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I thought this was worth posting non clinical and sensitive to mother nature article

Rx For Whelping and Ceasarians

by Barbara J. Andrews

Sooner or later, every experienced breeder encounters whelping problems. We are conditioned to accept, and even to expect problems with certain breeds. Worse yet, we’re told that bitches who deliver by caesarian may reject or even kill their puppies.

What a pity for a creature programmed to cherish and protect her offspring with her very life. And what a miscarriage of common sense that needlessly puts the breeder through weeks of sleepless nights, round the clock feedings, and constant worry. A bad experience can lead to erroneous concerns about whether or not to breed a valuable bitch again, and indeed, final decisions are frequently based on a litter which fails to reach optimum health, vitality, and structural potential.

There are logical reasons why caesarian surgeries impose hardships on the bitch and her anxious owner. There are equally sensible solutions but first, a little tweaking to your overall perception of the process will make this much more palatable.

C-sections are sometimes necessary to spare the bitch and save the pups. It is how we deal with labor and the immediate aftermath of surgery that will determine its effect on the dam and her whelps. Our well intentioned interference wreaks havoc on a process which has worked for thousands of years. True, some newborns fail to survive the harshness of nature but in fact, they are almost always lost to predators or natural tragedies, not to lack of mothering. Were we to believe the confusing array of books, seminars, and expert advice which surrounds us nowadays, we could only surmise that the dinosaurs became extinct because there were no humans to whelp and rear them!

Hand rearing frequently results in a generation of maladjusted canines who have been deprived of the constant licking, rough nosing about, tactile sensations, feeding rivalry, and the most basic learning experiences necessary to survive the first few weeks of life. Good dams beget good dams and for much more than genetic reasons. A female puppy deprived of the complex sensory and hormonal stimuli as well as the social interactions that naturally occur from birth to weaning is ill equipped to handle her own future litter.

Start with basics. The newborn is instinctively drawn to the warm comfort of the udder, groin, and genital areas of his dam. Getting there however, is a learning process that begins with a good mother’s guidance as she rolls and prods him in the right direction. Notice how she breathes on him. She isn’t smelling him, his individual scent was imprinted in her deepest being before she had finished licking the birth fluids away. No, she is leading him with her warm breath back to the constant and perfect environment of her cuddle curl. (More on that later.)

Contrast this with the whelp forced to lay on a dry heating pad or under the harsh light of an equally dehydrating heat lamp. Pups are born in dark places and are rarely exposed to bright light until after the eyes open. Their eyelids are closed for a reason. Close your own eyes. Shine a flashlight towards your eyes. Got it? The brightness filters through your closed lids. If you won’t allow her to whelp in the closet, at least give her a dark sheltered quiet room. Throw the heat lamps out. If you have orphan pups, give them a hospital quality moist-heat pad in one corner of a covered box.

If the artificially heated pup becomes too warm, there is no escape, no way to regulate his barely functioning thermostat. Human hands helpfully put him back in the heated area and the more he cries in discomfort, the more likely he is to be placed again and again in the heat. A brand new little body that is just learning how to react to outside stimuli begins to show the effects within hours. He develops painful stomach cramps, “bird-seed diarrhea”, and breathing difficulties. Improperly diagnosed and treated, he will die. The telltale yellow stool with little greenish lumps is undigested milk. Just as a chilled whelp can not digest milk, neither can an overheated one. The trip to the vet wherein he is taken out of the hot environment is often the first relief he has. He quiets down, grateful for the respite. All too soon, he’s brought home and hurriedly placed back in the overheated nest whereupon he again begins to crawl and cry.

I can’t count the calls from breeders who, home from the vet with dutifully medicated pups, find them no better off. A few careful questions will often result in the prescriptive “put them in the bathtub for five minutes and call me back.” The results are nothing sort of miraculous! Commit this to memory, it can prevent incalculable stress for you, your litter, and your friends. A word of caution. Should you lay this aside or fail to grasp the overall concept, please be sure the pups are in fact trying to crawl away from the heat source. If they are fanned out like spokes in a wheel, “crying and crawling,” the bathtub trick will work like magic. If however, they are “piled” on top of each other in the nest, or if after three minutes on the cool porcelain they do not fall into exhausted sleep, the problem is not overheating and you may need to find another vet.

A newborn learns cause-and-effect behavior in the first few hours of life. Instead of having a tube forced down his throat and his stomach filled with more than it was designed to process at one time, he learns to bump the nipple repeatedly to demand nourishment when he needs it. Another life lesson occurs as he performs the food-by-demand ritual and is gratified by the let-down of her milk. He sucks vigorously, aggressively, developing the pushy, survival-at-all-costs attitude which will ultimately determine his adaptability to the hazards of life, with or without human management. A newborn unable to join to the nipple for frequent small meals, one that never learns to fight for his place but who is instead force fed according to the human attendant’s schedule, inevitably becomes an adult with a quiescent reasoning ability and a lackadaisical attitude about life in general. Never having experienced the most basic neo-natal struggles and achievements, if at some point in life, he suffers hunger, cold, pain, or fear, he is the poor dogge that will just sit and whimper in befuddlement.

When pups are bottle or tube fed, we are told to gently stimulate evacuation by cleansing the genital area with cotton balls moistened in warm water. What we are not told is that it should be very warm water. Shocking a newborn with tepid formula or cleansing cotton is a common mistake. "Body temperature" in a human feels quite cool to a dog whose temperature averages 101.5 degrees! When pups are learning to eat from a bowl, toy breeds may be turned off by the cold edges touching warm throats. They may quickly seem to loose interest in the food when in fact, they are hungry but the cold sensation translates as something unknown and inedible. A dog’s temperature is almost three degrees higher than our own so sensory stimulation should be considerably warmer than the “wrist test” used for human babies.

If a bitch is spayed concurrent with a c-section, she may not be given an oxytocin injection or may have been spayed early in the labor stage, may be extremely stressed or for any number of other seldom considered reasons, she may fail to make milk. With the uterus removed and hormonal releases cut short by interruption of the birth mechanism, the milk just never comes down. Large breed matrons or those that bagged up in the last few days of gestation may slip by the breeder’s notice. As the experienced bitch goes through the instinctive motions of nursing, cleaning, and comforting, the breeder may fail to notice that the initial milk supply has run out. Pups who never knew they were supposed to have milk can just lay there and quietly starve as will pups who experience a gradual lessening of the milk supply. The breeder who weighs or instinctively notes that the pups are not "firm and fully packed" may be puzzled. Within two to three days, dehydration becomes so evident that even the most novice breeder realizes something is horribly wrong. By this point, it will take heroic effort to save the whelps. Any vet who fails to warn the litter owner of the possible side effects of cesarean-spaying or extreme stress should be held accountable. It is gross negligence too often compounded by an attempted cover up of scientifically worded garble designed to lay blame on the bitch’s “poison milk” or pups who were somehow defective and “wouldn’t nurse and caused the bitch to dry up.” Beware.

The Cuddle Curl is an ingenious tool for all moms that nest; felines, canines, bears, even rodents. Bitches deprived of the natural birth process may never fully develop the protective posture that regulates temperature, controls a large brood, and insures the babies are not laid or stepped on. By the way, pups that are too warm crawl away from the heat source. Although mom will uncurl, even roll onto her back to allow mammary heat to escape, she can do little to change an overly warm environment. Pups will scatter and are at risk of being squashed as opposed to properly regulated whelps snuggled to the teat or neatly piled. Understanding the remarkable multi-purpose mothering device came after an enlightening discussion with Dan Greenwald, one of the greatest dog men we’ve ever known.