Re: Please help! Pups first heat and also have male!

In Reply to: Please help! Pups first heat and also have male!
Posted by:  Tracy
Posted on:  November 27, 2001 at 22:28:36

: Please help! My female has gone into heat for the first time. I also have a male one month older than her. I am trying my best to keep them apart but the barking, whining, yelping and crying is driving me totally insane. I find going to work a kind of vacation for 10 hrs, but I feel bad for my neighbors because I am sure they can hear them. I hear them. I don't want to spay or neuter them because I want to eventually breed them. Is there anything he can take, she can take, I can spray, etc... To hide the smell of her estra??? I am sure they are going through a terrible time, however, so am I.

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Hi, Tracy,

This is the price you have to pay if you want to breed your dogs. It sounds like, in your case, the benefits of spaying/neutering would far outweigh the price of having intact animals in the house. Even when you actually let the dogs breed, the male will go insane even more than he is now. Once a dog becomes a stud dog, you're dealing with a whole different animal.

As it is now, you have to keep them separated a long time to be sure she's out of heat, and if she eventually has puppies there are so many things that can go wrong. I nearly lost one of my bitches, which is nothing compared to friends of mine who have actually lost their bitches in whelp, even though they totally knew what they were doing. My last litter had to be bottle fed... and for the first week, that meant every two hours. This meant I had to wake up via alarm clock every single two hours to feed the puppies. The feedings got to be more spaced out as the puppies grew, but the pups are now 17 weeks and I still haven't totally recovered. I was so weak and tired (I have a job, so besides waking up at all hours of the night, I had to haul the pups to work every day so I could feed them) that I ended up with a flu that has lasted over a month, and is resistant to antibiotics, no doubt because I exhausted myself over these pups... and I ended up losing one despite all my efforts to keep them all alive and thriving. If you think that the fuss your dogs are making because they want to mate is bad... I hope to goodness you don't end up with pregnancy complications or any of the problems that can easily occur when you try to breed. I won't even start in on the problems of placing puppies in good homes, and weeding out people who would be horrible for your puppies, who will give you a call a year later saying they dont' want the dog anymore, and you get it back with behavioral issues because it's been shut in a crate 24 hours a day, or beaten, or teased. This has happened to several people I know!

Nobody said breeding was easy, that's for sure.