There are things that happen sometimes with
dogs, things that you've heard of but don't believe, or think they can never
happen to you. Or just "Lessons Learned" that might help someone
else. We'd like to share some things that did happen to us so you will
know not only that it CAN happen, it can happen to you:
The Merle WHITE in
Disguise - Everyone knows that a merle (or "double", or
"lethal") white puppy, which sometimes results from the breeding of
two merle parents, is easily recognized at birth because of its predominantly
white body and the absence of color around the eyes and/or ears.
Right?? WRONG!! We try to avoid breeding merle to merle if possible,
but sometimes there's a particular cross we want to make and in order to make
it, we have to breed merle to merle. We had a litter from two
merle parents. There were three obviously merle white puppies. The
others were marked normally with color completely covering ears, eyes,
etc. There was one small blue male puppy with even less white than the
others - he had only a narrow blaze, white chest, and white feet. Merling
covered the rest of his body. His mother tried to push him away at birth
and we suppose she knew then there was something wrong. But we helped him
to nurse a few times and then his mother accepted him just like the
others. He didn't grow as quickly as the other puppies but was active and
had a good appetite. When the puppies' eyes opened we saw that his were a
beautiful sky blue. About this time we began to notice he didn't act like
the other puppies. He didn't explore the nursery like the others. He
sat alone most of the time and cried pitifully like he was lost. We
thought it was because he got off to a rather slow start and was smaller than
the others. The older the puppies got the more difference we
noticed. He didn't find the food bowl as readily and when one of his
siblings pounced on him in play, he would startle and cry as if terribly
frightened. At the age of five weeks we had him tested and he was both
deaf and blind. This perfectly marked puppy was actually a homozygous
merle. So...merle white puppies are not always readily recognizable.
Be extra cautious when evaluating merle puppies from merle to merle breedings.
Hemophilia doesn't exist
in Australian Shepherds. Right?
WRONG. Several years ago we bred an outside bitch that belonged to a
friend of mine to one of our male dogs. When the pups were three days old
my friend wanted to go out of town and I agreed to puppy
sit. She brought
me the bitch and the puppies straight from the vet's office after having tails
docked and dewclaws removed. There were only three pups in the litter (all
males, two blues and a black) and when I looked in the towel lined basket I was
astounded at the amount of blood I saw, and commented on it. My friend
replied that the vet did have a little trouble getting one of them to stop
bleeding but they'd be okay. I got mama and babies settled in and left
them alone for a while. A couple of hours later I checked on them and
found the biggest, fattest, prettiest puppy in the litter, a blue, lying dead in
a pool of blood. A little warning bell went off in my head as I remembered
what I'd heard about puppies that bled to death after tail docking, but I
thought, "Nah, that couldn't happen to me." My friend was very
understanding about the death of the puppy, the bitch had chewed the stitches
out and we both attributed his blood loss to that. But deep inside I still
felt uneasy. I took the other blue male as stud fee, and we sold him to a
friend of ours that lives locally. The black tri male was sold out of
state. A couple of months later the friend called and asked if we'd
had any trouble with the other puppy bleeding excessively. With my heart
pounding I asked him why. And he told me that his puppy had been in the
vet's office three times, twice with uncontrollable bleeding under the skin from
unknown causes, and now because uncontrollable bleeding resulted when he lost
one of his baby teeth. He'd had pressure packs and two blood
transfusions. The vet seemed to think he was getting into rat poison
somewhere but my friend said there was no way he was getting into poison.
I knew something was terribly wrong. We had blood drawn on pups, sire, and
dam, and sent to Cornell University for analysis. The diagnosis was
hemophilia, the type which is transmitted through the dam. The other
puppy, a black tri male, was not affected. (Incidentally, the vet at
Cornell told me that their experience had shown that blue dogs, of all breeds,
are affected more often with hemophilia than other colors.) After talking
with the owner of the bitch and the bitch's breeder, I was satisfied that there
was no known history of hemophilia in the line. That's when we learned
from Cornell that hemophilia can occur "spontaneously" in a bitch by
the mutation of a certain gene, with no family history of the disease, and she
then passes it to her male puppies. So if you ever have a similar
situation, trust your instincts if you sense something is wrong.
Hemophilia CAN occur in your dogs.
The Bred Outside Bitch
- Suzy was a nice red tri working bitch that belonged to a friend of ours.
He asked us about breeding Suzy to one of our male dogs for a working
litter. We agreed, and after having the necessary testing performed to
determine the timing was right and the bitch was clean, he dropped Suzy off for
a ten day stay to be bred to our red merle male. Instead of being ready
Suzy seemed to be either just getting ready or already going out of heat and was
not very cooperative, but we chalked her behavior up to being a maiden bitch and
we managed to get her bred. Our friend picked her up, we gave him the
expected due dates, and cautioned him about keeping her confined. "No
problem," he said. A little more than two weeks before the expected
due date he called us with the news that Suzy was a mother. Skeptical
because of the early birth, we asked if the puppies were all right and he said
they were fine, there were nine of them, all big and fat and healthy. We
asked what colors and sexes he had, and he started off, "Well, there are
two blue merles, two blacks..." "Whoa, wait a minute," we
said, "that can't be. Both parents are red." He said that
was true but he sure had blue and black puppies. Now we knew the bitch
hadn't been exposed to another male here...so we started questioning him pretty
closely. And he admitted that before he brought her to be bred she had
been running loose because they lived out in the country and there weren't any
dogs close by...well, there WAS a blue merle male Aussie about two miles down
the road but he didn't figure there was any way... We told him there
certainly had been a way, that his bitch was already bred when she came to us,
and we would not register this litter as sired by our dog unless he wanted to
pay for DNA testing. Which of course he didn't. (There were also some reds
in the litter so it's possible, although not likely, that some of the puppies
were sired by our male.) We were LUCKY -- had the visiting Aussie male
been red, we might never have known what happened until much later down the
road. Besides almost causing a litter to be registered erroneously, this
"friend" had also exposed our male dog to possible diseases carried by
the visitor (thankfully, everybody tested clear). So be extremely cautious
when taking outside bitches for breeding -- it CAN happen to you.