Episode 206: Breeder Mythbusters: Top 10 Myths in Canine Reproduction

Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT explore facts and fiction regarding some of the most common myths in canine reproduction.

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. 

So today, we will be covering canine reproduction myth busting, which is a topic that we're really excited to dive into with one of our favorite guests, Dr. Andrea Hesser, who has joined us for many webinars in the past. So today, she's joining us to talk about the facts and fiction of some of the most common myths in canine reproduction. We're, of course, really excited to partner with Purina to bring you this webinar. This is something that, like I said, we've been hoping to cover for a while, because there can just be so many myths in the canine reproductive world. So we're really glad to have an expert come in and answer some of those top myths and help us separate fact from fiction. Of course, we got some questions before and that were previously submitted, so we're going to try to get to those. I want to just share a little bit more about Good Dog for anyone who is new here; I'm seeing some unfamiliar names, which is exciting for me, because I get to tell you a little bit about 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 dog breeders like yourselves, educating the public and promoting canine health and responsible ownership through events just like this. We are an online community created just for responsible breeders like yourselves to connect with quality Good Dog applicants from across the country and find forever homes for your puppies. We help breeders manage all aspects of their programs from start to finish, everything from getting your new litter of puppies listed, connecting with Good Dog buyers, getting payments securely for those puppies, sending them off to their new homes, and all of those littler things that happen in between your puppies being born and going home. Good Dog is really here to support you in all of that so you can have much needed time back to do what you do best, which is raising happy and healthy puppies. We also have a number of free educational resources to help your programs thrive. So we host events just like this a few times every month to make sure that we're helping your programs thrive in other ways, beyond managing your litters. We're really here to help you excel in having healthier programs. So that's a little bit about us, and if you're not yet a member of our community, we would love to have you join us. You can learn more about our mission and you can apply to join at GoodDog.com/join, and we'll drop that link in the chat now as well. And before I pass things over to Dr. Hesser, I just want to share a little bit more about her and her amazing background in canine health, for those of you who haven't had a chance to meet her yet. Dr. Hesser is a board certified reproductive veterinarian who practices in small animal medicine in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Her clinical time is spent doing general practice veterinary medicine and reproductive consultations and surgery. Dr. Hesser also provides semen collection and health testing services at local dog shows. She's a long time canine breeder and enthusiast with an interest in Whippets and Bull Mastiffs. And her mission is to serve breeders by helping them achieve their goals with their breeding programs, which is why she's here today. So with that, Dr. Hesser, pass things over.

Dr. Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT  03:34

All right! Thanks, Nicole. Hey everybody. Thanks for having me back. I had been asked to come up with this talk. This was like a really hot topic that a lot of people wanted to hear about, so it's going to be a very mixed bag, just FYI. So I tried to do things that were kind of varied in topics. So things to do with females, things to do with males, things to do with puppies—just so that there was a little bit of variety in here. But also I just want to say we probably got a lot of questions preliminarily. I probably didn't cover many of them. So in the future, we have a ton of mythbuster type topics, and we want to do a sequel to mythbusters, I think we certainly could. I know they usually will organize these talks kind of a ways in advance, but it might be something that we could do a 2.0 next year, or something like that. So I will do my best, though, if we have time, I've got 10 things to talk about, plus I've got a couple little bonus brief ones. And then if there's some time, we should just have an open discussion about some other topics too. If there's some other stuff that I did not touch. There are like 100 things I could have picked, right?

04:44

I just wanted to mention that Zest is doing great for those of you guys that followed. Last year, we had the seminar series where I was walking you through my Bull Mastiff litter. And I just wanted to let you guys know her legs are still very abnormal. Her hip is going to be abnormal just due to the fact that she had the injury that she did through her muscle and things from that abscess when she was young. But she is doing great. Her elbows are actually in great shape too. I just did prelims. She's 11 months old now, so she's almost an adult dog, you guys! She also has a half sibling now on the ground. So Cabana’s had six puppies, and at the end of January, they're about four weeks old. This is a little bit of an older picture, but doing great, thriving. Everybody's doing wonderfully. And I wish that that had been the litter that you guys got to follow, but yeah, just the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. 

So I kind of modeled this talk in the spirit of Mythbusters. I don’t know if anybody here used to watch Mythbusters. I loved the show whenever it was on, like in the 2000s-ish. But basically they will go through and say why—they declare kind of why things either were busted, plausible, or worked through. So we'll go through, obviously, we're doing a myth talk, right? So it's going to be . . . most of the things we say are going to be things that are pretty much disproven as far as the statements go. But that's kind of the idea. 

The first topic is going to be frozen semen related. So the first statement that we hear all the time, super common: “Oh, frozen semen doesn't work well for maintenance. That's why she didn't get pregnant. It's because you bred her with frozen semen. With a maiden, you have to prove her first, and then she can get pregnant with frozen semen.” A lot of you guys, I'm sure, use frozen semen with your veterinarians regularly. And the practices that you go to probably vary in their strength in confidence using frozen semen. There are lots of things that we could make sub-myths off of this, things like “TCI can't get maiden bitches bred with frozen semen,” or “maidens can't get pregnant with TCIs,” all things that I would say are confidently disproven. So what we know about maidens: so maidens are super fertile because they are young, generally. So most of these dogs, the reason that I would say they actually are a good candidate for frozen semen is they are the youngest, healthiest, most fertile from their uterine perspective, from their oocyte quality or their egg quality is higher, just like you guys probably experience, the older they get, the harder they are to get pregnant, the less likely they already conceived, the less likely their litter size is going to be kind of a full litter. Not every breed, but most breeds. You know, when they're two years old/three years old, they're prime when they're going to give you the best possible outcome. Youth is fertility. I mean, look at the human side of things. There's many reasons why maybe we have some teen pregnancy issues, but one of them is, if a teenager gets pregnant, it's because a teenager is just primed to have the youngest, healthiest uterus and the happiest oocytes. And the partner for that person was probably, hopefully, a young person. They also have the super sperm. The teenage boy is going to have the toughest, most resilient sperm of any sperm, and that's the same thing for dogs as it is for people. We often wait to breed until after health testing is done, but younger is better. There are some programs where, you know, they really want to use frozen semen. They have a giant breed dog that has a history, maybe, of having fertility issues on their side, and they want to do this particular breeding. They have confidence in their health testing history on their lines, and they feel good about rolling the dice a little bit on having their oo-phase kind of as two year old dogs. Well, maybe if that dog cycles when she's 20 months old, it might be better to roll the dice, have prelims on that dog and roll the dice on the health testing side of things. And I'm not saying we like to do that all the time, but it might be a solution for a program that's struggling to get pregnancies and that you had some really special frozen semen in mind. 

Their cervix isn't closed. Basically, the argument people will say is, well, if they haven't had puppies naturally, then their cervix isn't as open as once they've had natural delivery, when puppies go through their cervix. The reality is for breeds that don't do natural labor, that we do elective C-sections for, those breeders will say these rules are the same for them too, even though those dogs never had natural delivery, and those cervixes are similarly easy to catheterize and easy to manipulate and easy to work with for breeding with TCI, obviously. For surgical insemination with frozen we don't have to do anything with the cervix, so we bypass that as a variable. But I would say there's no difference between a proven versus a maiden on their cervix when we're doing catheters. We still struggle to get in there sometimes, but you know, we still have to work sometimes to get in through that cervical loss. 

On the flip side, why should we be cautious when we're breeding a maiden with frozen? Well, I mean, look at my experience, right? I bred Cabana with frozen with TCI when she was three years old. She had never been bred. And she had a lot of familial, strong fertility history, but in her case, she had a train wreck event. Well, if she had been that dog every time, that's why I bred her this time to fresh semen, because I wanted to make sure that I didn't put some really special frozen semen in her again and lose 75% of my puppies. I mean, because she could have some internal problem, like we were worried about neospora with her. That's a beautiful example of hindsight is 20/20. If I had bred to Ty last time and bred to his dad this time, I would have been very pleased with the outcome of having a bunch of puppies from my frozen semen dog. But it's predicting the future a little bit right. Like the reality is, the longer you wait, the less likely she's going to get pregnant with that chosen stud dog, at least. 

So the other thing with maidens that I would say is a real possibility, is, does she have the split heat tendency? If they're really young, if this is their very first cycle? So say you have Ibizan Hounds, and your dogs don't cycle till they're almost two years old, or after two years old, and their very first heat cycle is what you end up breeding on with your young girl. You end up spending a lot of money on progesterone if she goes through her heat cycle, especially with a sight hound. She goes through her heat cycle, has four weeks of proestrus, and then goes out of heat, and then goes back into heat a month later, and then cycles. I mean, it can be an astronomical number of progesterones that you end up having to run. Even if you have a practice that incorporates cytology and looks at other things, it's still going to be a pain. So it's not that the split heat is less fertile. Split heat is perfectly fine. If it's that second wave of the split heat, it's a perfectly reasonable cycle. Again, could be a sub topic, right? Split heat is not a bad cycle, it's just an expensive cycle. So just to reiterate, so there's no formal scientific publications that have looked at frozen with proven versus maidens. Anecdotally, there are some of us that have pulled the data out of our own miscellaneous client animals that have come through, and the resounding answer is that maidens have a higher conception rate. If we look at their average conception rate with frozen semen, whether it be TCI or surgical, the average conception rate is the same. As far as the between the modalities, the conception rate is slightly better in maidens. And I think it's because their median age is lower. So like, we're looking at an average age of two or three years old versus an average age of four or five years old. It might be that that's a little bit biased, you know, maybe it's really equal. I think that it could be that we're breeding older dogs, you know, breeding older dogs with frozen semen. I hate to say I see a lot of clients that, like, this is their idea. This is the only idea they have. And I cannot talk them off the ledge of having another idea, because this is the only chance they have. And so maybe it's skewed in that direction. It's skewed a little bit. It is anecdotal evidence too. I mean, keep in mind, this isn't something where we're looking at statistics and like proving that these are equal. But some of these practices, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of dogs that they bred in the various modalities with maidens versus proven girls. So again, said myth “maidens can't be bred with TCI” is not true. We do it all the time. I did it with my own dog. I would do it again. I plan to do it again. Zest is probably gonna get bred if she gets bread, depending on her health testing and how she's doing on her leg, and if I want to include her, she will be bred with frozen semen, most likely. And I 100% plan on doing a TCI for her. And you know, I feel the same way about toys. There are certain breeds that are just hard to TCI. So certain breeds that, if you know that you have a line that's really tricky, I mean, you could just plan for surgical and it would be fine. I just think, you know, it's, it is a lot of extra stress on the body for her, it's risk of surgery. It's a lot more painful, it's a longer day. It's much more complicated for you as an owner to come and go for that appointment. So lots of perks on that side. All right, so, in the spirit of Mythbusters again, this is busted. We do not think that this is the thing anymore. If we used to think it, we don't think it anymore. 

All right, this is a big one. Antibiotics for pregnancy. I always give my girls antibiotics during their heats. It helps them get pregnant. I swear it works. Give me Clavamox, give me Baytril, give me all those things. And there are lots of times I'm in the room and I'll talk to the owners, and they say, “This is what I'm planning on doing. I already have it.” And I say, “Okay, like, that's fine.” There are sometimes I get my arm twisted and I consent sometimes, but I would say most of the time I don't, and I'll kind of talk you through why. So I would say it is generally not an approach if the dog has a positive culture or something of that nature. We are seeking the results of getting a pregnancy. We are not just changing that we put her on antibiotics. You've also changed a bunch of other things that you've done; that's just like another thing that you put on as a feather. But that's the thing I think people cling to. Clavamox, I'm not sure has a lot of merit, but we'll talk a little bit about it. But Baytril has been a discussion point for a long time on “Why does it seem to have that effect?” Because there are people who will have completely different outcomes when we don't really expect them to have different outcomes, and we don't change the stud dog, and we have minimal changes between cycles. We actually think it might have other effects. So it's not the effect that we think of. So the antibiotic effect is not actually—we're not killing bacteria, that there's something else that the drug does in the body that causes an anti-inflammatory or a pro-gestational effect, meaning that they are more likely to carry. The thing that we have to keep in mind is these are antibiotics. They have the impact on your normal flora. So it does affect your microbiome. It affects the environment's microbiome. It affects the person that owns that dog's microbiome. When we give those dogs antibiotics. Microbiome, meaning, like all the bacteria that make up their normal processes, their gut mobility, their gut bacterium, the bacteria that are in your lungs, the bacteria that are on your skin—it affects all of it. The problem with that: so if we treat them kind of willy-nilly, we make resistance to the drugs that we need, and there's only so many drugs we have, so when we run out of drugs, we will have no more drugs to do things like treat medical managed pyometras or mastitis, or things that are directly relevant to her as well. I've also seen . . .I had a kennel of Bulldogs one time that had a respiratory outbreak that was resistant to Baytril because they had been using Baytril that way, and truly, they were pretty good clients. They didn't do anything real wild, but they had a respiratory outbreak, and they couldn't treat it. They lost a bunch of puppies. They had puppies at a third of their normal kind of weights by the time they were seven or eight weeks old. It was a nightmare. And it was interesting, though, because we cultured what was going on. I think they had a dog that aborted, and we cultured it, and sure enough, it was very interesting to see that that panel basically reflected what had been going on in their immediate environment. It wasn't the dog that had been treated individually, but it was a dog in that environment. So things that could be talked about with Baytril is that anti-inflammatory-maybe effect? That's kind of what we have jumped on and decided is that we think it's anti-inflammatory. So the inflammatory responses that are bad, that has to do with, like, an irritable uterus, say, that maybe we've benefited those. And then, even though it's an antibiotic, we've benefited something else, and then she gets pregnant. I do think this is real. We started talking about it more as a veterinary group lately. So it was presented on at the therio conference this past year on a couple of case reports. And there are a few different approaches. A lot of people are using Carprofen, which is Rimadyl. Carprofen, or Meloxicam, which is medicam, at different time points, such as right after they ovulate or at implantation or both. We can't use it all the time. It's not ideal to be using Carprofen throughout pregnancy or during pregnancy, right? Same thing with Baytril. There's certain time points we're not supposed to be using it as a drug for the benefit of that animal. The other kind of side mentioned too: If we don't know exactly when she ovulates, if you use this before she ovulates, it can block her from ovulating properly. So it could actually hurt you. And I would argue that that probably could happen with Baytril as well. I think it's possible. There's so many variables here, it's hard to kind of pin it down. So the contagious pneumonia outbreak that I had with the Bulldogs, I usually just tell people, I mean, for the pyo management thing—this is the drug. This is the drug that we use to medically treat pyos. That is the drug that we reach for. So if we've already primed them to be resistant to it, when you're bitch pyos, we can't fix her without spaying her, and that sucks. And when we can try things like Clavamox, we can try Lutelyse, we can try drug approaches that generally work, but that's why we're kind of protective of Baytril, individually. For anybody that's interested, so there is a lot of information out there on something called the One Health Initiative that is basically the grandfather statement that both veterinarians and the human medical field will kind of follow along and look at the resistance of bacteria associated with using antibiotics without cause. So you might have noticed also on the human side, that your doctor might not send antibiotics home for the same things that they might have 20 years ago, because we've realized that we are creating a very big problem in our immediate future. It's also why, like, some antibiotics are just harder to get in general. We just don't have them available anymore. I'm going to call this plausible. Antibiotics can affect pregnancy. You could have an infection, you could have an anti-inflammatory problem, and the drug that you happen to use might have an impact on that. So I think, you know, it is possible that you could affect it. Should we be using them all the time? No, I would say culture based. So using urine culture directive, if we see a ton of white blood cells, say, on her cytology or her discharge is really unusual. Her cervix looks like it's got some crud coming out of it. Well, I'm going to throw antibiotics at you. But as far as a fertility approach, I would lean toward NSAIDs and other anti-inflammatories as a better kind of judicious way to do that. 

Oh, this is a big one. This is a debated one, too. Man. I get in some real heated, heated debates with other people about this: clean out collections. Do they exist? “You need to collect your stud dog ahead of breeding, because his sperm will be better if he's cleaned out.” This is a very common statement, I think a common assumption. It's, like, endemic. Everybody thinks this is the thing, no matter how much experience you have. Like, I feel like it's, like, very common. A client will just mention it in passing, and I'm like, “Oh no, it's not a big deal.” So lots of species of male animals have what's called accessory sex organs, so things that provide some support to either making sperm volume or housing sperm or doing something that kind of helps the process of the breeding process for that species. So dogs have a prostate. They have a prostate that sometimes we have to manage, right? They can get prostatitis. They can get an enlarged prostate. But the purpose of the prostate is it is basically a secretory organ that provides fluid. It makes fluid. Instead of being two mils of sperm, it makes the ejaculate be 10 mils of sperm. That is what it does. That's all it does. It does not store. It has nowhere to store it. It just sits around your urethra, so the little tube that goes kind of from your bladder out the end of the penis, that is the urethra. This just sits right by the bladder, right around the neck of the bladder, and sits there and makes extra fluids so that when they ejaculate, they have fluid to kind of push everything out. Other species have other things. So there's other glands. Examples: bulbo urethral gland, that is in humans, bulls, stallions, boars, cats, all sorts of things. That gland has a secretory kind of quality too. So it produces different types of fluid and maybe different pHs depending on the species. Also things like ampullae. So the ampules are, it's a paired organ, so there's like two little leaps that come off and very common in livestock species. That organ, 100% of its purpose is to store sperm. So for things like stallions and bulls, they can store really crappy sperm that's been there for four years in that ampulla. And so there are some scenarios in those species where, absolutely, they have all sorts of names for them—so in bulls, they call it a rusty load. That's a real medical term. Makes you laugh, right? But those species, they absolutely can be different when you've collected them serially, or when they bred regularly versus if they had not. So sorry, this is a little bit fuzzy, but this is just the dog, just to show you kind of the anatomy here. So if you look right in the middle of the picture, the bladder is kind of that central dark area, and then the black circle that's right to the left of that is the prostate, so that, and then the kind of testicles to the bottom left. So basically, when he ejaculates that sperm goes from the epididymis, which is in the testis, it goes and pushes sperm through that tube. It goes by the prostate. The prostate contracts. The prostate contributes to fluid, and everything goes out. If they don't collect or breed, or anything like that, for a while, what they do is they push, casually, push semen from their epididymitis, which is down in their testicle. They push it into that tube, and it just goes out passively over time. It has nowhere else to go, so it just goes out with the urine. So for a normal urinalysis on a male—and you guys probably have observed this if you work in a clinical practice, or if you have your own like microscopes, or do any of your own work on your dogs—you probably have seen sperm in their urine. That is totally normal. They also can do things like we do see dogs that do goofy things like ejaculate backwards and then it falls in their bladder, it's all kind of close together, but yeah, it basically gets pushed out passively the whole time. So you know, if you haven't collected your dog, he's 12 years old, his semen can look totally normal on your collection. So my argument’s against cleanups. Is it a huge harm? No, but we do take away from their numbers. If you collect him today and you come to me tomorrow to freeze him? Well, he might have like, 60% of his collection tomorrow, if we collect him back to back like that or less. I mean, he might collect really well, but he might collect less numbers. And so even if the quality is 5% better, you've taken away more than I would have started with yesterday, had he been 79% normal morphology, instead of 84% that he is today with totally less numbers than he had yesterday. So I think you know, you can be your own worst enemy with that. And same thing with like, if you're collecting them regularly, if you collected three times last week because you thought it would help clean him out and then you wanted to semen on him this week, some dogs can handle that, and some dogs can't for numbers, so just be careful that that's not where you are, especially if you have tiny dogs, if you have toys or small breed dogs or older dogs also. The pro: if you do a clean out, I know he can collect. There are some times where we don't know. Are we struggling to get a sample because he doesn't know what he's doing yet? Does he need some practice? And that is practice for him, whether or not it's your house or at my clinic, it's still practice. And occasionally we will for medical reasons. So occasionally I will. So I've had, on one hand, in my 10 years, I've had dogs that really collected differently, but it's like weeks apart. So I did have an Australian Shepherd last year that proved me wrong, and I actually incidentally collected him again, because his owner wasn't at the appointments. His handler was bringing the dog, and I didn't take a video for her. She's a really nice lady. She's a dentist. The dog was super easy to collect. I was at a dog show, and she asked me, “Did you take a video?” Because she had asked about a video. And I was like, “No, I completely forgot. Let me just collect him really quick, and if something crazy happens—we collected this dog, like five or six times. I've never seen good semen. And if something crazy happens, we'll freeze it.” Oh, well, guess what? Something crazy happened, and I collected him the week before. Had never done that type of spacing. And sure enough, he looked great. He looked like 70% normal versus like 40% normal, which is what he had been doing chronically. So it isn't that it can never be helpful, but I think it's probably like 1% of the time. It's very, very rare. So like I said, probably less than five in my personal career out of thousands of dogs. So this one's pretty much busted, I would say. Busted unless you're a very unusual dog. Very, very unusual. 

So this is like, one of those topics, man, and I know the company that makes this extender is going to hate me, and I buy a lot of stuff from them, so don't worry. I do like a similar extender that they make quite a lot and use it all the time. I bought the 10 day extender because it's better and I can collect my dog, and I'm going to ship it to Europe, and it's going to sit in a box for a week, and this is the best idea that's ever happened. Hallelujah. We finally figured out how to breed dogs easier, and I can ship them at my convenience and go to my vet whenever I want. That is the speech we sometimes hear, usually not from other veterinarians or from breeders in the know, because most of you guys will ship your semen overnight, right? And then use it tomorrow. This is a claim. It's a marketing claim, right? It can, absolutely. I believe that this product can preserve semen for 10 days. I am sure there's probably some proprietary something that works really well to do that, but this is marketing. We don't recommend using it like that, personally, like medically, it's not the best idea. Semen denatures, has DNA damage. It has oxidative damage. They've studied it. The more hours it's outside of the dog, the less healthy it is. It's firm. It's not going to make puppies that are bad. It's just like, don't rely on it and plan for it that way. If it works out that way, great. I think the other thing too, is other companies don't market their extender this way. But I guarantee you, if you go and use the ST of this, which is the one I like, I like the ST better. I think they don't like to stick to each other as much. This one, they like to stick to each other a lot, which I don't really like. The way it looks on a slide. That ST extender, I bet you, it lasts for six or eight days, or, you know, something like that, as long as it's kept in refrigerated temperatures and kept at appropriate concentrations, and he didn't urinate in the sample, and, you know, like all of those types of variables, then, yeah, they can last forever. For years, before this product it was available, we absolutely can have a semen shipment arrive a week late, and it's still fine, as long as it didn't cook on the tarmac whenever it was shipping with FedEx, if it wasn't frozen whenever it was in Canada, or something frozen, solid and thawed, then it does fine. There are some dogs that have longevity, like in the female dog, that sperm can live for two weeks. So if we kind of simulate that experience and make it a nice environment for sperm, they can live for two weeks. This is not news. It's just smart marketing. They've sold a lot of extenders that way. I know there's a lot of people that have just, like, completely jumped all over this. So again, like 99% of the time the semen arrives fine. We miss the bitch. Usually when we ship semen, and like, the semen's delayed, we're not worried about the sperm. We're worried about her being too far to be able to be bred. Oxidative stress is something we can measure. So it's a lot of like flow cytometry and stuff that's way above my pay grade, or it's like the science of it, but they have documented this. There is actually a recent study, like in the last couple of years, that people looked at the difference of 24 hour versus 48 hour, and even, like, the shorter timeframes that there is marked difference between those time points for oxidative damage and DNA damage. So they have more DNA damage, they're less likely to fertilize if they have DNA damage. So it's always better in the male dog until you need it. It's better in the female dog once you have it. That is the best way to approach it. So don't collect him until he needs to be collected. I'm not keen on collecting tonight, and we'll collect them in the morning, and then ship it all the next day. I would just say, like, the good stuff is going to be the stuff that we collected in the morning, as long as the numbers can hold. So this one's busted for me. It is plausible that semen extender can promote the environment of sperm being able to stick around for a long time. But individual, product wise, it doesn't have to be this one. I wouldn't read it like it can function at 100% of its effect for that timeframe. It's just not medically a thing. 

Next myth, all right? Brucella. I get this one all the time. It's the constant point of discussion, right? Like between me and somebody that I'm talking to, as far as, like, especially freezing, right? “Oh, he's never been bred. We don't need to do his Brucella test.” If he hasn't been bred yet, I never let him naturally breathe. That was one I got last week. He's been bred to several dogs, and they lick all over the female in front of them, and I collect them, and then I put the semen in her. And so he's always protected. That's not true, especially those people that I worry about because they didn't do any testing and they didn't require any of her if they're having that type of approach, if it's most people, like usually, if they're cutting corners somewhere, they're cutting corners a lot of where. And if he's actively producing litters that are healthy, totally reasonable argument. I do get that argument. As far as, you know, it does support that he probably is not actively transferring things, but they can intermittently shed, and he can be exposed at any point, like, even if he had a litter that's four months old. Well, okay, I mean, it's been six months since that semen was produced. So like, how much validity does that have whenever this could be something that he got exposed to the day after he bred her, and he could have a completely different status, right now. We can transmit brucellosis a number of ways. Semen is the one that we always think up, right? So that's the one that people focus on in natural cover. You also can transmit it the other direction, so the female can transmit it to the male, which I think people understand, because if we're doing natural breedings, a lot of people will require a test for both parties. Also anything that that same tract. So the reproductive tract is one of the kind of focal areas. Well that's intimately involved with urine too. So urine is also contaminant. Spinal fluid is another area. So brucellosis loves the reproductive tract and it loves spinal fluid. Both of those places are very difficult to treat and completely rid the dog of this. That is one of the issues is we cannot get into the spinal fluid and treat the spinal fluid so it will always be there once the dog has the disease. Also can cause some really gnarly, painful stuff to do with your back as well, which is unfortunate. It also can be shed in other fluids, so any fluids: your eye secretions, saliva, defecation, and just about anything. It's not going to be as high of a concentration as semen or vaginal discharge or an aborted placenta or something like that. But it's going to be excreted in those areas too. And again, it's a permanent infection. It will never clear. It is zoonotic. Zoonotic means he can give it to you as an owner. Your dog can give it to you. It can cause serious illness in people. It can cause abortion, infertility, those types of things, but also can cause flu-like symptoms and like, for a, say, immunocompromised person could be a hospital visit. It could kill you. It's bacteria, so, I mean, it could cause havoc in a lot of ways. I've seen a spayed dog in California with brucellosis that was a six year old dog that actually went into nephrology. So it didn't actually come in through therio, because it had pyelonephritis. Pyelonephritis, so the kidneys were infected, and it had high kidney enzymes, and it was referred to UC Davis for that. And, surprise, it's a Brucella positive dog. It went to dog parks. It's been having that renal issue for a while. You want to know how infected that Bay Area dog park scene was? Probably tremendously so. And that was a spayed dog. Not recently spayed. It was a spayed dog. So, you know, who knows the true history behind the whole dog? But it's a bigger risk than I think people realize. The issue is not the frequency of how often we see them, it's the seriousness of the diagnosis and how much it changes the dog's future and your future owning that dog. It could wipe out on a whole kennel. There's lots of stories out there. I fortunately have not had a breeder that had that kind of wipe out effect, where they had to either cull their entire program or start over. You know, like their whole kennel is positive, they end up euthanizing most of their dogs or placing most of their dogs in single homes where they never go anywhere, they never do anything, and they don't have anybody—children, elderly people, no immune compromised people, no contact with other animals. It's not really an ideal situation. Obviously, if you have 12 dogs, you better place, how are you going to find 12 people that that would fit for it? I mean, it's impossible. So the best way to protect is to be preventative about this and be aggressive about testing.

35:25

So if you're going to test, make sure you plan ahead, because it takes some time for these to get back. We don't have these tabletop tests, unfortunately anymore, but you can see they're not ideal. The positive is on the left, so the agglutinate sample on the pictures on the left, the negative is kind of on those right too. That's the way that they would look. So nice and smooth is normal. We don't want to see them agglutinate, so like all those little particles on there that kind of look like sand. That's what we don't want to see. Those kits we used for years, but around Covid, we lost them. I think the company that made them stop making them. I know Virginia Tech, I think, was working on recreating this test and making this test available again, but it might take a long time for us to be able to get there. In the meantime, we've been using IFAs, PCR tests, or AGID tests. The Cornell test is like the gold standard test if you have a suspected positive. I usually use IFAs as a screening test, but it takes, I mean, most labs, it'll take you a week to get that result back. Also know that these are all through second parties, usually, most places are like sending samples to IDEXX, and IDEXX is sending a sample somewhere else or not IDEXX, necessarily. Maybe IDEXX doesn't do that, but that's the kind of pattern. A lot of the IDEXX, a lot of those labs, it just makes it easier for the clinics to be able to ship the sample to somewhere centralized that they're already connected to. But it depends on the company and it depends on the clinic, what the individual deal is and what their markups are, so what that clinic marks up and how that all works. But I mean, we hear wild numbers about brucellosis test costs. We also hear wildly low numbers sometimes, like from random farm that kind of GPs that we might interact with a client who mentions, “Oh, yeah, I can get my brucella test for 50 bucks.” I'm like, “If you can get it for 50 bucks, get it done before you come to me, because it's going to be 150 bucks here.” I think it's 120, something like that here. And some places it might be 250, or 300 or something. Some of it is that, like the middleman markup step. So they're going to have so much cost they're going to have to deal with, like, making it worth it for them as a lab. And then we receive that, and we have a certain markup depending on the practice of how they structure it. So just like, know that it's good to ask to clarify.

All right. So as far as, like, the time frames: usually all female dogs should be tested on their breeding cycles. So, like, each time that they're bred, I would breed them, and then whether or not they get pregnant, if they're bred on the next cycle, they need another test. Males should be tested every six months if they're being used. I usually use one dog as like a barometer for your house, because the reality is, if you have one dog, it gets exposed. The whole house is going to get exposed. So if they're commingled, if they interact, if they have kennel contact, if they're in the same spaces using the same water, you know, that kind of stuff. So like for me, I bred Cabana. I know Cabana is negative. I've got an older dog that is male, that he's not being actively used. I will update a test if he needs to be used. But like right now, I'm not just testing him to test him. I'm only testing him if he needs to be updated. I can presume that he's probably negative, since she's negative, because they basically like sleep in the same bed, right? If it's a frequent use dog, or if it's in a high risk area, sky's the limit. There are, in the Great Lakes area, there's some vets that do a lot of reproduction who require testing every three months for reproductive patients. I think it is totally reasonable, because we can get this disease too, right? Like they're trying to look out for their staff and be as thorough with their clients as possible, so that we don't spend $1,200 doing a breeding cycle on a dog that has a possible positive on a brucellosis test, or is positive on a brucellosis test. All dogs with any fertility concerns, I would retest, even if they've had a recent test. It's a good idea to just say, like definitely not that. You want to feel good, that it's not that. And then again, regional risk, you know, yield to your recommendations in your area. I'm in Texas, I would say six months is reasonable, as long as they're not having undue exposure to unusual things. Also in my area, we see a lot of hog dogs, so dogs that are used on feral hogs for hunting. Those dogs are at high risk for brucellus, but sometimes they will be positive on our initial tests, but they might not be positive for Canis. Some of these tests will cross react with other brucella species or other bacterial species. So this is busted. We should be testing. It is a good idea to test. It's just better to be in front of it. 

About thyroid infertility. “Thyroid supplementation makes my bitch conceive if she's low normal. My stud dog needs a thyroid test too, because his sperm wasn't great, so we probably should check his thyroid.” This is one of those things that there's kind of multi fold-things here. So we know that thyroid disease is connected to testicular degeneration. That means like when dogs just start to go sterile and their sperm starts to get really bad, and it's not caused by a disease, but they just get kind of soft testicles, and they go sterile. Those dogs have been correlated as being the same dogs that have like the autoimmune trigger. It is the same autoimmune trigger. So what causes them to get autoimmune thyroid disease is what causes them to get autoimmune testicular degeneration. It's like the same tune playing. We won't be able to change anything with supplementation if it's genuinely this. Sometimes they can benefit from supplementation. I would say, I haven't really seen it, but in theory, like, if you have a low thyroid because something is wrong systemically, otherwise something else bad is going on in your body, you fix that in time, but you also supplemented thyroid. Then sometimes, I think, like having that T4 a little bit higher during that window, sometimes that systemic disease will push the T4 down a little bit, so that might make them seem like they're a little bit low thyroid temporarily. That kind of scenario, they'll resolve in time with treatment. I'm not sure if it's actually from giving them Levothyroxine, though.

Pregnancy associated thyroid management. There's a study in Beagles from the ’70s or ’80s. And I'd like to mention the story, because it's wild. But back when we could do, like, really aggressive surgeries on lab animals—we can't do these things anymore because it's not considered, like, ethical to do it—but they went in and they had a Beagle colony that was bred and had litter histories, and they had, like, certain dogs that were bred to certain bitches in their program, and they were producing puppies so that they could continue to do lab testing in general. Beagles are like the poster child lab animal as far as the dogs go. Usually Beagles, because they're small and friendly and, you know, usually happy in that kind of environment. So what they did was they took those groups of dogs, and they went in and they took their thyroids out. They cut them out, they took them to surgery and removed their thyroid gland completely, and their thyroid levels went from normal to through the floor low. They had no thyroid. They went pot bellied. They had no hair. They had full blown like hardcore thyroid disease, right, hypothyroidism, and then they bred them six months later. Guess what? They all got pregnant, and they all carried their litters, and they all did everything like they did the first time. Same litter sizes, same everything. I mean, we can't use this as an example of everybody, but if that's the case, I have a hard time believing a subtle change in thyroid would cause some massive problem in fertility for most dogs. But is everybody the fertile Beagle colony? No, those dogs are bred to be fertile also. They're selected for fertility, and we only keep the ones that are in good fertility and that carry litters, because that's the whole point of proving reproductive efficacy and like, studying these dogs, because they can be bred, and we know that they're going to get pregnant and everything will go fine, but it's just a pretty impressive example of, like, if they have no thyroid, they can still do everything they're supposed to do. There are some proposals, though, so there's some studies, like at therio this year, we talked about—or maybe a couple years ago—think it was Dr. Cecciri talked about resorbing bitches and supplementing in specific cases during pregnancy or leading up to, like, if we have a dog that resorbed a litter, and it was pretty impressive, and we don't have an explanation for why they resorbed their litter, that may be the next cycle that we do earlier in their pregnancy that we do some thyroid supplementation, as long as we can, like, manage them that way. So I've adopted that occasionally with cases. Anecdotally, it seems to be helpful, but I don't know if it's really helping, or if it just, again, like we manage many things. If we have a case that we think is weird, we might be doing a lot of different things. So it's hard to tease this out as an individual variable. I think when people start reaching for this, they're reaching for all the things. They're changing their food, they're putting them on a supplement, like they're doing all the things that they can because they're trying to get them pregnant. But I do think it probably has some validity from that perspective. The thought is, we don't really know exactly why it works, but if she's having some issues, again, kind of like the boys, if she's having issues with her total thyroid, like circulating thyroid, and that's her problem. And we supplement that. Sometimes we've supplemented them into a more normal range. And then maybe whatever was underlying that was suppressing their thyroid a little bit, there was something underlying that was pushing their thyroid down a little bit. Maybe we've changed the dynamic of something going on with their body. I also test thyroid whenever I have a weird fertility case, I'm testing it because I want to see what it's doing, because it helps me. It's a barometer for the whole body. Your thyroid really, like it does get affected by almost every system, like something bad is going on, it can change the way that your thyroid functions, right? Even something not bad, even things like just your hormones being high. So it's why we don't do oocyte thyroid stirring heat. There's lots of little subtleties to that. So that one: plausible, but probably not the approach that we used to say, like, let's just give them all thyroid.

45:18

Next one is—this is one that comes up all the time: “My dog just wanted to heat. She'll probably fail her OFAs. I think I'll just wait. I'll breed her next cycle, or I'll just breed her without her OFAs, because there's no reason to do OFAs on her today, since she just came in heat. I can't believe she's in heat.” Sometimes it's me that figures out the dogs in heat and they came in for like, vaccines or something, like, “Oh my god, she's not supposed to be until next month!” Well, what is your urgency? I think it's the main question. Do you have time to wait? If you have time to wait and you believe this, then do it right? But my feeling is, test her, test her and breed her if she's fine. This is on OFA’s paperwork. That is why people believe it, because it is literally on the back of the piece of paper that you guys fill out to submit. But it is a human medical thing. It is not proven to be the case with dogs. In fact, PennHIP, which measures laxity, which is the whole argument, right? Like, oh, they have laxity. Because women have laxity when their estrogen is high, and so you know, their hips are going to fall out of their sockets and their PennHIPs will all be terrible. PennHIP disproved this. PennHIP doesn't tell you not to do them when they're in heat. They tell you not to do them when they're pregnant, which we wouldn't do anyways, because we don't want to take a bunch of X-rays when they're pregnant necessarily, like a whole bunch. I mean, like, I might take 20 OFA films on a single dog if I want to get the positioning perfect and like fussing with them. And PennHIP, we got several other types of films. We send a lot. They're sedated. We have to send several films. We would not be doing that during pregnancy, but even postpartum, they don't recommend immediately postpartum, because Relaxin has nothing to do with estrogen. Relaxin doesn't happen if you're not bred, if you're not pregnant. So I would just say almost all the time we do these films anyways, and they look fine, or they have bone changes. And if they have bone changes, like bad, moderate dysplasia on osteophytes, well they're not going to pass. And then you knew not to breed her, but they weren't going to pass regardless. Didn't have to do with that. So I think this is total bull. Personally. I know there's probably some people out there, and I'm fine. You know, if somebody says, “Oh, I'd like to reschedule,” okay, that's fine. Like, reschedule, but just don't, like, change your entire life around because of this. I would go out on a limb and say, 95% of the time we're super happy with the films. Every once in a while, maybe I have a marginal one that's got, like, some laxity, but I don't think it's to do with their heat. I think they just are dogs that have laxity, like I said, per PennHIP, the whole point of that test is laxity testing. So like, if they don't see a difference between estrus and non estrus in the same dog, then it's not a thing. 

This is one that's near and dear to my heart right now, because I have one in my whelping box. So creating umbilical hernia, can the surgeon or the dog. She pulled on the umbilicus when she was born, she ripped it, and she tore the abdomen, and she weakened those muscles, and now my puppy has a hernia. I think, no, they do not. I don't think that we can support any of that, because when we close these they are smooth and like they were perfectly intended by nature, so smooth. It's like joint capsule smooth, just so smooth on the way that that fascia is on their linea on the midline. It's not scarred. It's not torn to the side. It's never like left to right. It's just like, perfectly down the middle right? Perfectly symmetrical. It's not from that. The other thing too, think about: these puppies come out and they're dragging their placentas. They're pulling the placenta off of the wall with their umbilicus. And we don't see that that happens from natural whelp, right? And I would argue that's way more force, and over time, more force than anything that we can be doing, you know, in our settings, in the C-section, or in the settings, like if a female dog is cleaning her up and she's being pretty vigorous with things. I have one in my litter right now. It's a midline defect. It is hereditary in some scenarios, sometimes it's drug induced. Sometimes it's other weird food bar things that happen with her uterus or placental attachment. I think there's lots of things that can cause it, but I wouldn't panic, you know, if it's the greatest puppy you've ever had, fix the hernia, go forward. If he's producing them, then don't go forward with them. 

I did have some bonus myths. We can do them if you guys want to stick around, but I don't know. I'll yield to Nicole on her thoughts. But we might just wrap up. And I'll just make those for, like, next time, if we have another group. 

All right, topical medications, and you know, things of that nature: totally fine for pregnancy, as long as you use them in moderation. Just use them a little bit. They're fine because they don't absorb. This is a common thing that veterinarians will argue to me, and I will panic whenever a dog comes to me after it went to its GP and had an ear infection and got some EKT paste in its ears. All of the medications that touch this dog, that are around this dog, that go in its mouth, that go onto its body, parts, anything of that nature, those all have to be things that are approved for pregnancy, all of it. Eye medications. You have a dog that has an eye infection but doesn't have an ulcer, and they give you a drop or an ointment with dexamethasone or predrop. Sometimes we have to treat her first, but you need to know that could cause, at certain stages, could cause all of your puppies to have cleft palates or something really bad, like really bad stuff sometimes. We do have to prioritize her, but like sometimes it's the antibiotics in the ointments that we have to be careful about. Ears, I think is a big one, because a lot of people have meds at home that they had left over, and they'll just, like, casually use them. Or like this ear solution that's over the counter, the Cymox, that is hydrocortisone. Same thing. You could have an entire litter of cleft paddles or midline defects, puppies that had intestines on the outside and things like that. If you use it at the wrong timeframe. If you've used it in the past, don't feel comfortable. Just, you know, heed the warning. I've had those C-sections with those litters, and it's pretty heartbreaking. Don't forget skin meds. This is one common in attack box: neoprene powder, right? People put it in between their toes and like it's their daily routine for their dog that has chronic allergies that probably shouldn't have. It's not a good idea. It has steroid in it. Same thing with these sprays and even like Ketochlor shampoo, can you use it? It's not that you can't, under any circumstance. If I had a wicked skin infection situation with a pregnant dog, I'm going to prioritize her sometimes and go ahead with Ketochlor. But Ketoconazole is not the best thing to be asking that body to metabolize. We don't have pregnancy studies. We don't treat pregnant dogs with antifungals routinely, systemically. And they do absorb through the skin. That's the whole idea. It's affecting them enough of a deeper tissue level that it is contacting their bloodstream, and they are going to see that. 

And then I'm just saying it out loud, just because we're talking about meds: oral meds. Oral meds, just a reminder. Don't use oral meds that you just have some extra of and that you would just like quick fix use. Make sure you talk to us first before you use anything.

And on that note: don't quit giving her heartworm and flea and tick prevention if you are in an area . . . I know, all of us are in the United States, so we're all in an area that needs heartworm prevention. However, flea and tick, use at your discretion. Depending on where you are. Where I live, they need to be on all of it. HeartGuard, Interceptor, Sentinel—there's all sorts of options that are safe. Don't stop it for that month. You are putting her at risk for that month to then be heartworm positive, and then you can't breed her the next time. And she's going to not be bred for a year and a half while we fix her heartworm problem. It happens. We see positives for our breeding dogs sometimes and sometimes this is why. There's discussion about Bravecto. You guys are probably familiar with Bravecto. Bravecto has a label that says you can use it. I've used it with no problems. I have some colleagues who don't like to use it because they think there are problems. The argument is the package insert does disclose that they had a birth defect in one of the litters during the testing for eight weeks of the trial. But how often do we have birth defects? They happen. So was it the result of the drug? Was it just because that dog had a midline defect on one of his puppies? And like, is that a reason to throw it out? I can tell you here, if you have a tick problem in your area . . . I mean, like when I practiced in Oklahoma, we kept this on the shelf. I loved it for pregnancy. Three months of prevention. So if you don't regularly use tick prevention, or even if you do, what's nice is I can give it to you when she's being bred, and you can give it to her, and it is perfectly seated to prevent fleas and ticks for that entire time frame, until she is basically weaning puppies. It's like, you don't have to remember to redose it. In my neck of the woods, a tick to the knees will potentially kill your dog and her liver. It could cause her to have fertility problems, but it could also just kill her. So, like, I wouldn't do it. Protect against it if you need it. Also just a gentle reminder: Remind us that she could be pregnant, because I will forget. Even if you're coming to me in repro practice, I'll forget sometimes. Be her advocate. I'm very much a shiny objects person. I'm sure you can tell that just listening to me talk. It is a good idea. I might forget that we had seen her two weeks ago and done a TCI on her, and I might want to be more careful about how I approach that. I would always treat her in that first month before we know she's pregnant. Treat her as though she could be, so if she gets an ear infection, you know, it's not fun. But treat her, you know, with cleaning and trying to decontaminate her ears and keep her ears as dry and clean as possible, versus treating her with drugs. If we can avoid treating with drugs. If it's a bacterial infection, maybe she can have antibiotics, but she can't have antifungals. There's different strategies we can take sometimes for treating. All right, so this is busted. Don't use them. Do not use without approval.

54:57

Last one is goat's milk. I supplement my puppies with goat's milk. And that's always what I do, and it's perfect, and I love it. So this is a diagram that just shows you the different concentrations of milk of different components, so the different protein levels, carb levels, fat levels, energy levels, like they're solid concentrations. So it just kind of shows you the variety here. And if you look, you see goats. So solids: 130. Go down to dog: 227. That's almost half of the solid content. Protein not far from one another, right? Go to carbs, way higher carbs than the dog, right? And then fat, way lower fat than the dog. And like these seem pretty subtle. Energy is half, almost of what the dog's concentration. So that means this milk is basically half as potent in density, and, like, nutrient density in some ways, for what we need. So it's not perfect. Goats are not dogs, right? So like this isn't a surprise, but why has it become a go-to? So it's easily accessible. I can go to Walmart and pick this up where I live. I can get goat's milk in a powdered form. I can get it even at a neighborhood walk. I can get it anywhere. There's no prep, and it's super easy to store. I mean, this is really easy. It's shelf stable right in the powdered form, and it re-suspends pretty well, the fridge version. I mean, that milk can be good for a month or two on the date. Just remember, like, goat's milk—it was made for goats, right? The reason it worked is because of the globule size. So there's, like, these little components of milk, and those globules come in different kinds of shapes and sizes and makes. So the size is so small that they don't get osmotic diarrhea, which means they don't have, like, an influx of fluid from their body that tries to displace all those little particles, but that's what happens with things like cow's milk. So it isn't built right for puppies, but it doesn't cause them to get diarrhea, so they don't die from dehydration and from diarrhea, which is what happens if we get them cow's milk or something like that, in a pinch. And I mean, I use it for things like making gruel for puppy mush and things like that. I'll use it in a pinch for puppies, but make sure you get pasteurized. Raw milk can carry disease. I know that's like a whole other lecture, but there's no benefit to raw milk other than you're challenging the immune system of everybody in your house and the dam of this litter. You're more likely to end up with serious problems subsequently. There's not any difference to them in their nutritive value. 

What formula can you use? S black is the closest thing on the market. I will tell you. Like in practical use, I like the cans better than the powder, but they do get osmotic diarrhea sometimes with this, even though it has the best formula component. So if you use S black, if that's easy for you to find, take the full strength, like make it up full strength, and then dilute it a little bit. So dilute it like one to two for the first day or two that you start using it, even if it's like a partial supplement. Do have goat milk, and I'll be honest, I put that on here just because it always makes my eyes go, “What? What?” It's like a puppy formula, but it's goat milk S black. So I think they're just using goat milk like a component to it, and maybe it's better. I don't know if anybody has any thoughts on that, but I would think it just probably causes less osmotic diarrhea. And then, of course, there's all the homemade formulas, right? Like, that's all the things that are out there. I've used a lot of those. I've made lots of things and made the liver water on my counter and all that stuff. But I'm usually using that for putting weight on puppies, or, like, as an additional supplement. I'm not usually using that as an exclusive unless it's a puppy. Sometimes it's like a puppy that's trying to die. Sometimes I'll reach for that super intense one. I just think, for, like, chronically, it's not perfect, right? Same problems, like, it's not made perfectly for, like, what they need. And then, just a reminder, for any formula: If you open a can of this, you don't have to waste it. You can put it in an ice cube tray, freeze it in ice cubes and then use it, you know, one cube at a time, or however much you need it at a time. If you have a litter that you're supplementing, you'll go through a lot, but you won't go through a whole lot at each feeding, no matter how big your puppies are. So this is kind of plausible. I would say. Goat's milk—it's still a good option. It's just not the best option. But if Nicole has any questions that have come up during the talk, or if there's some other things that had been sent in ahead of time, we'd be happy to talk about those now. 

Nicole Engelman  59:23

Awesome! Thank you so much. Hopefully we have time for a few. If that's okay with you?

Dr. Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT  59:27

Absolutely. Yeah, as much time as you need.

Nicole Engelman  59:29

Great. I apologize if these seem very random. I think people ran with the topic of the webinar when submitting questions. We do have a question about if there's anything that can be done nutrition wise, to produce more of one sex in a litter. 

Dr. Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT  59:46

Ooh, great question. No. The answer is no. I love that question, because there are—I didn't think to include the sex bias topic, the one we hear all the time, and I know people swear by this, is that if you breed early, you get girls / if you breed late, you get boys, within their kind of ovulation time. The argument for that, just as a side topic, it's the nutrition one I don't really have any thoughts on. The thought is that the male sperm, because it has less weight . . . if you think XX/XY, we think about that as letters, but it is physical material. So if you think that Y is three quarters of the weight of an X, so if you have a sperm that's made with the same tail and the same amount of kinetic energy, the male sperm should be able to swim a tiny bit faster. It might not be actually that measurable. But, like, if you think about it, it doesn't have to be very much, right? If he gets there first, even if he's like a half a second ahead of time, if he gets there first, then he is going to be the first one to be able to attach, make that acrosome reaction and get in that egg, versus his friends behind him. So it does make sense to me that a male sperm will be more likely to conceive, because it's going to win if the egg was already sitting there ready, and the later in the cycle the eggs are sitting there ready. The earlier in the cycle the sperm will get up there, and then the eggs kind of have to mature and take some more time. So I don't know that we totally understand that, but that's kind of a thought. We get greedy about sexism, I totally get it. I was so excited to have four girls last time, and I got four boys and a girl this time. And the girl . . . she doesn't have enough mask for me to really keep her to show her. So, you know, like, we just get what we get sometimes. And I think if we disadvantage the timing, and we try to prime it for things like on that side of things, like the scenario I described, where you pick your time and you, like, very specifically breed on a certain day and don't breed later. I think you're just playing odds of like, “Do you miss her completely?” Because you've kind of played too aggressively on your “let's try to get girls versus boys” hand. And I think that's probably why I wouldn't take the approach on the breeding timing one.

Nicole Engelman  1:02:01

Awesome. Thank you for answering that one. I think we have time for two more. This is one that I think we've seen many times across different webinars, but maybe we could share an answer to this in terms of a myth busting: Is oxytocin recommended after the final puppy is born?

Dr. Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT  1:02:18

So if you have an accurate puppy count, there's no reason to give oxytocin. So there are varying degrees of how comfortable practitioners are. Therio practitioners, internists, like people who do a lot of repro as far as, like, how many placentas is important for them to excel? Like, what percentage of things? I mean, I have a friend in California, who quite literally, will tell you, even if you had a deceased puppy, that she'll see you in, ultrasound it, it's deceased, and she won't encourage you to do a C-section. She will just tell you to go home. That puppy will pass and potentially give oxytocin. You know, there's some strategies to it. I don't feel that. Personally, I think I would rather there not be things sitting in there that don't have to be in there. But when the puppies are nursing, they are releasing her oxytocin. So they're giving oxytocin to her. If you think about it like that, as long as you have puppies out nursing, I wouldn't be concerned. But fortunately, dogs don't really get Metritis, so they don't get uterine infections as easily related to retained placentas and retained puppies. I think having an accurate puppy count X-ray is a really important approach. If you feel like maybe you want to give a clean out shot, I think the better approach would be go and check. And even if it's doing ER, go and make sure she's empty. If she doesn't have a puppy left, I wouldn't be giving anything. And if she's had all her puppies, there's no reason. We might use oxytocin, like to help encourage milk let down. So I'll do that postpartum, like post C-section, or something like that as well sometimes.

Nicole Engelman  1:03:52

All right, I think we have time for one last question, kind of relates to the first question I asked: Who determines the size/amount of puppies. So many people say that it's the dam. Is that true? Is there no way to determine? What do you think about that one?

Dr. Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT  1:04:11

So I think the litter size. So it's not the dam from the perspective of her size, but it's the litter size. So if you think about how big a singleton puppy can become. They might be disproportionately bigger than normal. As a singleton, I had that experience. So Cabana’s puppy weight. She had six. She had one that was still born. She had, I think they were between 18 ounces and, like, 22 ounces something around there, which are big puppies, but that's pretty typical for Bull Mastiffs. So the stud dog’s sister whelped the day after her, had a singleton puppy that they went to C-section on, and that puppy was considerably bigger than my puppies, and it was, they're genetically very similar. They were the same due date. They were the same timing of everything, same breed, same genetics, but very different, and I think that's the difference that we see. I'm sure there is some validity to some sires or some dams have better, larger birth weights, or more substantial birth weights. I think some of it has to do with how healthy their placentas are. So like when they're in utero, we'll often see little skinny, sad placentas with those like little, frail, skinny puppies. Like I had a Corgi breeder that had an 8- puppy C-section, which is a pretty large litter for a Pembroke Corgi. Her birth weights are usually pretty healthy, but she had some three and four ounce puppies that were like little Chihuahuas in that litter, and they just didn't have very good placentas. Well, turned out her uterus on one side wasn't as healthy. It didn't have the blood supply as the other side did. So we had some of those types of findings. So sometimes it can be things like that. But if you think in livestock, they have something where they can predict birth weight genetically based on that cow; that bull produces large frame compared to other bulls, and they can test for that sort of thing, genetically. I'm sure we could probably prove that, just we have so much variability, even within our own breeds, on size, I think it would be really hard to prove in a dog, but I bet you, there is some genetics to that. I also think nutrition is huge, like there are some breeders that have shared with me that, like switching between diets, they change nothing else about their programs, but they incidentally, changed their diets and their birth weights were totally different from where they used to be, because they just get better nutrition.

Nicole Engelman  1:06:28

Awesome. Thank you for answering that one. I think those are, unfortunately, all the ones we have time for. Thank you to everyone joining, for asking such great questions. This tells me maybe we need to do a part two to this topic, because it looks like we just barely scratched the surface.

Dr. Andrea Hesser, DVM, DACT  1:06:43

I know. Well, and I was gonna say you can compile those questions for me sometime, and we can try to figure that out in the future.

Nicole Engelman  1:06:49

Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much. Dr. Hesser, as always, it's such a pleasure having you join us. I know I speak on behalf of I think everyone joining us today, when I say this was incredible for the community. We love having you, and we hope to have you back here again very soon. Thank you so much to all of the breeders who joined us today, and we will be announcing our next webinar very soon. So just keep an eye out in our newsletter and on Facebook for that, and until then, I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their day, and we'll see you at our next webinar. Thank you, everyone. Bye!