated from everybody. And so what we call it is a six week rule: three weeks before she whelps, and three weeks after she whelps, you lock it down. Nobody's coming in and out that you don't know. You're not bringing in new animals and cohabitating them within your household. Ideally, you would have a situation where you can sequester life stages so pregnant dams and/or whelping dams are not going to be in general population. All show animals ideally would not be anywhere, even in the house, with the animals that are pregnant and/or have puppies on the ground and that they're out in a kennel and separate because they're going to be fomites, going from agility trial or performance trial, conformation show, what have you—bringing things back into the household that aren't going to hurt the adult animals but that may hurt the puppies and or the immunocompromised dam. The other thing is humans are huge fomites, so we can actually touch something that has a disease, and we can carry it back to the individual and while it's not going to affect us, it can infect that individual animal. So make sure that we're washing our hands, we're cleaning appropriately, and then we're doing clothing changes as needed. So again, if it comes back to: you have the fortune of having a kennel and a dog house (like dogs in your house), making sure that we are separating ourselves when we're walking through those and that kind of flows into this other bullet point here that's called “order of care.” Ideally in your kennel if you have multiple types of animals—so let's say you've got animals that are out showing; okay, you've got old animals; you have puppies that are greater than eight weeks of age; you have dams with puppies; or you have pregnant dams—all of them should be treated very, very differently. And you should go from the most immunocompromised to the least immunocompromised in order of care. So you start with your less than three week old puppies and dams first. Then you go to puppies over three weeks of age second. Then you go to your pregnant dams. Then it's adults who don't leave the household, like these retired animals that are just kind of hanging out. And then we do our most high-risk as far as being able to bring contaminants onto your farm and into your kennel, which are the ones that are leaving the farm and being exposed to other dogs on a regular basis. And never should you go from those dogs that are show dogs after coming home from a show and go directly into a puppy whelping area. You should wash your hands. You should clean and change your clothes, because the biggest thing that we worry about is herpes. And herpes is devastating. If you've ever had it, you will never want to have it again, and you probably won't, because we're going to tighten down your biosecurity. But certainly we've seen problems with bitches that have been pregnant, that have been exposed to kennel cough. Unfortunately, again, they're immunocompromised. We've had bacterial problems, salmonella and campylobacter and then transmission of parasitic infections. And even though you've probably never seen internal parasites in your animals unless they were born to a sterile colony, all animals have parasites. And so we just need to be very, very careful with the immunocompromised patients and animals in your household. 

So I'm going to touch on herpes virus just because this is the gift that keeps on giving, unfortunately, and it's not really a gift. Typically, herpes virus causes neonatal deaths. Experimentally, we can infect pregnant dams and cause placentitis and abortion with stillbirths. But the majority of the time when we're seeing herpes virus as a problem, it's in that first three weeks after birth, and for some reason, we contaminated that litter. The thing is: it's a temperature sensitive virus. It replicates at an oral, nasal pharynx, so in the back of the throat, and it resets the thermoregulatory point, because it actually likes to have a lower body temperature to be able to replicate. That's why it likes puppies less than three weeks of age, because they can't maintain their own body temperature, and so it's easier for the virus to replicate. It's ubiquitous. It's everywhere. Depending on what country the paper was done in, you have anywhere from a 60–80% prevalence. That means out of 100 dogs, 60 to 80 of them are gonna have a titer to herpes virus. It's a latent infection. They never clear it, and unfortunately, it ends up being a high morbidity situation where everybody's gonna be affected. Adults are fine, because, again, they can fight off the virus, plus they probably have antibodies to it, but our naive puppies in the first three weeks cannot do that. And so this is really, really important to make sure that we are walking down our biosecurity to prevent herpes.

Clinical signs. “Fading puppies” is a term that I don't think we use a lot, but it's kind of a catch all phrase. Typically, I use “fading puppies” only for herpes, and typically these animals are cold, they cry, and they very quickly, kind of crash and burn. And there's nothing that you can do. You can try all the things that you want to do. We can do all of the things. Very rarely do these puppies actually survive. Again, it's high morbidity. Everyone's going to be affected for the most part, and it's high mortality. Most of the time, 100% of them are going to succumb to disease, no matter what. The biggest thing about this is if you are suspecting that you have herpes and you're in that less than three weeks of age—necropsy with your veterinarian is going to be the key to diagnosis. As soon as you know you have this problem, then it prepares you for what lies ahead. There is no effect of a treatment. We can try to support these animals. We can increase the temperature of our kennels. We can put them in incubators. We can try to support the babies, but the majority of them are actually going to succumb to the disease, and there's nothing that we can do about it. Antivirals aren't super helpful. It's really, really hard to titrate doses. And the few puppies that we know that have survived an outbreak of herpes in a litter tend to never be normal, okay? And so their development is very stunted. Their mentation is very, very unusual. So again, I use all of these pictures with these puppies at X pens to kind of say, okay, look, they're in jail. You lock it down, you don't let anything in or out. And, again, you ever have an experience of a herpes outbreak, you will never want to do it again, because it's just heart wrenching.

Okay, so now that we've talked about biosecurity, I'm going to move into a little bit more about puppies versus adults, and these are kind of the major things that we need to talk about. So puppies are 80% water. This is in stark contrast to adults that are 65% water. They require more frequent and high mass fluids going into their bodies. While puppies are born somewhat precocious, their internal organs are still developing. And what does that mean? That means any drugs that we may give them or any nutrition that may go in their body is going to be metabolized differently than in an adult. So if we are in a situation that we're going to have to actually treat them with things, we are going to have to be very careful about what type of drugs we're using, what the drug dosages are going to be and/or the frequencies. The other part of that is: because their internal organs are still developing, they have less energy stores. Puppies, when they're born, have very little fat stores at all, and that means that they have very little margin for error for them to go without energy. And so again, it goes right back to and cycles right in with that water. They need to be fed frequently and making sure that they're maintaining their hydration, but they're also maintaining their glucose storage for what little storage they have. The other thing is, is that they're immunocompromised. They have no adaptive immune system at birth. Okay, it develops over the next six to 12 weeks or beyond, but that's why we talk about colostrum and passive immunity being very, very important. When they are born, they have no way to fight off disease except for what they get from their dam. So being very, very careful that, again, biosecurity, that's why we put it first, is making sure that we're locking things down and there's no way that they're going to be exposed to something that's within our control. The other thing is, is, again, they're called polikothermic. They cannot maintain their body temperature. And so this is something that we have to be really careful about in our husbandry, and making sure that we are not compromising them by not supporting them in the best environment possible. And this, again—it goes back and it relates to that 80% water. If we're putting them in a dehydrating environment, and we're not supporting them with hydration, and we're not supporting the environment with humidity, then we're dehydrating them by default. Okay, so again, remember water, internal organs developing, they’re immunocompromised, and they can't maintain their own body temperature. All of these things taken alone, are very, very important. Put together, and if we fail at any one or two of these, then we're going to have a compromise neonate. 

So we talk about the 3 H’s, that’s what I teach my students, because there are words that correspond to these things. For you guys, we're going to call it the three neonatal killers. If they're cold, they're thirsty and they're hungry, we're in big trouble. Okay? Remember, they're polikothermic, or they cannot maintain their own body temperature. Also, for that matter, normal temperature of puppies is going to be from 96 to 99 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's normal. If you have a puppy that is registering 101 or 102, that is not normal, okay? If you have a puppy that's not registering on your thermometer, that is also very bad. The biggest thing about this is: one, we worry about herpes virus. Okay, are we low temperature because of husbandry, or are we low temperature because we might have a viral infection that's setting our thermo regulatory point? But the biggest thing related to this is that their GI system does not work when they're cold. So if they're not registering 96 or above, and you try to feed them, what will happen is it'll just sit in their GI tract and go nowhere. And then if we manage to get their body temperature up to 96 or greater, what will happen is we have this reflex opposite flow of their GI tract, so we start getting regurgitation. And so what happens is they regurgitate whatever has been sitting in their stomach, and then they aspirate. So again, this is the biggest one out of all of these. You've got to keep them warm, okay? And making sure that if you're feeding orphans or your supplemental feedings, that they are actually registering at 96 degrees Fahrenheit before you feed them. Otherwise, we're going to risk aspiration pneumonia because of that reflex opposite movement of the milk that's sitting in the stomach. 

The other thing is 80% water, guys. I can't say that enough. They are little water balloons, and if you think about how they're housed in the uterus, they're a fluid filled sack within a fluid filled sack, and then all of a sudden they're pushed out into the world—that's a very dehydrating environment—just sitting there. So if we're not making sure that they're taking in enough fluids, they're going to dehydrate, or if we're providing external heating sources and we don't address humidity, then we're going to be in big trouble. Okay, so again, first heat, then humidity. Then the last thing is again, and we kind of touched on this a little bit: their organs are developing. They don't have fat stores, so they have limited sugar stores, which means they cannot go without nursing for more than 24 hours. And, really, depending on the size of the neonate, they really shouldn't go multiple hours without nursing or being fed. So again, making sure that we're going through this and going very step wise. We’ve got to make sure they're warm, we've got to make sure that they're hydrated, and we've got to make sure that they're being fed. So we're going to kind of break these down. These are my notes for happy neonates. Okay, and you'll see them. It repeats and repeats and repeats. They have to be warm, they have to be fed, and they have to be well hydrated. 

And how do we achieve such things? So warm neonates. Recommended—these are kind of the breakdowns—for the first week, 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the whelping room. I put an asterisk next to this because if you have a coated breed and the dam is with them 24/7, you may not have to have the temperature that high, but you're certainly going to have it in the 75 to 80 range, easily. If dam is hot and the babies are spread out, they're pretty warm. If the babies are all piled up on each other, and you have what we call pig piles, they're cold, so you need to provide them some extra warmth. And then you can kind of see how we go from eight to 28 days. We're around 80, and then 29 plus, at 70 to 75. Again, take this a little bit with a grain of salt, because it depends on if you have orphans or if you actually have a coated breed who's in and your husbandry in the actual environment. You can provide heat lamps, or you can provide heated pads. So this picture that I have on here is actually a working dog kennel that we have that actually has recessed heating pads in their kennel floors. And you can see these babies are not cold. They are spread out on the heating pad, but they're absolutely loving it. But the biggest thing is that it is flush with the floor. Those babies can get away from this if they get too hot. Same thing needs to happen if you've got heating pads, which I'm not a huge fan of. This type of heating pad, I'm fine with. Or heating lamps. They have to be able to get away. You cannot cook your babies, because if you're providing external heat source trying to keep them warm, you're just dehydrating them in the same time frame if you're not providing humidity. It makes a really big difference. The other thing is: out of traffic areas. So if we're trying to put them in the kitchen or the living room, you're going to be in a drafty area. It's going to be very, very cold. It's going to be hard in a big area to heat if you need to. Plus, it can lead to your dam being a little bit more nervous. So that being said, making sure that you're having them in an out of traffic area, back bedroom, big bathroom, somewhere that you can close off and make sure that it's not going to be cold. And then, just as another reminder: that GI motility that's going to go from the stomach all the way through to the anus, in the proper direction, they have to be greater than 96 degrees for that to happen. If they're not that warm, do not feed them. Obviously, in the hospital, we've got incubators. Those people that have brachycephalics, I think it's pretty common for people to have incubators these days. The one thing that I can tell you is make sure that your incubator is actually measuring humidity, and that you're providing humidity while they're in that incubator, because you can dehydrate them very fast if you're only providing heat. Use an external hygrometer. Do not trust the readouts that are on the incubators. We have about four different types here at the Veterinary College, and not a single one reads out accurately. We have external thermometers that are not within the system, and hygrometers that measure the humidity that's not hooked into the system with these babies at all times, because we want to make sure that we're providing the heat, but we're also providing the humidity. Those two things go hand in hand.

Okay, so we talked about warm, and I'm going to keep harping on that, because it's not really talked about enough. The babies need to stay warm. The other thing that we need to talk about is fed. Okay? Colostrum is necessary in our neonates. Only five to 10% of IgG, because it's such a big molecule, actually passes through the placenta for passive transfer. Okay, that being said, we need to have them nursing on a very regular basis once they're born. One, because it helps the dam with oxytocin and natural contractions to milk those other puppies back down to the cervix. But two, because their GI tract closes in eight to 10 hours, and once that GI tract is closed to IgG, you cannot get any more passive immunity into them. So as we're moving through, making sure that that colostrum is necessary. Colostrum is not created equal from one dam to the other dam. The majority of the time, most of the colostrum is going to have 60% IgG in there, 35 to 40% IgA, and 5% IgM. IgG is the memory, okay, and so that's what they're deriving from their dams. But not all dams have the same immunity level in their colostrum, and we're going to talk about that in a paper, and kind of give you an idea here in a couple of slides. The biggest thing is, is make sure that these babies are nursing as often as you possibly can get them in that first eight to 10 hours of life, again, to try to get that passive immunity from the dam, and making sure that they're eating at least every two hours. If not, keeping them with the dam, 24/7, so the milk bar is open and they can go get food whenever they want. That's very important. Colostrum quality is actually very important. If it's so important for our babies in the first few weeks of life, it's very important to make sure the dam is healthy. And so there was this really interesting article for 2024 that actually came out. It's from an Italian group. They look at this quite often. They were looking at bitches that have protective antibody titers against parvo virus, distemper virus, and adenovirus. And so the first column is parvo. This is adenovirus, and this is distemper virus. And now we're looking at bitches that were vaccinated on a regular basis, per what our normal standard protocols are, and ones that are not vaccinated on a regular basis. And if you look down here, it's the percentage of the ones that are actually protected. So for parvo virus, actually, 90% of them were protected, whether or not they were vaccinated on a regular basis or not. But if you look at the numbers, the ones that are regularly vaccinated were the ones that didn't always have a protective immunity. Adenovirus, about 80% of them were affected. And this is something that can cause neonatal diarrhea, okay? And so we need to be really careful about that. And then distemper virus—this is the one that we really should be paying attention to. So even in the regularly vaccinated animals, only 75% of them had a protective titer, and only 33% of those that were not vaccinated on a fairly regular basis, which left us with 50% of them being unprotected. What it tells us is that our distemper virus vaccines are not very good. Okay. That being said, it still is a big difference between 75% protected and 33% protected on those that were following a standard protocol versus just a regularly vaccinated. And I know this is a hot topic, but the reason I bring it up is because—same paper—what they looked at is regular vaccination and irregular vaccination does dogs in the proportion of healthy puppies and puppies that had a pathological event—so whether it was diarrhea, pneumonia of some sort, some other cause that wasn't trauma or external that was directly related to poor vaccination status. And you can see that more of our healthy puppies fell into the regular vaccination column than they did in the irregular vaccination column. So overall, the conclusions of this paper was, while each dam may have a different titer to these specific things, it doesn't always correlate to what the baby is getting and how it's protective. But overall, they did find a statistically significant difference in the animals that were regularly vaccinated; they had fewer puppies that have pathological events. So, again, ties back to making sure that the dam is healthy, making sure that she's up to date on her vaccines. Those of you that want to do nomagraphs, that's fine, but the nomagraphs in the dam do not directly correlate—and that's been proven—they do not necessarily directly correlate back to what's going to happen in the immunity or in the colostrum of that dam. So be very, very careful. Realize that biosecurity is going to prevent us bringing these diseases to them, but be very aware. That's why veterinarians will talk to you about vaccination of your animals.

Supplemental feeding. So we talk about how they need to be warm, they need to be hydrated, and they need to be fed. These are all very, very important things. Sometimes we have to supplemental feed. Maybe they're orphans. Maybe you've got a litter of 13 and she's only got eight teets. There are a lot of reasons that we mind to do that. The bottom line is: follow the guidelines on the milk replacer for the 24 hour volume requirements based on the weight of the animal. To date, and I leave feline in here because this is something that I talk about quite often, there's no exact replacer, either for canine or feline. But a lot of people tout goat milk replacer versus cow based milk replacer. If you actually look at the fat content and the protein globulins that are there, cow based milk replacer is more like canine and feline milk than goat is. So again, keep that in mind. We stick with Esbilac. We don't go with the goat Esilac. That's typically what we use. I can't wait for Royal Canin—and I'm not touting brands here—but can't wait until Royal Canin actually comes into the United States. We don't have it right now. It's actually the most similar to canine milk. So if we're going to reach for something, if we had that, we would go for the baby dog milk. The other thing that we talk about is supplemental versus bottle feeding. Okay, this really depends on: one, if they have a good suckle and they're healthy, or if they're sick. And it also depends on how many you have to feed. If you have an orphan letter of 12 or 13—okay, it happens—bottle feeding is going to take you every two hours. You're going to take the entire two hours. You're not going to get any rest. You're gonna have to start back over at baby number one again, because it takes them so long if you have an appropriate slow flow nipple. We tell people to go and get the slowest preemie flow human nipple that you can get and feed them with that bottle. Yes. Are they going to get frustrated? Uh huh. Are they going to get tired? Uh huh. But they're going to have to work at it, and we're not going to have aspiration ammonia. Tube is my go-to. It's easy, it's fast, and it's going to be able to safely provide the adequate amount of calories in an appropriate manner. And you're going to have an idea of what's left in their stomach or not at the beginning of the feeding. And then again, talking about solid food can be introduced at three to four weeks of age. That's normal weaning. If we have orphans, we can push it to two and a half weeks if we absolutely have to. But then again, just some things to think about.

Hydrated neonates are going to be the last thing that we talk about. And, again, it goes into that fed and warm, okay? If we're providing external heating sources and we're not providing humidity, then we're not really keeping them hydrated. Fed—same thing. We're going to be able to hydrate them through their stomachs, but we need to make sure that we're doing it appropriately. So again, humidity should be set in an area that is getting external heat sources at 55–60%. Most of the time if you're at 45–50% just general humidity in the air, then you're doing really, really well. But that's only if you don't have actual external heat sources. If you're providing an external heat source, then you need to increase the humidity so that you're actually maintaining that. So again, puppies that are with their dam and they're nursing normally and they're healthy otherwise, then they're fine. If we have lots of babies, or in the case of this little one that came to see us, we have a dam that is very, very compromised, and she doesn't have any milk, and everybody is dehydrated and not doing well, we switch directly to tube feeding. Every owner can learn how to tube feed. It is much safer, it's quicker, and we don't risk aspiration pneumonia. Plus the added benefit if I know if that milk that I fed two hours ago is actually moving through their system. Okay, so again, I much preferred tubing over bottle feeding. If you choose to bottle feed, they have to have a really good suckle reflex. They have to be healthy, and you have to use a human slow flow nipple to make that work very, very well. Okay, so overall care of your newborns is remembering that they're not adults, and reminding sometimes, as much as we try to teach our veterinary students when they leave here that baby puppies are not adults. We cannot treat them like adults. So we need to make sure that they understand their temperature differences, their hydration differences and their metabolism differences, and adjust them real time if we have a second neonate. Colostrum in the first eight hours of life, man, put them on and leave them on and hopefully they get enough and that mom's colostrum is good quality. If the colostrum is not good quality, we can certainly supplement in the veterinary realm with serum from well vaccinated animals, but it's only going to give you about a 10th of what you would get in a good quality colostrum and nursing event. It's still better than nothing, but something that you would have to discuss with your veterinarian, especially let's say, you're in a rescue and you get a couple of three-day-old babies that you have no idea what the dam's colostrum quality was like, whether they actually nursed, or if that dam was well vaccinated, we can certainly support them. We use our blood donors here to do that. But that being said, you just have to be really, really careful about providing that passive immunity the best way that you can. Normal puppies, they eat, they do what I call fall off in a milk coma, and they dream. They should always actively dream, and I have a video of that because it's really, really important to make sure that no puppy should ever be laying there listless. They might for a little while, but they should actively be moving and twitching, and it's their neurologic system developing. Dam needs to stimulate the urination and defecation. And puppies really don't cry. If they're crying, something's going on, okay? And so pay attention to that. And if you can't stop the crying, that's a major red flag. So here's a cute little puppy that's in what I call a milk coma. You can see everybody else is at the bar, but see how we're twitching and we're moving. And sometimes they'll make little puppy noises. This is normal, and this is what all the babies should be doing. They shouldn't be laying there listless. And if you wake them up, they should be agitated and be looking for something to eat. If you wake them up and they're just kind of laying there, that's not normal, okay? And so again, just making sure that we're doing that active dreaming, because that's super, super important. Okay, so from the veterinary side, and there's something that you guys can do when you call thinking that you will have a problem, we may ask you over the phone about these types of things that are coming up in the next couple of slides. Neonatal reflexes are one of the best indicators of puppy health that we have. Okay? And there's three of them. There's called Righting, where we actually put them on their back and they should actually try to flip themselves over. If that's delayed or non-existent, we should be taking notice. Rooting: so if we actually put them up to the dam, or we use our thumb and forefinger and put it close to the muzzle, they should be actively bumping that with their nose to look for a nipple. Again, absent or delayed should be giving you a red flag that something's going on. And then suckling: all of us have stuck our pinky finger into their mouth to see how much of a good suckle they have. Absent or delayed, again, is going to be a problem. And these are present since birth. They should be something that is going to be very active and strong, and it tells us how healthy that puppy is. Again, if it's weak or non-existent, you should be calling your vet as fast as you can. 

I don't know how many of you guys have been exposed to this before, but there is Apgar scoring. It was adapted from humans, and neonate viability scoring is something that we use on every neonate that comes in to see us. So basically, we have a point system where we look at muscle tone and activity, pulse or heart rate. The reflexes when they're stressed. Talk about  pinching a toe, mucus membrane, color and respiratory rate, and based on where they fall in this grading system . . . Zero points: you can see, obviously, if we don't have anybody breathing, we're pale or cyanotic, we don't have any reflexes. I mean, this is a problem, right? We should have a score of zero. If we have some activity, moderate heart rate, some movement when we stress them out, slightly cyanotic, then we're going to get one point. And then active, greater than 220, crying, pink—and you can see how those of you that have whelped naturally or helped recover puppies post-C-section, we're going to kind of move through these parameters fairly quickly, as long as we're recovering very well, and some of puppies hit the ground running and come out at a two. And so we add up all these points, and then again, we give them an average vitality score. And I would say the majority of puppies that are born naturally are going to be in that, you know, 5–10 range for the most part, if you're giving them a couple of minutes after they come out of their sack and mom's licked on them for a little while. C-sections are going to be very different, because it depends on what type of drugs that were used in the dam beforehand. So again, that's something that we'll talk about a little bit here moving forward. But again, you can certainly look at this chart, try to give your animal a score, and then when you're talking to your veterinarian, you can tell them, “Hey, I think they have an Apgar score of six. I'm kind of concerned,” and it's just another way for you to communicate with your veterinarian. One of the other things that we really have to stress is birth weight and weight gain. Okay, low birth weight leads to low energy reserves that we already have and they have an increased surface area that dehydrates them even faster. It gets us no ability to be able to thermo regulate. We can't regulate our own body temperature, and that directly affects our GI motility. And what that does is it decreases our short term survival. So we're already predisposed to hypothermia, and we're already predisposed to hypoglycemia because we have no stores and we can't maintain our own body temperature. Well, then if we have low birth weight, or we're not gaining weight, then we're having trouble. Okay, and then, unfortunately, we end up with loss of puppies. And so I cannot stress enough how much breeders should be weighing their puppies. You don't have to do it multiple times a day, once a day at the same time, every single time. Don't feed them and then weigh them, and then the next day, you go three hours without feeding them and then weigh them. At the end of that three hours, you need to make sure it's after the same routine every single time. It's really, really important.

The one parameter that we can track that's super easy is that weight gain, and it is truly your window to health. Most people, when they call us and they say they're having trouble, we want to say, “Send us a snapshot of your graph, or send us your actual number so that we can graph them for you and look at them.” It depends on what papers you look at and your experience. I usually tell people 5–10% of your birth weight, not your body weight, every day. The bottom line is they should double their birth weight by 7–10 days old. They should be making really, really good progress, but greater than 4% loss from one day to the next, that's a severe problem, and immediate intervention needs to be implemented. Clinically, if there's any loss, then you should probably be calling somebody and asking for advice. The only timeframe that that might be considered normal is the first 24 hours when they were born, and you might have weighed them when they were not dry and they were still wet, and they might have a little bit of loss, but as long as they continue to gain and they're appropriate mentally, and they're doing everything that their other litter mates are doing, it's going to be perfectly fine. 

One of the other questions that we tend to ask is: Is it thriving? Is it doing the same thing as these other litter mates? And then we will actually look at the statistics and say, “Okay, is this small one gaining at the same rate as the other ones?” Because it may just be that individual is smaller than the others, even though it may not feel like it, but when we actually look at the data, it's actually gaining at the same time frame. That's really important. The reason that I kind of split hairs a little bit about the birth weight gain per day is if we're gaining 5–10% of our body weight per day, you may end up with something like this. And why this puppy does not look like it's extremely fat. If they're gaining too much, and you are blessed with a milk cow for a dog, you can potentially overfeed your babies. And what ends up happening is you get swimmer puppies, and that's a condition where the chest is actually flattened because they can't get up on their legs, because they're slugs and they're not moving around. There are other causes for it, but too much weight gain, too fast can certainly predispose them to that. So again, greater than 4% loss in a day or not gaining at all, is very concerning, and that you need to call somebody, and we need to talk about some interventions. So here's just a representation of a litter that was actually orphaned. So they were born back in 2016 to a dam that unfortunately whelped fine, and she had all of these babies, and then she was tragically lost to GDV on the surgical table 24 hours after birth. So they were orphaned on 3/31, and then they presented to us at the clinic on April 1, 2016. That being said, we were tracking their weights to make sure that we were feeding appropriately, because they were orphans and we were raising them at that point. But if you look at over here, we have 4/1, 4/2, 4/3, 4/4, 4/5, 4/6, 4/7, so if we started out around 10, and now we're up in the 20–30 range, we've more than doubled at least in that first week that we're there. Now I know they were born on 3/25, but, again, they didn't really get the best start to life, and that was something outside of the breeder’s control. That being said, right around that 4/7 date, we see this gray puppy here. While we're still gaining, we're not gaining at the rate that our litter mates are. And this should be a major red flag, because this puppy actually ended up not surviving, and it was because of a seizure disorder, and it started having seizures. We actually ended up grafting it onto an age-match litter, because he wasn't gaining appropriately. And he continued to not gain appropriately and started having seizures around eight weeks of age. That being said, this is why graphs and Excel are your best friend. You guys can graphically look at it. Your veterinarian can help you look at it. We can go back and actually look at the stats and see how much they're gaining per day, and flag those that may not be doing very well and supplement as necessary. So again, I can't tell. We really have to track those weights really, really, really well. 

So, again, we're going to kind of talk about a few things. I'm going to quickly go through some stuff that we've already hit on, but again, touch on it because it's super important. And then lastly, we're going to say: when do we call your vet and how do you make the decisions that you need to make? So again, husbandry, biosecurity, the bottom line end is herpes is not your friend. Everybody's got it. Don't be testing your bitches, because more than likely they've been exposed. I've never—knock on wood—seen a bitch that has been naive. Just make sure that you're locking your kennel down for the last three weeks of pregnancy, the first three weeks of the life of the puppies, and that you're observing strict biosecurity. Same thing is going to go for kennel cough or parvo or distemper. I know some people out there work in a veterinary clinic, or they might work in a shelter. You do not want to bring that home to your breeding kennel. So again, make sure you're washing your hands, changing your clothes, maybe your work shoes stay outside or in the mud room. Biosecurity is going to be really important. And then the three H's, like I said, 80–90% of the neonatal puppy problems that we have can be fixed with those three H's. So keep them warm, keep them fed, and keep them hydrated. Those are the things that you have to do. If you've addressed those, then it's probably something that's outside of your control, and then body weight is an indicator of growth, stores, and hydration. So remember I said at the very beginning, body weight is going to tell us if we're dehydrating or we are not getting enough food. We're going to see that weight plateau and/or go backwards. So making sure that we're doing that to address at least the hydration and the feeding part. 

Trauma. This is something that, again, is going to be fairly outside of the breeder’s control: clumsy or a new mom. We all know them. We've all had them. They don't know where their babies are. They don't care where their babies are. Making sure that you have pig rails and/or you're making sure that the clumsy bitch isn't alone with her puppies until she really gets better at mothering is going to be really, really important. And sometimes it's just a goofy dog and they don't know and they sit on the puppy. Well, that's not great for the puppy, so again, making sure that that's really important. 

Post-C-section dams. For those of you that have to have C-sections for one reason or another, the bottom line is, all females are going to react to anesthesia differently, and you need to not leave that dam after C-section alone with her babies for the first 2–3 days. And I hate to say that, but if you need to take a shower, and your bitch is post-C-section, and there's nobody there to sit with the babies while you take a shower, you put the babies in a basket, you put the mom in a kennel, you go take your shower, and then they can go back with the mom, because we have had more puppies lost, either to a dam, sitting on them, crushing them, or eating them. They have very weird reactions sometimes, when they just said, “I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee.” Okay, be very careful with your post-C-section dams. 

And then, of course, falling, being dropped or puppies traumatizing other puppies if they're suckling on, especially in orphans and that kind of stuff. So again, any type of trauma like that, make sure that you're calling your veterinarian and getting them examined, or trying to mitigate any of those types of things. Most of the time that's not necessarily in your control. 

Parasite control, parasite control, parasite control. It's the most common cause of poor doing that we see at least in southwest Virginia and most of the animals that we talk to and people that we converse with on the phone. Serial fecal flotations as needed. You’ve got to remember most of these parasites, especially in our adults and our early puppies. You are not going to see anything. The pre-patent period for hooks and rounds is going to be two weeks. So don't do a fecal before two weeks, because you're not going to be seeing anything. If they get diarrhea before that, it's either diet change or, like I said, the adenovirus. Okay, that being said, there's a very easy way for us to stop or greatly reduce the amount of transmission through the placenta and the mammary gland of the dam to the puppies, okay? We do our mom during pregnancy. There are two ways that you can do this. We do three days of Fenbendazole a day 41, 42, and 43 of pregnancy. That gets anywhere from 85–92% of parasites that will migrate through the placenta and the mammary gland. It works real well. The other thing is if we're seeing resistance to the Fenbendazole, then we can use Moxydectin at day 56 or 57. That gets 100% of the parasites that may migrate through the placenta and through the mammary gland to the puppies, up to week five or six postpartum. So, again, making sure that we're taking care of the vessel before the puppies even hit the ground is going to be really, really helpful in the parasite department. We always tell our owners, “Go ahead and start pyrantel pamoate at two weeks, four weeks, six weeks and eight weeks of age.” Pyrantel does not leave the GI tract. It's going to hit at that two week kind of cycle period to make sure that we're getting those that are still there. And I don't know if you guys have seen some of the recent conversations that we've had, but we are starting to see hookworms that are resistant to pyrantel and fenbendazole. So, again, one single dose of moxydectin during pregnancy is going to help with that, because we don't have a lot of dogs that are on moxydectin on a regular basis. So, again, making sure that we're addressing parasites, because that's going to be a huge cause of poor doing. That weight chart that I just showed you, this is one of the puppies as an eight week old. And even with the deworming that we did at two, four, six, and eight weeks of age, we still kind of have the unthrifty parasite look to them. So, again, it just depends on what the burden was of the dam before the puppies even entered the world. 

Congenital. Congenital abnormalities are born with, but not always genetic. And so these are going to include cleft palates, abdominal species, craniosces. We'll see cardiac defects, persistent right aortic arches that you will see as omega esophagus later on in the puppy's life. Patent ductus arteriosus, blue babies. Septal defects do happen. We do see shunts, lung maturity, or insufflation could be a problem, especially in premature babies. The biggest thing to remember is a lot of these things—other than maybe our midline defects that we can actually see externally—don't reveal themselves until they get to a certain weight or weaning. So, for example, lung maturity may not be a problem until that baby hits a certain weight that what normal functioning lung that they have can no longer support the oxygen demands of the size of that baby. And the same thing with liver defects. If you've got a shunt, that baby is fine, as long as they're being fed on a regular basis and the milk bar is open. What ends up happening is that when you start trying to wean them, and they start trying to eat their own, then you actually might see seizure activity because they cannot keep their normal metabolism going because they're not being fed super often. And so, again, things that you just need to be careful of. 

Here's a picture of a very premature puppy, and something that you need to be watching for. This puppy's got very sparsely haired on its toes and its legs, very sparsely haired on its face. If you have puppies that come out like this, you should be watching them very carefully. Whether or not they're going to survive is not sure. It depends on how premature they are, what level of maturity their lungs have gotten to. But again, just make sure that you're looking for sparse hair. And I apologize in advance for the next one, but I need to show you some graphic pictures so that you guys can see the worst of the worst. 

So midline defects. Okay, this puppy that's on the left has got a cleft palate. Make sure that you're looking for those, and the ones that are only in the soft palate, and don't include the hard palate you may miss. It's okay, but you'll notice when you start seeing milk coming out of their narries as they're trying to nurse when they get a little bit older. The puppy on the top is a walrus baby, water baby. The clinical term is anisarca. And so again, those are things to watch for. And then the two that are on the right, that's craniosces with actually an absence of a brain, and they have no eyelids, so that's very abnormal. And then obviously abdominal and thoracic pieces, so our abdominal contents and our thorax are outside of the body cavity of the baby. Mama didn't do this. This baby was born like this. And so again, making sure that we are aware of these things that happen. Typically, if we see any of these things in our clinic, it's an automatic, humane euthanasia if they're born alive. Trying to treat these conditions, especially . . . we can't treat the two darker babies, but anisarca is very, very difficult to treat because of the 80% water. But anisarca in itself is an overabundance of water and then cleft palate babies, while we can do surgical revisions, you have to get them to a certain age to be able to do that, and they have a high rate of failure. And even for the life of that puppy, they end up having chronic pneumonia and lung changes because of the mild aspiration that they have during their lifetime going up to the point that you can repair the cleft palate. 

So when do you call your vet? I know I just threw a bunch of information at you. We tell our owners anytime you're concerned. I don't care if it's two o'clock in the morning, if you're worried, call us. I'd rather you call me. We discuss it over the phone and decide if it needs to be seen or not than you wait three days, and now all of a sudden, it's dire, and we can't fix it anymore. If you go two days without weight gain or greater than 4% loss in a 24 hour period—again, if they're losing weight, you should be paying attention to that. If you have lethargy or seizures, that's an automatic. If they're not acting normally, you feed them and they don't perk back up, then they should be coming in for an examination. Dams are very intuitive. If a dam rejects the puppy and a single puppy and it keeps putting it to the side, there's probably something wrong with that puppy. Please don't force it on the dam. We've had some dams that get so angry at their owners, and they're like, “Fine, if you're not going to let me reject . . .” They'll eat it. So that being said, mama rejects a single puppy, but is mothering the others, pay attention. Maybe that one needs to have an examination, and we'll see if there's something we can do. Diarrhea at any time. Again, they're 80% water. We have to keep them hydrated. Diarrhea at any point is going to be fatal for these babies. And then if you have any deaths, they need to be investigated, because they have implications for either your breeding program and/or if the other puppies are in danger of having any other things go wrong with them.

So I'm going to leave it with the value of a necropsy. Okay, if you lose a puppy, make sure that you submit it. Call your vet up, put it in the refrigerator and say, “Hey, I lost a puppy. Some of my other puppies are acting fine or not acting fine.” Give them a complete history. This is the easiest way for us as veterinarians to get you a definitive diagnosis. And do we always find a diagnosis? No. But for this gift that keeps on giving, this word just keeps popping up everywhere, herpes. Patho mnemonic is what we call particular hemorrhage on very specific organs. If we see that, we will be able to tell you we suspect that this was herpes. Your entire litter is probably infected. You might want to do these husbandry things, and we can kind of paint a bad picture so that you are prepared that you may lose your entire litter. The other things that we can find is potentially we might be able to find congenital defects. We might tell you if we have aspiration pneumonia. So let's say potentially, that they have been supplemented and they aspirated. Well, what were you supplementing with? And how? Maybe we should change how we do that, and then we treat all the others that are still alive to mitigate any effects of aspiration pneumonia. And so with that, I'm happy to take some questions. Hopefully that was helpful. It's a lot to pack in.

Nicole Engelman  59:09

That was amazing. Thank you so much. I would say it was more than helpful. We do have time for a few questions. I want to be conscious of everyone's time. The first question is: Is there any way to help a mom with plenty of milk, but puppies just aren't gaining? They're full, not complaining, round bellies, but little to no gains.

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  59:27

So the problem is: is, why do they have round bellies? And so certainly, that probably would be a situation where, if you think mom has plenty of milk, are the puppies just not nursing off of her, and that's why she's full? Because they're not draining the glands? We shouldn't see overt full glands on dams that are nursing their puppies on a regular basis. Or is something else going on with the puppies where their GI tracts aren't moving? And so, again, what's our temperature in the room? What's the temperature of the fetuses? And is there something else that's going on that we can address on the veterinary side? So if that situation happens, I would take it to your vet, absolutely, and have an examination, because it certainly sounds like something else could be going on that's not simple.

Nicole Engelman  1:00:09

Definitely. Thank you for answering that one. Speaking of temperatures in rooms, we have one breeder joining us who is located in the desert and is wondering if there are any other precautions or things they should be doing, such as using a humidifier with their litters?

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:00:24

Certainly, if you're in a very arid place, I certainly would be making sure we're hitting that 45–55% mark of humidity in the room, and making sure that we're not overly dehydrating them through having very, very dry air.

Nicole Engelman  1:00:40

Amazing. Shifting gears back to what we were talking about with canine herpes virus, I know you mentioned biosecurity lockdown. Are there any other ways that breeders here can prevent canine herpes virus from happening?

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:00:55

No, because I mean the thing is it's so widespread. Everybody has mostly been exposed to it. It's a matter of making sure that your puppies aren't getting exposed and so not stressing your dam, not giving new animals who may be stressed coming in. This is the reason that we don't hospitalize dams and puppies unless we absolutely have to, because our ICU is full of animals that are shedding herpes just because they're stressed out. So again, mitigating stress, making sure that we're not mixing new animals in with, you know, the animals that are there all the time and don't go anywhere. And again, that six week rule. You know, you hate to tell people not to go to dog shows or do the things that they normally do, but once you've lost an entire litter to herpes, it'll seem like short term pain for long term gain.

Nicole Engelman  1:01:40

And with herpes, is there, like a rule of thumb you can share with breeders on how to be sure it is herpes and not something else?

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:01:47

Necropsy, necropsy, necropsy. And so if you lose a puppy, making sure that you get that to your veterinarian. Do not freeze it, put it in the refrigerator, get it to them as fast as you possibly can, they should be able to perform the necropsy. And if they see, like that picture that I showed you guys, those particular hemorrhages, that's going to tip them off that they suspect this probably is necropsy. It's not definitive, but it'll give you a really good idea that we might be in for a long haul.

Nicole Engelman  1:02:15

And now we're seeing a lot of questions about humidity, which is very fascinating to me. So just to consolidate a few that I'm seeing: people are curious if there's a specific level of humidity that you need and if it should be a cool mist, or does it have to be a warm mist?

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:02:30

So it doesn't matter, as long as the humidity and a hydrometer is in that 45–60% range, depending on whether you're providing an external heat source, you should be perfectly fine. It's the environmental humidity that's important, not necessarily the way that it's being delivered. 

Nicole Engelman  1:02:49

Awesome. Thank you for clarifying that. Shifting gears for our last few questions here. Some people had questions about vaccinations during pregnancy for dam, so one of the questions we saw was: If a dam’s next annual vaccines are due, either while pregnant or while nursing puppies, should she get those shots earlier, before breeding, or after nursing the litter?

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:03:11

Typically, we try to get everybody to get them done beforehand. So keep track of when they're due and make sure that they're done before you breed the dam, because then I don't have to give them a modified live. Now in the shelter situations, we go ahead and vaccinate them when we don't always have negative effects, but I'm not going to do that on a client-owned animal. Or if you choose not to vaccinate, just realize that the colostrum quality may not be what you want it to be.

Nicole Engelman  1:03:33

Awesome. And we did see a bunch of questions about colostrum. Specifically, if there's a brand that, as a vet, you recommend?

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:03:41

No. And the thing is we do not keep colostrum as a commercial here in the clinic. I've never investigated. I don't know how they're getting colostrum from these dams. I don't know how many of you have tried to milk a dog, but it's very difficult. And so if we have failure or passive transfer, usually as veterinarians, we just shift to using serum. But that being said, I guess do your research and do the best that you can with what you've got.

Nicole Engelman  1:04:10

Love it. And last question I think we have time for: What was the name of the book that you had mentioned earlier? We saw some questions about that I think.

Dr. Julie T. Cecere  1:04:18

It's Small Animal Pediatrics: The First 12 Months of Life. Again, it's a veterinary textbook. So it might be a little heavy, but it does a pretty good job of breaking things down, and that's in there. The “Breeding Better Dogs” that Dr. Sparrenberg and I wrote, also has a chapter on the neonates. I think we did it up to the first three weeks of life. That's got some really good information in there. Just be very cautious about what you take off of Facebook and Google. I can't say that enough, because you don't want to do something wrong and find out that, ooh, that was not something I should have done.

Nicole Engelman  1:04:47

Yes, I think that is perfect advice to end on, which is one of the big reasons that we host symposiums like this, so that you can feel confident about the information that you're getting. Thank you so much, Dr. Cecere. This was amazing. We just can't thank you enough for being here. Thank you to all of the breeders who joined. It sounds like everyone absolutely loved this. So yes, this will be available as a replay. And a reminder that we will have our follow up quiz from this session posting in our private group and in our newsletter, and you will get the recording in the newsletter and the private Facebook group. So just keep an eye out in both of those places so you can get all of those things. And until then, I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their day. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.

Nicole Engelman  1:05:35

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.