How to Get Your Bitch Pregnant with Dr. Marty Greer, DVM JD

About Dr. Greer: Dr. Greer is a renowned author, speaker, veterinarian, and canine reproduction specialist. In addition to being the Director of Veterinary Services at Revival Animal Health, she is on the board of the National Animal Interest Alliance (NAIA), the Society for Veterinary Medical Ethics, American Veterinary Medical Law Association, and the Society for Theriogenology.

Transcription:

Laura Reeves [0:00] Welcome to the Good Dog Pod! I am your host, Laura Reeves, and we have a super fun set of guests today. Cat Matloub (my cohost, who is Head of Partnerships and Legal Affairs at Good Dog) is joining me, and we’re having a conversation with one of my very favorite people in the entire world, Dr. Marty Greer—DVM, JD—I might add, who is the owner of Veterinary Village in Wisconsin, veterinary practice specializing in reproductive services for dogs. She is a board member for the National Animal Interest Alliance. She is the Director of Veterinary Services at Revival and—my favorite part—she is the veterinary voice for Pure Dog Talk. And just all around an amazing human. So welcome, Marty! I am so happy to have you join us on the Good Dog Pod. 

Marty Greer [1:51] I always love being here. 

Laura Reeves [1:53] It’s amazing. And we are talking about dog breeding and getting your girl pregnant. Getting your bitch pregnant is step number 1, right? 

Marty Greer [2:05] Well, yeah, it’s kind of a critical first step. 

Laura Reeves [2:08] So talk us through some of the things that our breedings who are listening need to pay attention to when they’re planning their first litter or planning their next litter.

Marty Greer [2:19] Sure. So probably the two most important places (or the two most likely places that we see problems with fertility) are going to be the female’s timing, so knowing that we’ve got good timing on the front end using progesterone testing and on the male side, having good quality semen that’s delivered into the uterus. Those are the first two key pieces to making sure that we have good fertility, or good chances of fertility. There’s lots of other pieces to it, and we’d need to go down a couple of different paths to make sure we cover everything, but I think those are the two things that I start with. The third thing that I frequently talk about (and it’s increasingly evident to me that we have some issues with) are the nutrition of the bitch.

Laura Reeves [3:05] Yes!

Marty Greer [3:06] I think that’s a really important aspect, and it’s one that I’ve started to move up the list on questions that I ask of clients: what they’re feeding, how they’re feeding, and a few other details about that. We can go down a couple of different paths with that.

Laura Reeves [3:20] Yeah, Marty, let’s actually start with that. Because I think there’s a lot of really untapped and very interesting pieces to this, on the nutrition piece. I want to get to the progesterone timing, and I want to get to semen quality and some of those things as overviews, but I really would like to hear more about what you’re finding and what you are learning about nutrition: what people feed, how they feed, and the impacts that it has on their litters, since we know that it can have tremendous long-term consequences.

Marty Greer [3:55] Absolutely. I guess I’ve become more of a believer in this in the last two years, with some of the advent of the grain-free diets and some of the other concerns. But it affects both male and female fertility. The difficulty is we don’t have any good studies at this point, but it would be lovely if we could find someone who would be willing to run some studies for us to assess quality of diets and nutrition. Most of the diets on the market are perfectly fine for maintenance diets for our dogs. Two years ago, we started to see some concerns with the grain-free diets and how that related to dilated cardiomyopathy, and there’s still a lot of questions that I thought after two years of discussion we would have a better handle on—but we don’t. We do know that taurine and some of the other amino acids in the grain-free diets were concerns. And it looks like (without getting too deep into DCM, dilated cardiomyopathy) there’s probably three general categories of diseases. One is genetic, one is nutritional, and one is… we don’t really understand, so there’s idiopathic causes. 

Laura Reeves [4:57] Interesting.

Marty Greer [4:58] So I thought by now we’d have a better handle on it, but we don’t. So I started talking to clients more and more about diet two years ago, when this whole thing came to be. As it turns out, there’s a lot of differences in diets, and we have a lot of clients who are feeding small company brand diets, we have clients feeding grain-free, we have clients feeding commercially-made raw, we have clients feeding raw meat diets that they make themselves, and then we have other homemade diets. So there’s a lot of categories for what we see here. The concern I’ve had is, as frequently as we talk about this, I can see that there’s a pattern that’s becoming evident: that the three major companies that make dog foods that are the only ones that I’m aware of that regularly have feeding trials for their dogs are going to be Hills Prescription & Science Diet, Royal Canin, Eukanuba, IAMS—which is all under the Mars umbrella—and Purina. So we see more success in the dogs that are feeding these three brands of diets than we do in some of the other brands of food. Even though the other brands tend to be fairly heavily promoted for breeders and cost might become an issue, I really think we need to look really hard at what clients are feeding and assess whether there’s been any changes, and I have some pretty interesting stories that verify this. 

Laura Reeves [6:21] Yeah. We have our own personal conversation that we were talking about, just before we came on air, about a situation that I’m personally experiencing as a breeder. So I think that that has a lot of bearing and I definitely think that that’s something I’d like to dive into further in a future podcast, but I really believe that breeders paying attention to what their bitches are eating—and not just their bitches, their stud dogs, right?

Marty Greer [6:44] Yeah, interestingly, I think it’s important that we talk about the boys, too. It’s easy to overlook that. But semen quality is really critical. A number of years ago, we had a client that came in on a Friday afternoon at four o’clock for a semen freeze on his 11-year-old sporting dog, and my staff kind of rolled their eyes. Oh man! At four o’clock in the afternoon? We have to do a semen freeze? This is really late in the day for an appointment. I said, “Don’t worry. He’s 11 years old. I’m sure when he comes in, we’ll look at his semen and it’s going to be poor enough that we’re going to say to them, ‘Here’s some nutritional supplements. Go home. Come back in 90 days when you’ve had a chance to improve the quality of your dog’s semen, and then we’ll talk about freezing it.’” Low and behold—he comes in and we collect the semen, and it is tremendous semen quality. So, I am very convinced that there’s a nutritional component to this, and I have also received semen from a veterinarian who is a specialist in canine reproduction, and when I got the semen from her 11-year-old dog, I looked at it under the microscope. It came in as fresh chilled. I picked up the phone and I called her. I didn’t say to her, “Do you feed supplements?” I called her and said, “What supplements and diet do you feed?” Because it was pretty evident that she was feeding a high-quality food. So there’s absolutely, positively a correlation between nutrition in the stud dog and the fertility in the female that we just haven’t really adequately explored from a research perspective. Diets that are on the market are generally tested to make sure that they will maintain all life stages of a dog, so unfortunately, because it’s just their life stages, it doesn’t include reproductive abilities. Reproduction is a luxury of the body. Your body doesn’t have to reproduce to stay alive. It needs to have a brain, it needs to have a heart, it needs to have those kinds of nutrients to support those organs, but overall it doesn’t have to be able to reproduce, so that’s where some of this problem comes in. Dietary companies don’t look at that. 

Laura Reeves [8:42] That is fascinating, Marty. I had never even thought of it from that perspective, but that is absolutely fascinating. 

Marty Greer [8:49] Thanks. I think about this a lot!

Laura Reeves [8:53] It’s why I love talking to you so much, because you think about zebras while everybody else is thinking about Shetland ponies. And I just love that! Okay, so talk to us about our girl dogs. Talk to us about our bitches. Most people, I think, in today’s society have understood the science of progesterone timing and some of that, but can you hit the high points and maybe explore some of the reasons that it is so valuable to a breeder?

Marty Greer [9:23] Sure, and there’s really two reasons that we look hard at progesterones. One, of course, is to get the females pregnant. Because if we don’t get the semen in the uterus at the right time, we’re not going to have a successful pregnancy—particularly if we’re using stressed semen, which would be fresh chilled and frozen semen. The more long-term that it is stored, the more stressed it is and the less likely it’s going to be successfully getting a female pregnant. So we have to have really good timing. Semen that’s frozen has already gone through a step called capacitation. So the acrosome (which is the little cap on sperm) has already gone through some enzymatic changes during the freeze. So we put frozen semen in a day later than we put in fresh or fresh chilled semen. Our typical timing is progesterone at 5 means ovulation (and 5 really means between 4 and 8; it means where we’ve started to see a rapid rise, where they sit at baseline at 1.2 and 0.8 and then 3.1 and then usually once they get to 3, things start to rapidly climb). But every now and then, we’ll have a female that stalls out in that 3–5 range, so we continue testing until we make sure that we’ve exceeded 5 by several fold. We like to see it 10–20 before we make a decision on using fresh or fresh chilled semen. So we breed two days after 5 with fresh semen or fresh chilled semen, and three days after 5 if the progesterone is over 20, with frozen semen. So we have two caveats. It’s if this, then that kind of rule, so we have to meet both of those criteria with frozen semen before I’m comfortable in breeding. Now we have two progesterone machines in our practice. At one time, we were running five because we wanted to assess the different machines and have a pretty good handle on what went on compared to [11:00] Marshfield Labs and IDEXX Labs, along with the progesterone testing that we were doing in our office. So we’re now down to two machines, and many, many veterinary hospitals have the ability now to run progesterones because IDEXX catalyst machines (the catalyst 1 machine) will now run progesterones in office. The veterinarian at that office needs to buy the test kits for it, but the catalyst machine is running very accurate numbers on progesterone, so a lot of veterinary clinics that previously (until about a year ago) could not get progesterone results same-day now can run them. And from the time the blood sample goes in the machine to the time the result pops out the other side (that doesn’t count the time to draw the blood, spin the blood, let the blood clot—all the things that have to happen) it’s under 10 minutes before we have a result. So it’s great for timing breedings. 

Laura Reeves [11:48] And, Marty, just to inject briefly: this is a very, very different process than what used to be in-house at most clinics, where you did the drop of blood and it was a blue or pink. It was almost like a pregnancy test. 

Marty Greer [12:03] Right.

Laura Reeves [12:03] Those old ones were not very effective. 

Marty Greer [12:06] No, those are semi-quantitative. They’re better than nothing, but they’re not quantitative enough. They don’t give you a number that allows you enough accuracy to make a decision on a sophisticated breeding, like with frozen semen. Most people with frozen semen are very careful with the semen that they have. They don’t want to let someone else have it if they’re not going to be good stewards of the semen utilization, so it’s really important that we do that. The other reason that we want to do progesterone timing and know when the females ovulate is for the purpose of timing the time that she’s due to have the puppies. So, a lot of people are like, “Well, I can get her pregnant.” Yeah. I can get a lot of dogs pregnant, too, but the question isn’t whether we can get her pregnant. The question is: Can we get her un-pregnant at the right time? Can we get her un-pregnant safely? And what does that all mean? So we have some dogs that are high-risk pregnancies that need to have C-sections, so we need to know exactly what day to schedule that for. We have some dogs that go into preterm labor; their progesterone prematurely declines. So without the knowledge of what the endpoint should be, we don’t have the ability to safely keep the female pregnant with progesterone supplementation—and we don’t recommend progesterone supplementation, except in very, very special circumstances where it has to be done to support a pregnancy. You have to be really aware that there are some definite downsides to doing progesterone supplementation. But without knowing what your due date is, you can’t schedule a C-section, you can’t keep her pregnant. And we see both primary and secondary [13:34] hyperludioidism (that’s when the progesterone drops prematurely). Sometimes it’s because there is something wrong with the litter, and sometimes it’s something wrong with the mom. So we have to be really careful with how we interpret those results. Without knowing our endpoint, we can’t tell. It’s really great to be able to put a dot on the calendar and say, “This is exactly when she’s due.” So I can go to work, I can go to bed, I can do all the things I need to do and keep my life going, and when it’s time to have puppies, I know exactly when my puppies are due. So I think it’s a really valuable tool that a lot of people tend to overlook the use of. 

Laura Reeves [14:10] Well, and the stress, right? In the days before we knew from progesterone timing it is going to be exactly this number of days within 12 hours, this is when she’s going to have puppies. So if she doesn’t have puppies when you think she is in the olden days, you spend three days freaking out. Are the puppies dying? Is she dying? Ah! Now you know. If she hasn’t had puppies by this, yes, go have a C-section. For me, it takes such a load off of my anxiety, which I have plenty of. 

Marty Greer [14:43] A lot of people don’t realize how narrow the window is for when a bitch is due to have her puppies. We only have 48 hours before to 48 hours after her due date to successfully get puppies out. More than 48 hours ahead of time, they’re likely to be premature. Their lungs aren’t mature enough to start developing, and the puppies just don’t breathe when they’re born. On the other hand, more than 48 hours after the due date, the placentas tend to deteriorate and decline, because they’re really programmed to last 63 days. So as soon as we start to see deterioration of placenta, of course we don’t have blood flow to the female’s uterus anymore to the puppies, so we start to lose puppies on the other end. So we have a very narrow window of time. A lot of people are like, “Well, let’s just do what’s called reverse progesterones,” which is when you do progesterone at the end of the pregnancy. I can tell you that that also has some downsides to it. 

I had one client that had a breeding at his home that he was unaware of. Now, it was his male to his female, and he was planning it anyway; it just wasn’t planned for that heat cycle. He came in to the practice every single day for 10 days in a row to get a progesterone done on his female, because she was pregnant with 10 puppies and he’s older and he wanted to have a C-section, so we were planning it. But he spent a lot of money on progesterone testing to figure out what day it was due on. Low and behold—she actually had her C-section done on New Year’s Day. So that means I get to also pay my staff extra overtime for them to all come in and assist with his C-section. 

Laura Reeves [16:07] I’m telling you! This is my life! C-sections have been on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Thanksgiving Day, or while you’re away at a major national dog show. That’s when C-sections happen. 

Marty Greer [16:23] Exactly. You can just set your watch to it, right? 

Laura Reeves [16:25] Guaranteed! Okay, so we’ve gotten our bitch pregnant. We’ve timed it right. When we were talking about the progesterone timing, we’re talking about the nutrition—what else are we watching in terms of conditioning and things that we need to do to take good care of our bitches to make sure that they’re going to get pregnant and going to have a healthy litter a couple of months later? 

Marty Greer [16:49] We want to make sure that she’s in good physical condition. We don’t want her too heavy. We don’t want her too thin. The condition that we want to show our dogs in—whether it’s in a field event or a confirmation event—may be a lot more lean than you would want to have a pregnant dog at. So, we do like our girls just a little bit soft and squishy. 

Laura Reeves [17:09] Fluffy.

Marty Greer [17:10] Not out of shape. Just a little fluffy. If she’s recently had a litter—I do want to circle back just for a minute here to nutrition—once in the last 6–8 months, we want to make sure that she’s been kept on a puppy food or a pregnancy diet, so that she is nutritionally where we want her to be. We know that DHA is depleted in dogs that have had multiple litters. DHA is a fatty acid, and that can be supplemented. It’s in some of the supplemented puppy foods. If you see DHA on the label for the Smarter Puppy IAMS products, it’s on there. But you can also just purchase DHA. I just bought some at the department that sells nutritional supplements at the big box store the other day, so it’s not difficult to get. 

Laura Reeves [17:54] Tell us about the dosage on that, because I think this one is a really important piece. 

Marty Greer [18:00] I don’t believe that I have ever seen a published dose, so I just usually give one human adult dose. It may come as a fish oil capsule. It may come as just DHA labeled for pregnant women. Just one capsule a day. If you’ve got a small dog, maybe one every other day, because it is a fatty acid, so you probably don’t need it every day. But every other day would be appropriate. So we want to make sure that she’s fit. We want to make sure that she’s well-fed. And we want to make sure that she’s got good dental health as well. There was an article published two years ago by the dental group that indicates that severe dental disease (or even moderate dental disease) can set up enough of a bacterial component of disease that that can interfere with fertility. It shocks me how many people come in with their females ready to breed. I don’t mind breeding a female that’s a little bit older if she’s been successful in having litters in the past. But they come in sometimes with just really foul mouths, and the time to start cleaning her teeth is not at the time that she starts her heat cycle. I don’t want people hand-scaling their dog’s teeth at home. I want them to have a professional dental cleaning, like three months before she comes into heat. Take her into your veterinarian, have her anesthetized, get underneath the gums good and clean, get her on an appropriate antibiotic at that time to keep any problems from happening in her heart or her kidneys or any other places that the bacteria can be seated into during the time that a dental cleaning is occurring. Just make sure that she is in top-notch shape. You wouldn’t expect a dog that’s not fit and well-fed and clean and healthy to be appropriately getting pregnant. And if we’re going to do any kind of medical care, like a surgical breeding or a [19:31] insemination, I really like these girls to have a bath a few days before they’re ready to breed. If you’re going to be using her as her own teaser bitch, you’re going to collect semen with the stud dog with her present, I don’t want you to bathe her right as you’re walking in the door, because you might wash off some of the good scents. But within a couple of days of the time she comes in, give her a good bath. Take her in for the grooming or if you have your own grooming equipment with a blower at home, that’s great. Give her a good bath. Get her blown out. Get her cleaned up. You don’t want to take some icky, smelly dog into the veterinarian. And you don’t expect her to have good health if she’s walking around with bacteria and parasites on her coat and on her skin. We forget that sometimes in our kennel situations those things happen. So it’s really important. I use a chlorhexidine shampoo because I like it. It’s good and anti-bacterial, and it’s safe and it just cleans them up. It smells good. And they go into the veterinary clinic looking like something you’re proud to be sharing and breeding. You don’t want some stinky dog coming in and having the veterinary staff roll their eyes after you leave and saying, “Ugh. Did you see that one? Ugh. Did you smell her?” 

Laura Reeves [20:36] My vet’s the worst. I take my dog in for an ultrasound, and she has to use the alcohol scrub to scrub her tummy. If she can get any dirt off of it, she looks at me. I’m like, “She laid down in the dirt! Man, come on.” I wanted to inject this, just really briefly, Marty. Cat, can you speak to Good Dog’s periodontal disease thing, that I think ties to this really nicely?

Cat Matloub [21:02] Absolutely. I was hoping I could chime in! We actually just had a webinar on periodontal disease and how serious it is. Dr. Judi Stella (Head of Health, Standards, and Research) actually worked on a periodontal disease initiative with dog breeders when she was at the USDA. We’re currently offering, as part of Good Dog’s Canine Dental Health Month, which happens to be right now (July), we are offering $10 off a dental cleaning or dental cleaning product for all breeders in our community. We have different monthly initiatives for exactly these kinds of really critical health things that sometimes folks don’t focus on. I’m excited; thank you for mentioning that! 

Laura Reeves [21:47] I was like, “I see you, Kat! Your eyes are bugged out!” 

Cat Matloub [21:51] But I didn’t want to interrupt such critical information! 

Laura Reeves [21:56] Well, Marty, thank you so very much for bringing your unbelievable knowledge and skill. I speak from personal experience—absolute looking for zebras instead of Shetland ponies—I really, really value your input and I believe that you are a national treasure to the dog breeding community. 

Marty Greer [22:18] Thank you! 

Cat Matloub [22:20] Dr. Greer, might I say that when I entered the dog world, my first purchase was your book on canine reproduction and neonatology, which is still the number one dog breeding book out there! If you dog breeders haven’t read this, get a copy of this book! I have the signed copy. 

Laura Reeves [22:36] Oh my gosh, that is fabulous. 

Cat Matloub [22:42] I can’t believe we got to have the person who literally wrote the book on this, so thank you so, so much! 

Marty Greer [22:46] Thank you! 

Laura Reeves [22:48] Alright, Marty, we’ll be talking to you again soon! Thank you.