Episode 204: Best Practices for the Welfare of Breeding Animals

What is the earliest age you should breed a female? How should you house brood females and stud dogs? What routine testing or veterinary care should be provided over a female or stud dog's breeding life?

Watch the video version of the 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.

Nicole Engelman  00:28

Hi, everyone. I am Nicole. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Good Dog’s Community Lead, and I am so excited to kick off our first educational webinar of 2026. We, as you know, filled 2025 with tons and tons of webinars. I think we had about two new ones every single month, and we had our health symposium in October. So we were able to bring breeders lots of canine education throughout last year, and this year will be no different. So we're excited to kick off this year's series of webinars with a brand new guest, Dr. Peggy Root, who will be presenting on best practices for the welfare of breeding animals, a topic I imagine many of you are very interested in. So just a quick little snapshot of what we're going to be focusing on today: Dr. Root is going to review the common practices and recommendations from reproductive veterinarians to help you make more informed decisions in your own programs. Of course, we have to thank our friends at Purina for helping us bring this webinar to all of you and bring it to life. This is a really great topic, I think, to kick off a brand new year. It's pretty broad, and it allows us to really dive into the things that you're curious about. I know we got really specific with some of our webinar topics last year. So it's nice to kind of zoom out a little bit and take this bit more of a general approach with best practices. We have many plans for webinars for the rest of this year, but I don't believe the whole year is spoken for. So if there are things that you're interested in learning about that we haven't covered yet, please let us know anytime. You can email them to us as you think about them at breederteam@gooddog.com. We love hearing from you. We love hearing what you're curious about. So keep sharing those suggestions. And on the topic of past webinars, if you're brand new and joining us for the very first time, we have a whole library of past webinar recordings. We make sure that they're accessible to breeders at any time. Many of them are also not just for members of our community; they're available to all dog breeders. It is really a treasure trove of recordings. I think there's something there for everyone. So in case you're curious about past webinars at Good Dog, that is where you can find all of those whenever you'd like to. I know I mentioned questions already, so as always, we have a Q&A segment at the end of the presentation. We're just going to prioritize some of those previously submitted questions from our community first, and thank you to all the people who sent those in. And to just kick things off, I want to share a little bit more about Good Dog for anyone who is new here, joining us for the first time, or just unfamiliar with who we are as a company. Good Dog is on a mission to build a better world for our dogs and the people who love them by advocating for breeders like yourselves, educating the public and promoting canine health and responsible dog ownership through events just like this. We are an online community that is created just for 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 programs from start to finish, so everything from getting your new litter of puppies listed, connecting with buyers, getting payments securely for those puppies and all of those smaller details that happen in between your puppies being born and going off to their new homes, Good Dog is here to support you in all of that work. We also have a number of free educational resources, health related discounts to help your programs thrive in other ways as well. So if you are not yet part of our community, we would love to have you join us and you can learn more anytime at gooddog.com/join. You can also just reach out to us with questions, if you have those, at breederteam@gooddog.com. So lots of ways to reach us, lots of ways to get your questions answered, and that's all about Good Dog. And before I pass things over to Dr. Root, I just want to share a little bit more about her and her background. We are so excited to have her joining us for the very first time. Dr. Root recently retired after working nearly 40 years at the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine as a Professor of Small Animal Reproduction and Assistant Dean of Education. After graduating from the University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine in 1987, she worked in small animal private practice for several years, then returned to the university to complete a residency in theriogenology. She became board certified in theriogenology in 1994 and completed a doctorate degree in theriogenology in 1995. Dr. Root is also the author of several books about small animal theriogenology written for veterinarians and dog breeders, including The Dog Breeder’s Guide to Successful Breeding and Health Management, in case anyone is familiar with that. And with that, Dr. Root, I will pass things over to you to get the presentation started.

Dr. Peggy Root Kustritz  05:17

Okay, thank you, Nicole. So first of all, hello. Good afternoon from Minnesota, where it is no nicer than it is for Nicole in New York, and I'm sure the folks in Michigan as well. It's snowing yet again today, and the temperatures are dropping as we speak. And you know, the plus is all of the bugs are dead in Minnesota right now, which is why I love living here in the wintertime. Other than that, I look forward someday to visiting the places many of you are listening from today. So as Nicole noted in the bio, I am recently retired from the university, and during my time there, I spent a lot of time working with dog breeders, and I know many times the students that I taught didn't want to work with dog breeders, and I was always very clear with them about how many of the dog breeders I worked with were like you, that you were really striving to understand what was best for your dogs. What are the new things that are happening? What can you work with your veterinarians on to help you achieve your bigger goals, better health, larger litter size? Whatever those goals are, we all want nice, healthy puppies that can go out and do the jobs that we want them to do in the world, even if that job is just as simple as being great companions. And so I value working with people who do seek more information, and I am very happy to answer your questions as we get to the end of this seminar. This is a really big topic, and so as we think about this big, big topic, I want to be clear right from the get-go what I'm going to talk about today and what I'm not going to talk about. I've only got, like, 40-45, minutes, so that, in and of itself, limits what I'm going to talk about. 

But I will talk about housing, and specifically about sort of the basic idea of what is minimally adequate housing, and give you some information about sort of adjunctive things to housing that people question, like: Do they need enrichment? Do they need exercise? Do they need toys? What does that look like? So I'll talk about that. I will talk a very little bit about diet, but about it specifically for them as breeding animals. And then mostly I will talk about management of these animals as breeding animals. How old do they need to be to start breeding? How long into their life do they breed? How frequently do they breed? How do you test to make sure that you are going to produce puppies that are superior to the sire and the dam that you have chosen? And specifically, I'll talk about brucellosis testing as an example of an infectious disease that we wanted to be monitoring for. And then finally, I'll give you a list of general recommendations, both from the American College of Theriogenologists, which are the boarded repro vets here in the United States, and from one of the European agencies, generally in Europe, and at their veterinary schools and within their veterinary organizations—they are much more, I would say, rules-based, than many of the North American organizations are, and they do come up with some very good recommendations that obviously we're not legally bound to follow, but that are good things for you to think about as you consider how you're going to manage your individual dogs and your kennel. 

So what am I not going to talk about today? Well, first of all, I'm not going to talk about general veterinary care. So this is not going to be how you get a physical exam done, why you get a physical exam done, vaccine recommendations, parasite control. You can read it here. I'm not going to talk about that today, just because there isn't time to talk about all of those things. I also need you to know that when I first started investigating this topic, which was many years ago, there wasn't much in the literature. And then when I re-investigated more recently, as I was preparing for this talk, there isn't much more in the literature. So a lot of times, you will be looking for research-based answers. What do we know from studies that have been done about these different topics? And the answer is not very much. And I don't say that to say that there's no value in discussing what we do know, or that it's not valuable enough that people discuss it. I think it's just one of those very broad topics that's kind of hard to really focus on as your primary research focus in academia, for example, so it just doesn't get an opportunity to be investigated. What this means, though, is that it's really important for you and your veterinarian to make sure you are paying attention to things as they come up, because every little new piece of information that we get, every new study that is done, is super valuable because it really adds something every single time. It's unlikely to just be a repeat of something else that was done. So do watch for those things when you see little excerpts in your newsletters. Here's what's new in the literature. Sometimes you'll see something about welfare. 

Some of the information I'll present, we'll talk about legal requirements. So I'll talk about housing first, and that's wrapped in a lot of legal requirements. Some of them vary by country. Here in the United States, they mostly vary by state or by locality. So some of them, it's a municipality that is creating the ruling. Some it is the state. There are some federal things, of course, like some of you probably get USDA inspection in your kennel facility. And so there is a variety of possibility for what laws you might be required to follow, and it is impossible for any one veterinarian to follow all of those laws, especially when you're talking to a group that's from everywhere, like you are, and it is your job to know the laws where you live, so you certainly will discuss them with your veterinarian, and your veterinarian will certainly talk to people at the state or county or whatever level it is to help make sure everybody understands you're doing what you need to do to meet those requirements. But you shouldn't call the vet first if you have a question about the legal requirements. That gets done well outside of veterinary medicine, somewhere else within the government where you live. 

So that said, let's start by talking about housing. So the first thing with housing is that generally, when you look up regulations for housing, it is for kennels of a specific size, or kennels that produce a specific number of animals. And so very rarely will you find very broad requirements that say “This is absolutely what is required for all animals.” Generally, it's going to be in this municipality, this particular legal organization requires that every dog has a cage that is this many feet by this many feet. Or there can only be so many cages in a room that's this big, or things of that nature. So very often they will be very, very specific: size, construction materials, things like that. And for many of you, you absolutely have to follow those so if you are under the regulations, for example, in Minnesota, the Board of Animal Health has a regulation for kennels of a certain size based on how many animals they house and how many litters they produce, they have to be investigated. And there are some very specific things that they have to meet, as far as housing goes. Many others of you are not in that situation. You only breed one or two litters a year. You only keep one or two breeding animals. You have other things that keep you from needing to be a part of these very formulaic requirements that some larger kennels will have to be under so then you need to think about, well, what is the minimum? If I'm thinking about what is the best practice for this group of dogs, what is the minimum? And the minimum is really a minimum. So as you read this, don't say to yourself, “Well, I'm going to do so much better than that.” I would say back, “Gosh, I hope so.” I hope everybody who owns a dog, no matter what that dog's role is, is doing better than this minimum. But at a bare minimum, every dog needs to be able to stand up and move around to get away from its own waste. It should have food and water available, not necessarily available at all times, but available appropriately. So, for example, a dog that is housed outside right now does not have water available because it's frozen, but they need to be able to get into a place that has water that they can access. And the housing that you have must be easy to clean, easy to disinfect and easy to dry. And that's why I show the picture of someone painting along with this slide. And that's because very often when I'm talking to someone about their housing, they have beautiful housing with a lot of bare wood in it, and bare wood is not easy to disinfect and it is not easy to get completely dry. And so you need to be thinking about that as you're thinking about how you're going to house your dogs. Some construction companies will send you information about beautiful kennel facilities that they can build for you, and they are beautiful. They look like something from Home Beautiful for dogs, but they're not easy to disinfect and they're not easy to dry. And every time I see those, it's a little bit frustrating to me, because I know that's not really meeting that minimum criteria. You need to make sure you are not passing along infection, parasites, anything of that nature, because of the way the housing is set up. And you should never put animals back into wet kennels. That's just bad for the dog, and it is, again, a way to spread disease. So things should be able to completely dry before the animal goes back into it.

14:15

All dogs need regular exercise and regular interactions with human beings, and I don't mean that every dog needs to have a large cage space and a large kennel. There's a zillion ways that you can do this, so I'm showing you different pictures here. These are dogs that are running outside. You can have a big open space where all your dogs run together in your own yard. That's fine. You can have a big inside space where dogs can run, which is what's shown here in the middle. This is actually a picture from a church that just opens it up for people to bring dogs. It's sort of an indoor dog park for them. And I have to be very honest and tell you, I'm not a big fan of dog parks. I feel like even when they try to regulate them, I've just had to take care of too many dogs that were injured or developed interesting diseases after having gone to a dog park or that had to be treated for parasites just over and over again from being at the dog park. So I'm not a huge fan of dog parks, but I do really value people who make sure their dog gets to exercise, gets to run in a fenced area, gets to go on walks every day, whatever that thing might be. And it has been definitely shown that dogs that have regular interactions with humans are better dogs. They don't show many of the sort of nuisance behaviors that we don't want to see in an area that has a fair number of dogs. So if you are housing four or five dogs in a place, you do not want to listen to them bark all day long. And a lot of that barking is nuisance barking. They sort of set each other up. And it's been shown that if they're really interacting with their caretakers, that people are stopping to pet the dog, to talk to the dog, to check the dog over, when they set the bowl down, maybe they sit and talk to the dog for a minute instead of just feeding and walking away. Those sorts of small interactions in all species of animals have been shown to be associated with better behaviors and better health. So for example, totally out of this realm, but if you're raising dairy calves very often, they're raised in little individual hutches, and that's a disease control consideration. But if the people who come out to feed them in their little hutches spend just a couple of minutes talking to them, maybe brushing them, checking them over, they grow faster. They are weaned onto regular food faster, and they actually give more milk in their first lactation. And who would have thought that that little bit of interaction very early in their lives is reflected in this great difference when they become an adult functioning cow? I'm sure the same sort of thing happens in dogs, because we certainly know that happens in human beings, that babies that have more interactions develop differently than babies that don't. Why wouldn't dogs? And so the more time we can spend really interacting with our dogs the better for those dogs. 

What about toys? Now, I think we all know that dogs enjoy enrichment, some dogs more than others. I've had some dogs who spent half of every day playing with toys I had in this house, and I've had other dogs who ignored the toys entirely. The literature is really mixed, and there's actually a fair amount of literature on the need for toys. A lot of this is in the behavior literature. The one thing that was found that was a fairly definite plus for the use of a specific kind of toy, that being a puzzle toy that you load with food, and then instead of them just eating out of a bowl, they have to get it out of the puzzle toy. So they have to roll it around and it falls out as it rolls around, or they have to dig it out of little special areas that it's snuggled into, or it's like a Kong, where it's moist food that they have to lick at and work at to get it out. And it showed that the dogs did spend more time exercising if they really had to work with those puzzle toys. And that is a good thing. That way you're getting sort of a double whammy. You're getting them some exercise, and you're feeding them, and it's enriching for them. It makes them hunt, if you will, a little bit. The literature on the other kinds of toys—so tug-of-war toys, ball toys, anything else that we give to our dogs—is variable, so some of them show that it didn't make any difference at all, and some of them showed that it did. And so you can't always say, “Well, if I give them a lot more toys, they are definitely not going to show those negative behaviors like chewing at themselves, or excessive barking or things of that nature.” The other thing to consider with toys is that they need to be kept clean, and so that is something that becomes another job for you. If you're going to use toys, make sure it's a cleanable toy, and make sure that you do clean them regularly, especially if they get shared between dogs. 

So how about how many of them you can put in the same place? So we'll talk first about stud dogs. So stud dogs can be housed with other males, and they can be housed in mixed gender groups, as long as the females are not in heat. Once those girls are in heat, and once they're even fairly close to being in heat, because the dogs are very astute about recognizing that in ways that we do not yet perceive, you will get more inter-male aggression. So if you have two male dogs that get along fine, maybe a father and a son, and they're housed together, and they're doing great, just be aware that when some of the females start to come into heat, they may start arguing a little bit more, and that's normal, because if you think about it, all of a sudden their attention is being changed, and there needs to be kind of a hierarchy, because that's how dogs think about who's going to breed whom. So be aware of that. You can certainly house them together as long as they all get along together any other time. But when the girls are in heat, you're probably going to want to separate those males. Female dogs that are intact, that are not spayed, and that are housed together, eventually will all go through heat at the same time. They call that the dormitory effect, because the same thing happens in women. So if a group of women lives in a house together, they will eventually all cycle at the same time. Any of you who are women and have sisters, you probably all cycled at the same time while you lived in your parents’ house. And that is something that we can use to our advantage. If you have a female dog who isn't cycling and who is in every other way healthy, and is of an age when I expect her to cycle, oftentimes, the first thing I'll say is, “Well, maybe try housing with some other dogs that are going through heat and see if they'll just pull her into heat at the same time.” So sometimes that's an advantage, but sometimes it's a disadvantage, because all of your dogs are in heat at the same time, and you do have to pay attention to that, because, again, you're going to want to be thinking about who's being housed with who as you go through estrous at the same time. Some bitches, you do get a little more inter-female aggression in some dogs, if they're in heat at the same time and they're housed in the same place, like if they completely share a kennel space, or whatever. Other bitches go through heat, and they just ignore each other, and they don't care. But you need to watch for that, that sometimes some female dogs will get a little bit more aggressive, especially towards other females, as they are going through heat. 

And then finally, what do we do with them when they're pregnant? So if you have a dog that you're worried about being exposed to canine herpes virus or any other disease condition, then you might want to house her away from the general population. Similarly, if you have very rambunctious dogs, and you don't want her getting knocked around by the other dogs all the time, you might want to house her away from the general population. Generally, most people do not do that. They don't place them in a separate place until they're close to whelping. But these are the sorts of considerations that you might have that would lead you to say, “I want her away from everybody else. I'm going to put her in a separate builder or in a separate room, or just at the end of the kennel with empty kennels in between,” or however, your place is set up. When she's very, very close to whelping, you should give her a place to whelp. Some people will have a whole separate whelping area. Some people will have a whelping box that they put into the place where the dog lives. And I like this chart. This is from a paper that described lots of different things that breeders in different countries do, just to sort of help us all understand: Well, what do most dog breeders do? And in this paper, you can see that in the United States and Canada, most people are going to leave them in the same housing, and then they're going to make sure they have a place to whelp within that same housing. And so it's uncommon in the United States for dogs to get completely put away in a separate place, although, like I say, when I get asked that question, I ask, “Why are you worried about it?” And if they do have a specific concern, it's certainly not a problem to house her in a different place for a short time. 

Okay, on to diet. Diet, again, I'm only going to talk about diet specifically for while they're being a breeding dog, not diet for their whole life, which is, of course, a whole huge separate set of talks by itself.

22:41

So with stud dogs, really, they're just adult male dogs, and so you really just need to think about: How old are they? How big are they? What is their body condition score? And if you haven't done body condition scoring, ask your vet to show you how they do it. And use a chart like this one. This is Purina’s, and it is a great chart to follow. So the goal for this is to be ideal, which is the five right there in the middle. If they're too thin, the number is lower. If they're too heavy, the number is higher. And you can see from the chart that you're looking at their silhouette and you're feeling them. Can I feel their ribs? And how easily can I feel their ribs? Do they have that little pad of fat that develops right up on top by their hips? Are they carrying fat down under their belly? You really need to feel the dog to be able to do this well. And the literature has shown that dog owners—general dog owners—tend to underestimate, so they will tend to say their dog is a five, when it's really a six or a seven, based on what their veterinarian believes. That's probably because most people see a five as a little bit too thin. So if a dog is at a five, if you're holding your hand flat and you feel across your knuckles, that's what the ribs should feel like. You can barely see them and you can feel them easily. You don't have to push down through anything to feel them. That's a five. If you bend your hand up, it's becoming more of a six. They're there, but you got to feel for them a little bit, and that's actually a little bit heavy. Six is, you know, like me, you know, I had three kids. I'm a little bit heavier than I'd like to be, but I'm not dangerously obese. I'm not an eight or a nine. We live in a world where people think six is okay for dogs. In the United States, people think six is okay for dogs. Purina and many other nutritional groups recommend a five based on long, long term studies looking at dog body condition and what it means for how quickly they develop chronic disorders like arthritis and what their general lifespan is. So in general, it's better to be a little bit thin than a little bit heavy, and that's why we're aiming for five. And that's what you should be aiming for with your male dogs. And again, if you're not sure how to do that sort of assessment, talk to your vet about it. That vet should be doing that assessment every time they see your dog, and talking to you about how you're feeding your dog, how much you're exercising your dog, and they can show you how to do it. And I like this scale. You'll see other scales. You'll see a one to five scale. Somebody has a one to six scale. I don't like the one to six because there's no middle, and I want a middle to aim for, and say that's the right thing. And the one to five scale, there's just not enough differentiation in it. So I really like this scale of one to nine. 

I get a fair number of questions for male dogs about supplements. And some of these are herbal supplements, some of these are protein supplements. There's lots of different things that people have tried with the goal of improving semen quality in dogs. Most of these products are not proven at all and are not well regulated. So by that, I mean there is no FDA panel that went through, looked at all of the research said, “Yes, this is definitely of a benefit to the dog,” and that then follows up and verifies that what they say is in the bottle is what's in the bottle. So you're taking a risk with some of these products, that you're just not giving the dog what you think you're giving it. I know there was one for a while that was a very popular one. I can't remember the name of it. It was an herbal product, and I took it to our acupuncturist, who was also an herbalist, and she said none of those were dangerous things to give the dog. She just didn't know that any of them were generally beneficial things to give the dog, but she didn't think it would hurt the dog. And I have felt that same way with many other products that people have brought to me and said, “What do you think about this?” If it's a very, very protein based product, they're just going to digest a lot of it. And those proteins aren't going to magically go someplace else in their body. They just get broken down into amino acids, and it's just like eating a piece of chicken. And so you need to think about what's in it, and what could it actually do? And then again, you need just to make sure there's nothing in there that could hurt the dog. And that's where your veterinarian can be valuable in looking at that list of ingredients and helping you think about, well, is there anything in there that would be detrimental to the dog? Very, very rarely did I see something in what people brought to me that I thought would hurt the dog. And so my general recommendation was, usually, I don't know if this is going to help. It might. If you want to go ahead, go ahead. And then the other thing you need to remember, and I'll talk about this in tremendous detail, in July. In July, I'm talking about how we assess fertility in male dogs, and all the different pieces that go into that. And one of the things that I'll talk about there is how long it takes from when they make a new sperm till we see it in their ejaculate, and it's months. If you're going to use a supplement, you can't just give it for a week and say, “Well, my dog doesn't look or act any different, and I'm going to check the semen, and it doesn't look different.” It can't possibly look different that quickly, because whatever you're giving, their testicles just got it. So that's just affecting semen production at that time. And then it is two months before we see that in the ejaculate. So any time you're doing anything like this, you need to give big windows of time for us to be able to see if it has had an impact or not. For bitches, there's no need to change the diet immediately as they become pregnant, because during that first probably two-thirds of the pregnancy, the first half for sure, yes, of course you have puppies in there. And yes, of course they're developing, but during that embryologic development, they're not really growing. They're changing. They're developing, but they're not doing anything that requires an enormous number of calories from the bitch, and in fact, for the first 17 days of that pregnancy—so if you think about pregnancy, 63 days from ovulation, for 17 days from ovulation, those embryos are just floating around in there. They're not even implanted into the bitch's uterus, so what she's eating doesn't directly impact them the way it will later on. That whole time, during that embryologic development, you really don't have to change what you are feeding her if you have had her on a good adult food that is helping her maintain her body condition. Once she gets to the end of the pregnancy, that's when the puppies are growing. And so then you might want to change her to a growth or performance diet. And I do give you some recommendations for what some of the percentages of protein and fat might look like. And this is the same diet that you can use during lactation. And lactation is an enormous physical drain on the dog, and so it's good to give her those extra calories, the extra protein, the extra fat, to help her make that milk for those puppies. One thing I strongly discourage you from doing is giving oral calcium during pregnancy. And this chart—I know it's just like a huge, complex chart. I do not expect you to really look at this chart in much detail. I certainly will not be giving you an exam on this chart. I don't know if I could pass an exam on this chart today. But the goal of this is to get you just to see; this is a snapshot of some of the things your body has to do to control calcium in your body. So calcium is very, very important. Calcium makes your muscles contract. Calcium can't get into your body well, unless it's got some vitamin D, too. And so the vitamin D is mostly going to be provided by the sun and then through your liver and your kidneys. That's where we get our vitamin D that is then going to work with the calcium to be able to affect things like muscle contraction. When you need more calcium, there's one specific hormone that tells you if you need more, and  there's one particular hormone that tells you if you've got enough. And then it has to go get it from some place, and it's hard for it to get it from your gastrointestinal tract, because dogs and other species, we just don't really absorb calcium very well from our GI tract. We do, but it's just slow. And so generally, if it really needs some like it will when it's making milk, it'll go to your bones, because obviously your bones have a lot of calcium in them. All of that hard structure that you feel of your bone—a lot of that is calcium. And so your bones are a storage place for calcium in your body. So the problem is, if you give calcium to a dog during her pregnancy, it keeps telling her body you've got enough calcium. You don't need to pull any out of your bones. You have plenty, plenty of calcium. So the system kind of shuts down a little bit, because all of this takes energy. To run all of this takes energy. So if your body doesn't need to use that energy, it's not going to. And if you're giving it lots of calcium, it says, “Great. We're going to shut this down for a while, because calcium levels are sitting fine. We don't need to be able to go and pull it out of bone.” But then once that bitch whelps and she needs to lactate, she's absolutely going to have to pull calcium out of bone. And that system isn't ready to roll, and it takes time for that system to kick in. And so you have actually disadvantaged the dog by giving her that calcium during pregnancy, because she might not have absorbed that much of it. And now her system is shut down. So as long as she is on a good, balanced diet, that is probably enough calcium for what she needs, and you don't really need to give her more until she's lactating. If you want to give her more while she's lactating, you can't hurt it once the system is up and running, but you've got to let her get that system running so she can pull the calcium from her bone that she needs for lactation.

31:52

Okay, age of use as a breeding animal. And this is one that is kind of semi-well-researched, but there's still a fair amount of “This is our best recommendation, because this is what we think is a good idea.” So be aware of that. So first for male dogs, puberty onset in male dogs is going to be defined by when they first show breeding behaviors and when they first have normal semen quality. It is positively associated with final body size, meaning a dog like the dog shown here on the left will go through puberty at a younger age than the dog on the right. The bigger they are, the later they will come into puberty. And most species of animals are considered to be capable of going through puberty when they reach about 80% of their adult body size. And so of course, that tiny, little Chihuahua is going to get to that 80% way quicker than a giant breed, like a Great Dane would. When you're going to use them first as a stud dog is going to be dependent on that timing. And so generally, how big is your dog? What kind of breed of dog do you have? Also on pre-breeding testing, which we'll talk about in a little bit, making sure they're not going to pass along any hereditary disorders, or that you're controlling the likelihood that that will happen. Normal semen quality, which you may or may not know the first time you use a dog—obviously, a lot of times you're just going to choose to let that dog breed that bitch, and you're not going to go to a veterinarian, and so you don't know semen quality. And then finally, normal breeding behaviors. And these are actually fairly hilarious papers to read, the behavior papers about breeding behavior in dogs. You know, like: What percent of time does a male dog breed the head of the bitch before realizing it needs to be on the other end? I mean, really fairly obviously hilarious stuff, if you're me, anyway—reading about how long it takes a dog to figure out what is normal breeding behavior before he becomes a good, functional stud dog. 

Bitches are the same thing, that it's by body size. So that Chihuahua bitch is going to come into her first heat earlier than a Great Dane bitch would, and this in bitches at puberty onset is going to be defined as the first visible signs of heat proestrus and estrus with the swelling of the vulva, the bloody vulva discharge, the attraction of the male dogs, all of those things. Can some dogs go through a heat cycle, and their first heat cycle is not visible to us? Yes, I'm sure that happens. But because we can't see it, we tend not to hunt for it. We just assume that the first one that we can see is the very first one that the dog is having. As in males, you're probably going to want to think about your pre-breeding testing before you use that bitch for breeding. And other things to consider are her levels of maturity. When is she cycling, relative to when she's likely to be achieving that 80% of body weight, and when she is achieving other markers of physical and behavioral maturity? There's less information in the literature about behavioral maturity than there is about physical maturity. So physical maturity, you might say, “Well, how do I define what is physical maturity?” So for some people, this could be skeletal maturity, and here we're talking about closure of the growth plates. So these radiographs are showing you a forelimb. And so here on the top you're seeing—this is the humerus, so this is the upper arm, and here on the bottom, this is the elbow. That's the top of the ulna, which is one of the bones in the forearm, and the other one is the radius. So these are the three main long bones in the forearm. In the rear limit would be the femur and the tibia. That would be the upper and lower bones. You can see when you look at these that there's kind of these little caps on either end, and there's this little dark line in between those caps on either end. That's the growth plate. So when an animal is growing, when a person is growing, that's where the growth occurs, and it sort of pushes out in either direction. And once you go through puberty, those close, so that's why, for us, we tend to stop growing when we're in our late teens. We've gone through puberty, we're starting to produce testosterone, if we're male, or estrogen if we're female, and that closes our growth plates and so that bone can't expand anymore. The other thing that you might consider indicative of physical maturity is normal body condition score. So many young bitches will run a little bit lean, and then they'll start to put on a little bit more weight, and you'll feel them start to fill out a little bit over their ribs. And that would be another thing that you could look for. I forgot to mention when talking about closure of the growth plates: closure of the growth plates varies by the bone, and it varies by the size of the dog. And so that's why some people say a dog isn't physically mature if she's a giant or large breed dog until she's 18 months of age, but she might be physically mature if she's a toy breed when she's a year of age. And that's absolutely true, those growth plates are going to close earlier in a smaller breed of dog than in a larger breed of dog. 

Behavioral maturity is a little bit harder to define. You know, this, I can say, “Is that growth plate open or closed?” Boom. Question answered. Behavioral maturity is a little bit more difficult to define because it's so variable. How do we know what we call maturity behaviorally? And most people would say it means that they stand to be bred at an appropriate time, if you're looking at breeding behaviors, and that that happens at about twice the age of puberty onset, so that the behavioral maturity is set off by a time. In both males and females, that appears to be true. So as a general rule, people say you should not breed a dog on her first observed estrus cycle. And the reason that people say that is because there's a concern that the concentration of the hormones present is lower, and oftentimes it is noted that they are not receptive to breeding for as long in that first cycle. And so it is just thought it's sort of an immature system. I like to help my breeder clients think about this as being pregnant as a teenager. You can do it. You can carry a pregnancy as a teenager, but you are not yourself fully developed yet, either mentally or physically. It's probably not the best idea, and so it's sort of that same idea for us when we're thinking about using our breeding animals and thinking about when they should have that first litter. On the opposite end, if you're thinking about, “Well, how old is too old?”  . . . Here's where you're thinking about what is called the critical age for these dogs. And as a general rule, when we think about breeding older bitches, a lot of people worry about it somehow harming her, like it being too hard on her. And there really isn't much to define that. And so mostly what we're really worried about is that conception rate is often lower in older bitches. And if the litter size is smaller, the puppies that are in there will grow bigger, because they will grow to fill the size that's there. So smaller litters have bigger puppies in them. And this is a radiograph showing you a pregnant dog. So you're seeing her spine. Up here on the top. There's her tail. And here is where the head of that puppy is going to have to get through, this space here is the birth canal, and that's the head of that puppy. And if you can see comparing this size of this head to that size of that birth canal, the bigger those puppies get, the more likely it is to cause dystocia, where they're unable to whelp naturally, and then they're going to have to go in and get assistance and possibly even a C-section. So that's the concern with breeding them when they're older. So the critical age is defined in the literature as a decrease in litter size by 15% or more from average for that breed. And as you might imagine, it happens earlier in large and giant breed dogs than it does in small breed dogs. So small breed dogs, you can probably breed until they're really quite old, 10 years of age, before they hit that critical age. Medium sized dogs, eight or nine would be about the latest you'd want to go. Large and giant breed dogs, you've only got about five years to get them bred.

39:36

Now, that said, there is literature for big commercial kennels that raise a lot of dogs, dogs used for research, things of that nature, and they try to use a cut off point of breeding for bitches as five years of age. I myself have also seen, as a veterinarian, that if a bitch is not bred the first time before she's five years of age, she's harder to get pregnant, and I believe that's probably due to changes in her uterus from repeated cycling without pregnancy. I don't know that for positive but I'm not the only one who believes that as well. But as a general rule, five years of age—that seems to be something to be thinking about when you're thinking about, “Do I want to breed this dog yet? Oh, she's already three years old, but I want to get a new puppy, and I can't get a puppy for a year.” Well, then she's going to be four before you got a puppy, and then he's got to grow up before he can breed her. You know, be thinking about those things as you're thinking about how you're going to use these animals for breeding animals. 

How frequently can we use these animals as breeding animals? So if it's a male dog, you can use them very frequently, and there's little impact on them physically or mentally or on their semen quality. So you could use a breeding dog quite a bit before you needed to worry about it for male dogs. The biggest concern there really comes into that effect that you get when there's a super popular male dog in a fairly small breed, and then you have way too many of the puppies that have his genetics, and then whatever detriments he had get sort of multiplied by the fact that he was used so frequently. That's a concern. But for the dog himself, dogs do great. Male dogs do great when they are used frequently for breeding. If you breed them or collect semen from them for more than three to five days in a row, their libido will start to go down. So they like to have a day off in there. I don't know if it's fatigue or I don't know what it is, but they definitely show a decrease in libido. And when you collect a semen sample from a dog, or when he breeds naturally, a lot of that first spermatozoa, a lot of the first sperm that are in that ejaculate come from the epididymis, which is the tissue that sits above the testis and is sort of a maturing area for the spermatozoa, and so you will use up that supply at first, and then the next time you collect the dog, if you haven't given time for that supply to refill, the number will go down a little bit. So if you use a dog two days in a row, or if you collect a dog twice in one day, the second collection will always have fewer sperm in it than the first collection. And I'll talk about this more again if you come to my talk in July, when I talk about semen evaluation. So very often, what people will do is to say, “I'm going to use that male every other day.” And so when the bitch comes to the male and she is ready and stands to be bred, they will breed her that first day, and then not again until the third day, and then maybe the fifth day if she's still standing. They'll kind of try to space it out a little bit going every other day, and that's for the sake of the male.

Okay, what about bitches? This graph is showing you the hormonal changes that take place when a bitch goes through heat, and these are very different than the changes that you'll see in other species. So you'll see, if you look at this graph, there's a big spike for estrogen. So estrogen is what they're producing when they're in proestrus, and in estrus when they're first coming into heat, and when they're in standing heat. And then their estrus levels fall, and their progesterone levels go up, and that's because they've ovulated; they're ready to be impregnated. In every other species, if they don't get pregnant, their progesterone levels immediately fall. They recognize that. They say we did not get pregnant, their progesterone levels immediately fall, and that animal goes back into heat. So that's what happens with everybody else. With dogs, their progesterone level goes up, and it stays up whether they're pregnant or not, and it doesn't fall for about 60 days or two months, which would be about gestation length. And so they go through this prolonged phase. We call it diestrus here in the United States; they call it metestrus in some other countries. And during that time, they're full of progesterone, they can even sometimes look like they're pregnant. And at the end of that time, their progesterone will fall, and then sometimes they'll act like they had puppies. They'll show those kinds of behaviors. They'll lactate. That's false pregnancy, and it's just a reflection of the fact that all dogs go through these hormonal changes, whether they're pregnant or not. 

Does being pregnant—actually pregnant—prolong the time from one estrus cycle to the other? And it may or it may not. In some studies, all of the bitches went ahead and just cycled regularly whether they'd actually had puppies or not, and in some other studies, it appeared to be slightly prolonged. But nobody really knows that for sure. The big thing for you to know is that every time she goes through heat, she could probably be bred on that cycle. And we don't have these very, very quick cycling that we see in other species of animals. So should you breed her every cycle? If you bred her and you got her pregnant, should you breed her again the very next time she comes into heat? The pros of that are that you aren't as likely to see that false pregnancy. She's not going to show that decline in her progesterone in a way that makes her demonstrate lactation and all those things, despite the fact that she didn't give birth. And there are some studies that suggest that false pregnancies may be associated with mammary nepalia, and so that would be a pro of breeding her every cycle. It also lets you get your litters before she's too old, before she hits that critical age, or before she's likely to develop pyometra, which is the most common reproductive tract disorder that we see in older bitches. The biggest con is the physical stress of carrying the pregnancy and then lactating. So she's lactating for part of that time before she comes back into that next heat. And it's really hard for bitches to maintain their body condition while they're lactating. So you really, really want to make sure, if you're going to breed back to back, that she has regained that normal body condition before she is rebred. 

Pre-breeding testing. I'm going to say one thing, and that is: check in with your health club through the American Kennel Club. So the American Kennel Club requires every national breed club to have a health subcommittee, and that's where you find the most current information about your specific breed. And again, this is changing all the time. Tests come and go. Recommendations for those tests come and go. So really make sure you know where to find this information, through the AKC and the national club, or through other breed associated websites. And I strongly, strongly encourage everybody to do testing. I'm sure you, as people who come to these kinds of seminars, are doing this testing, but it really frustrates me when people don't, and then they're disappointed when they find problems with the dogs. These are identifiable problems. Let's find them. And it doesn't mean that dog is necessarily canceled from breeding. You just need to be smarter about how you're going to use them. 

The one thing I think you absolutely should test for is brucellosis. Brucellosis is a bacterial disease, and it can be carried in both male and female dogs. For some reason, people say you don't need to test the males, and that's absolutely untrue. You need to test both the males and the females. And I think they should be tested periodically, even if they're not being used for breeding. The one test that is most commonly used is called the rapid slide agglutination test. This is testing for antibodies against brucellosis in the dog system. So basically, it's telling you: Was the dog ever exposed? It doesn't become accurate until about eight to 12 weeks after exposure to the bacterium. So there's really no wisdom in testing any more often than every three months or so, because you can't catch it for that. We like this test because it has good negative predictive value, and that means there are very few false negatives. If you get a negative, your dog is clear. This was a test that was run in your vet’s clinic for years and years and years. Now it's hard to get them, but it's still the one that is most commonly done if you send it to an outside laboratory. The other kind of testing that's being more commonly done now is PCR, or Polymerase Chain Reaction testing, that is very accurate sooner after exposure, and it has both good negative and positive predictive value. And so if you get a negative, it is probably a true negative, and if you get a positive, it is probably a true positive, and it is not recommended again, because of how long it takes the test to identify things and just to statistically be as accurate as possible; there's zero reason to do it any too much more frequently than every six months.

47:58

Brucellosis was something that we didn't see very much when I first started as a veterinarian, and we actually see it more now, and that's because there's a lot of movement of dogs into the United States from other countries and across the United States. So here, for example, in the northern tier of states, we don't have as many feral dogs as there are in the south part of the country, especially the southeastern part of the country, and so we will sometimes run out of dogs, and then the Humane Societies here will contact the Humane Societies down in the southeast and say, “Do you have any dogs? We could use some dogs.” And they will send us dogs. And that unfortunately means diseases get carried along with these dogs. So it is something that, because the incidence has been increasing in recent years, they are stressing testing more frequently. 

Final thing to talk about: These are your valuable breeding dogs. So how do you watch for reproductive tract disease in your dogs? In your male dogs, this is going to be testicular neoplasia and benign prostatic hypertrophy. Both of these develop in dogs when they are older. They are both very common, with benign prostatic hypertrophy being remarkably common. These are both fairly benign disorders, testicular neoplasia in dogs, very different than it is in men, not as likely to move around in the body, not as malignant. Both of these disorders can be cured by castrating the dog at the time that they are identified, so your vet will check for these by doing a complete physical exam on your dog, including palpating the scrotum and doing a rectal exam and then possibly doing ultrasound of the testes in the prostate, if that is warranted. Uterine disease is most common in middle age to older bitches; most common one is pyometra. Very, very high incidence in dogs as they get older, and this your vet will identify using clinical signs, blood work and radiography or ultrasound, and again, this is curable by spaying them in the vast majority of cases. 

So what are the recommendations? These are the recommendations from the American College of Theriogenologists and from the European Food Safety Authority, which I know sounds weird, but that's just one of their animal based-groups. So the first one is: All breeding animals should be housed in a manner that permits them to show their normal behaviors. They have to be able to exercise. They have to be able to interact with humans. They have to be able to interact with other dogs, and you don't want to do anything that promotes mental distress. So you need to be wise about who you place with whom. Feed them an appropriate food for their life stage to maintain their body condition. So think about their age and their activity. All dogs should be checked for hereditary disorders before being bred, and should be checked for brucellosis about every six months. Don't breed bitches before they are physically mature, and do not breed them on the first cycle. Watch out for that critical age. If you're going to use an older bitch for breeding, and if you're going to breed a bitch on consecutive cycles, make sure she has regained her body condition. And then just one last push: if you're not going to be breeding these dogs anymore, you might want to consider spaying and castrating those dogs. What age at which to spay and castrate dogs is a huge topic. That was my research, unexpectedly for me, for 40 years of my life. So if you want to talk about that, let Nicole know, and I'll be happy to spend a whole time talking to you about that. But that's something that I would hope you would consider for those animals that are no longer used for breeding. Questions? Sorry, I know that was a lot to throw at you. Sorry about that.

Nicole Engelman  51:18

No, that was amazing. Thank you so much. I know you mentioned you're on a bit of a tight schedule, so I want to be conscious of your time. Luckily, I think you answered many of our previously submitted questions just throughout the presentation. We did have a few that I thought were pretty interesting. I was curious for your take. One of them is asking you: When, if ever, is it acceptable to bring a line back into a pedigree, or is line breeding in any way ever a good idea?

Dr. Peggy Root Kustritz  51:47

I think it would be foolish to say we're never, ever going to line breed, and that's because some breeds—we just don't have that many individuals to choose from. Very few conditions make me say, “I would never, ever use that dog,” or “I would never, ever breed that dog to this other dog.” I think you really have to look at the dog as a whole and decide why you want to bring that line back. If that is the line that is free from allergies, and you're breeding Golden Retrievers, that is a valuable line of dogs, and we do not want to lose that genetics. If that is the dog that you've ever seen in this breed that had excellent hips. We probably want to try to capture those genetics, if we can. So I think you really need to be cautious in saying baldly, “You should never line breed.” That, to me, that's too broad a brush. I mean, there's so many individual variations that that's a good conversation to have, and maybe even to sit down and really think about, “What am I looking for? What are the things that are important to me and my breeding dogs, and how do I weigh the value of this particular sire and this particular dam to get the best possible combination of those things?” Really be thoughtful about it. 

Nicole Engelman  52:55

Definitely. Thank you for answering that one. I know we can't give specific advice to any breed specific questions, but we do have a number of breeders here who have very active dogs, so whether they're hunting dogs or things of that nature, can high levels of activity impact heat cycles for dogs?

Dr. Peggy Root Kustritz  53:14

Yes, they can. They have to be very high, and it usually will also impact the dog's body condition. So the equivalent for us would be marathon runners and ballerinas—you know, people who just are enormously active and enormously fit and enormously thin. The less body fat you have actually, the fewer some of the hormones you can make, because they rely on cholesterol and other fats to build those hormones. And so, yes, if you have an extremely active dog, and especially if her body condition score is a little bit lower, that can impact her cycling. No question about it.

Nicole Engelman  53:46

Great. I think we have time for just two more. I see Doreen here is wondering what can be done to prevent false pregnancies in between litters. If there is anything that can be done for that?

Dr. Peggy Root Kustritz  53:59

Well, you can spay her. That'll do it for sure. The problem is, you know, in a way, I love false pregnancy, because it tells me the system worked. She ovulated, she maintained her high progesterone, her progesterone fell when it was supposed to. That is what I want her to do when we get her pregnant. And so in a way, I don't want to prevent that. The only way you could really try to prevent it would be to purposefully make her progesterone levels fall. And there are medications that we can give that will make her progesterone levels fall; they may just make the false pregnancy happen when we give her those medications, because it's the fall in progesterone that triggers all of those signs of false pregnancy. So number one: it might not work. And number two: the signal that tells them when they're going to go back into heat is that fall in progesterone. So if I, for example, give her medications and cut off that big part of her diestrus, she may just come back into estrus that much earlier, which may not have been what you wanted anyway. So I don't know of a graceful way to do it. 

Nicole Engelman  54:59

Great And then this last question, I thought this would be an interesting note to end things on. I know a lot of breeders joining are in pretty remote areas where it's really difficult to access this level of care from a reproduction vet. So if there is no repro vet in a breeder’s area, what would you recommend? Is there a best substitute? Is the answer just that they need to still bite the bullet and drive to find one? What would you say for that? 

Dr. Peggy Root Kustritz  55:26

You know, it's hard, because you don't usually get to pick who your vet is when you live in a rural area, and dogs are usually low man on the totem pole, because they're probably out there taking care of beef cattle, and that's their primary job, and then the dogs are just there. But I have found when I've gotten phone calls from people who worked in a rural area that had worked with a breeder and were really interested in helping that breeder do a good job, they found ways to get a hold of people and give them advice. So yes, I have an absurd amount of training in veterinary reproduction, but there are a lot of vets out there who don't have one third the training I do and do a really good job, because they know when to call for help, when to ask for advice. So I would say, if this person likes their vet that they're working with, say to that vet, “You know, I breed dogs. I would love to work with you.” And then there are a couple of things they can do. Number one: that person can investigate what's available through the Society for Theriogenology, which any veterinarian can join. You don't have to be a specialist. It's for anybody who wants to learn more things about theriogenology. And there's tons of resources. There's a meeting every year, there's tons of things, and there's a list of all the other members who belong to that society, which means you find the nearest person, and you call them, and you say, “Hi, I'm Dr. Josh Molyak in the middle of nowhere in northern Minnesota, and I can't get a hold of Peggy right now in the Twin Cities, and I need a question about blah, blah, blah,” and then they can help figure it out. So that would be number one, and then number two would be to think about whatever is the nearest university and find out who their theriogenologists are, and just call and introduce yourself. Find out if they're given any CE, whatever the thing is. Because if I know who somebody is, I'm much quicker to get that phone call back. I mean, there are some people in very, very far northern Minnesota that if I see a phone call from them, I answer it because I know it's a dystocia or something, or they wouldn't be calling me. It's not something that's a casual question, and I only know that because they came and found me and we talked at the MVMA meeting, and we have a relationship. So if that vet is interested, that is something that is not impossible for them to do. And I have found those clients that asked me for that level of care, they were such great clients. You wanted to work with them. So I can't imagine many vets would say “I don't want to talk to you about it.” I hope they wouldn't anyway.

Nicole Engelman  57:48

Yeah, definitely. That's great advice. Thank you. I think those are all of the questions we have time for. Dr. Root, thank you so, so much for being here. This was an amazing talk. We're already so excited to have you back here in July, and I can tell our community loved this presentation as well, so we can't thank you enough for being here. Thank you to, of course, our community for joining us today and helping us make this webinar what it was by asking so many great questions and participating. And if you're not yet part of the Good Breeder community, we would love to have you join and you can stay up to date on all of our future events and webinars by following us on Facebook, joining our private Facebook group, if you're not yet part of that, or just learning more about joining Good Dog at GoodDog.com/join. And I will leave everyone with just a sneak peek of our next webinar, because it is coming up quickly. It's going to be on Wednesday, February 11, at 1pm Eastern, with Dr. Ruth Ann Lobos, who has given a few presentations to our community so far, and she's going to be teaching us all about life-saving nutrition. So we're really excited about that. We'll have that event posted shortly, so everyone can register for that one. And I think that's it for us. Thank you all again for being here. Thank you, Dr. Root, and we will see you at our next webinar. Thanks, everyone. Bye!