Friday May 31 -- Sorrow and Reassurance

When I let Cocoa out this morning I discovered she had inadvertently crushed and killed one of the puppies; it was a sad time and I tried some puppy CPR for a couple of minutes with no change. My partner looked at the puppy too and we agreed it was gone. We were able to keep Cocoa from seeing the puppy and I hope, because she is so busy with 9 puppies, that she won't ever know or understand what happened. Nature can be a little harsh at times, a 40 pound wheaten terrier does not usually have 10 puppies; for a first litter it is very uncommon and the poor dear is making a valiant effort to feed and clean her litter.

We buried the puppy in the corner of our garden in a little box in the same spot we had buried Tammy, our black Cockapoo, almost 20 years ago. Obviously I got a little paranoid after this and kept jumping up anytime I heard a cry from the puppies in case Cocoa was sitting on one of them. She did sit on them a few times but I think they would have been able to get out okay; I lifted them out gentle and set them in front of her. 

Cocoa is struggling a little with feeding; her lowest 4 mammary glands are producing milk quickly and are visibly getting bigger to handle the load. Two more seem to be starting to grow and produce milk. Her last two are still very small and are not very effective yet. That means the poor thing is having to feed nine puppies with only four really effective mammary glands. She probably spent a total of 10-12 hours today just feeding her puppies and she is starting to look exhausted. She's drinking lots of water but not eating at all so this evening I mixed a cup of dry puppy food, some low sodium fat free beef broth and a little chopped up hard boiled egg (Cocoa really likes egg); I warmed it in the microwave for a few seconds and the bowl was practically empty before it even hit the floor. I felt much better that we got some food into her and we'll keeping feeding her like this four or five times a day if she'll take it; my book on raising puppies says while she is nursing she will consume as much as four times her normal amount of food (that would be 8 cups of dry dog food a day). Hopefully she'll start eating her plain dry dog food soon; we have a feeder that guarantees there is always food available if she wants it.

As you probably know puppies cannot go to the bathroom by themselves at this age; they only urinate and defecate while being licked by the mom so she can consume it and keep the whelping bed cleaner. The picture below shows our clever mom's solution to the dilemma of having only four teets giving a decent amount of milk and having to keep nine puppies clean.

Her solution -- she's nursing them sitting up so she can allow puppies to feed and clean the ones that are on the outside (not currently feeding) at the same time. As you can see in this picture that means she sits down then spreads her front legs leaning forward and stays that way for a long time (sometimes 1/2 an hour or more); she's getting exhausted and I've caught her falling asleep sitting up a couple of times. We're trying to encourage her to lie down to nurse so it won't be so tiring but she isn't really catch on to it yet.

We weighed the puppies again tonight and much to our relief every puppy seems to have grown -- the nail polish thing didn't work out and there was only two puppies who we could still tell which one they were. So I just listed the weights and match them up with one another; the lowest tonight with the lowest yesterday, up to the highest to the highest. We did know which puppy was the one we lost. It worked out that all nine weights were higher than yesterday so we know everyone is getting some milk and starting to grow. Very reassuring; some of them have grown by 10% in a single day as you can see below.

Puppy chart

1. 225 grams and now weighs 249 grams
2. 260 grams and now weighs 290 grams
3. 255 grams, 270 grams (the smallest increase but still an increase)
4. 268 grams, 290 grams
5. 300 grams, 333 grams
6. the puppy we lost :-(
7. 285 grams, 311 grams
8. 271 grams, 305 grams
9. 271 grams, 312 grams
10. 290 grams, 330 grams

Perhaps not exact but very encouraging.