The Love Affair Begins…

After searching high and low, up and down, and all around, Peony finally swiped her paw right! We are pleased that Fleury also swiped his paw right to make a match! This begins the saga of Peony's Fast & Fleuryous Love Affair! 

A good breeder tries to improve their line and/or the breed with each and every litter they produce. This can make it interesting and a quest to find the right match conformation (structure-wise), temperament, intelligence and bidability, let alone good eyes, hearing, hips, and genetic health in the pedigree. All of this must match up dog to dog  (sire to dam) so you bring out the best from both parents. I always joke with my human friends that if they were so picky they would never procreate again. 

I feel this is a good match! We are excited to see these puppies!

Okay so the sire is picked. The bxtch always travels to the stud dog. It's just how it is done usually. I was hoping to do a live breeding but since I was unable to travel at this time, I decided it was more feasible to do a frozen breeding. You have the added expense of shipping semen and the cost of the Reproduction Specialist services and surgery.  But if the stud dog is far away, you have gas, time off from work, hotels, food, etc. So my plans changed from live, to a frozen semen breeding. Since Peony was already in season the semen needed to be shipped faster rather than slower, so that was a chunk of change but it arrived in two-days without a hitch. You can always get the semen shipped on not such a rushed schedule and it may be a tad bit less expensive.

The Reproduction specialist likes to get a baseline progesterone test between 5-7 days. Day one is the first day you see blood. Doing a baseline will help them pinpoint ovulation and the best time for your frozen semen method of insemination. I am choosing to do a surgical isemination as it has the highest chance of success.

Frozen semen techniques are as follows:

• Vaginal Insemination—semen is deposited into the cranial vagina using a rigid pipette
• Surgical Insemination—frozen semen is implanted inside the uterus during a surgical procedure and placed closer to the site of fertilization.
• Transcervical Insemination—intrauterine deposition of the semen by passing a catheter though the cervix

A frozen semen surgical implant is not like a live breeding. With a live breeding you have some leaway on the timing, as the semen can stay alive inside the bxtch for a couple days (some say a week, but I do not believe this is likely or there would far less failed live breedings). The lifespan of the eggs is very short. When a bitch ovulates the eggs are "dropped" but they are not yet "ripe" or ready for fertilization for 48 hours. Bitches ovulate when the progesterone is between 5 and 9 but may not be ready for a frozen surical implant until they are well into the high teens or higher. With a live breeding the bitch is receptive after ovulation, so if you get the semen in there waiting for the eggs to be "mature", the live breeding will result in fertilized eggs.  With frozen you have to get the timing perfect, the semen must have thawed well and be viable, and the thawed semen only has a few hours (12 up to 24 hours perhaps) to live so timing is critical, or you will have a miss. An experienced reproduction vet does progesterone testing and cytology (a swab of the cells of the cervix), sometimes daily as your bxtch is getting closer, to try to get the timing just perfect. LH test may also be used. Experience and skill at this is a must. Each bXtch is different and can be different each time! They call them bxtches for a reason... LOL

We had a progesterone test done on Monday, 7/31/2023 on Day 8 and she was only at 0.65. The thing with bxtches, is that once they ovulate the progesterone levels starts doubling and rising quickly.  Peony had a LIVE breeding last year that resulted in 10 puppies. She was receptive to being bred on Day 12 and Day 14. In theory, a frozen implant would be a couple days after that. This information may help, but honestly bitches do not always follow a previous pattern.

NOTE of INTEREST: Did you know that you really should not start traveling to the stud dog until AFTER your bxtch has ovulated? Sometimes a bxtch gets stressed and will stop her cycle and you have to start all over again in waiting. This happened once to me when traveling to a stud dog (I had thought she was far enough along) and once to a bxtch coming in to bred to my Newt.