Ruffly Speaking

Breeders have been sending mysterious packages across the country for years, but if they weren't using a vet at both ends of the deal they had to be very look-innocently-at-the-ceiling about it. Up until a few weeks ago, that is. Right before I bred Clue the AKC removed the necessity for veterinarians to involved, which means that I get to talk about what happened here as I was getting and sending my own packages. If you're a breeder reading this you've probably been there and done that and this is going to be a pretty boring post, but I figured that the pet owners might wonder what insanity goes on during four or five very frantic days in the life of a breeder. The deal, as you may have gathered, is that it's a lot easier to send the pertinent bits of a dog across the country than it is to send  the dog. The correct adjective is "easier," not cheaper or more effective. As a matter of fact, I could have sent Clue to Arkansas and back not once but twice for the amount I ended up spending on breeding her, thanks to her holding out for an extra week and costing me $450 just in progesterone testing. (If I seem to be hitting the dollar signs hard, it's on purpose – good breeders always tell potential owners that they can't make any money breeding dogs correctly, but I think a lot of owners don't quite believe them. After all, they know they just handed an enormous check over to this breeder, who is going to collect four or five thousand dollars this weekend; how could they NOT make money? If by naming numbers I can convince even one person that breeding dogs correctly is basically throwing money into a hole in the ground, that's worth it to me.) Anyway, people have known for decades that shipping semen was a lot nicer than sending dogs everywhere. Dog semen has been frozen since the 70s, and the practice really got going in the 80s and 90s. Cardigan breeders do not participate to nearly the same extent as I am used to in other breeds – perhaps because Cardigan stud dogs seem to live forever and a day and are fertile until late old age, so there's not the same urgency to preserve their genetic potential. In Danes, it seemed like every stud dog who was deemed worth breeding was worth freezing (and freezing in quantity), and in fact there are many puppies being produced from dogs who were born more than twenty years ago. Freezing semen can work real miracles; once semen has been frozen it can (theoretically) live pretty much forever, and will be able to fertilize eggs when thawed and warmed. However, frozen semen has two very big disadvantages: It cannot be removed from its bath of liquid nitrogen, so has to be shipped in a dry shipper or transported by hand in a large tank. This is a huge pain in the neck and very expensive. And second, the freezing process doesn't kill the sperm but it severely weakens it. Fresh semen can live several days in good conditions (inside the bitch) but frozen semen lives only a few hours. Because of the extreme fragility of frozen semen it generally can't get where it needs to go on its own. It has to be manually placed in the uterus, which in dogs virtually always means surgery. The bitch is basically spayed-without-spaying. A small incision is made, just like a spay, the uterus is fished out, but instead of the uterus being removed a syringe is used to fill the uterine horns with warmed semen. The uterus gets put back into place, the abdominal wall stitched or glued, and if all goes well you get a litter of puppies. The cost for surgical breeding is generally the same as a spay, plus the cost of progesterone testing to determine the best day to breed, plus a semen evaluation to make sure it's not all a waste of time, plus any shipping costs. The last time I asked around it varied by area but in Boston was $1500-$2000. A smaller bitch who needs less anesthesia would be a few hundred less. Understandably, surgical breeding is not exactly perceived with joy from most breeders. It's something that we're very happy is available, especially when it lets us access stud dogs long sterile or dead, but it's something that nobody takes lightly and it's not really a replacement for live breeding. What everybody needed was a way to keep semen alive for a few days, not a few centuries, to most closely approximate a live breeding. The main obstacles that needed to be overcome were related to the fact that sperm are alive. They are one of the few cells that can have an independent life apart from the body, and that means they need to eat. Normally the bitch produces nourishing sugars and nutrients inside her own body, allowing the sperm to live for several days. Sperm that aren't inside her will live only a few minutes. So as far back as the 50s reproductive specialists were experimenting with seeing how long they could keep semen alive, and the ingredients they came up with are very similar to what we use now. They typically involve something that feeds the sperm (a sugar, depending on the brand of extender a lactose, sucrose, or fructose) and something that protects the sperm from itself and from changes in pH (a buffer and a diluting liquid). Some also use egg yolk, which further feeds the sperm and provides an actual coating on the sperm cells to further protect them. None of the ingredients are particularly high-tech. All these formulas are called "extenders." Once the sperm are in a liquid that will feed and protect them, they are refrigerated to slow bacterial growth and to slow their own metabolism. They are put into a sort of hibernation where they consume very little nutrient, but when they are re-warmed they can come back to activity and can penetrate an egg. So that's the background of the story: You need an extender and you need cold. Those two things allow the male's responsibility to be fulfilled. Unfortunately, he's only part of the equation. At the other end of the continent you have a bitch whose reproductive cycle is very, very ticklish. Most mammals give themselves many chances to get pregnant, because any one cycle may fail. So their bodies have developed ways to tell if they successfully conceived and ways to tell if they didn't, and if they failed to get pregnant they start all over again. In dogs it's very different. A bitch assumes she's pregnant and her body goes through all the prep work and all the hormonal stuff whether or not she conceived. Her progesterone spikes and stays high for nine weeks; her mammary tissue prepares to produce milk (and may even produce it), her uterus' blood supply multiplies by many times. There's no negative feedback loop telling her to shut it all down because she's not pregnant. As a result, whereas humans cycle every 28 days (roughly) or mares every 21, a bitch cycles every 180 days or at even longer intervals. So you only have one chance, and if you miss it you're on hold for another six or more months. Adding to this pressure is the fact that the release of the eggs is a three-step process that we don't have a really good way to observe. The bitch's estrogen goes up, ripening a whole bunch of eggs, then she releases lutenizing hormone that tells the eggs to be released, and then her progesterone skyrockets to maintain the pregnancy (whether or not a pregnancy has actually occurred). The only one of those hormones we can routinely accurately observe is progesterone. Canine lutenizing hormone tests do exist, but are rarely used. So most breeders and vets rely on progesterone. Very few vets have in-house testing, though, so you are always getting results 24 hours after the test was actually done; you're always a day behind. All KINDS of old-breeders' tales and witch-doctory formulas exist to try to pinpoint when to do a breeding based only on observations of progesterone 24 hours before. Some rely on a level of 2.0 (which is associated with the LH surge); some rely on 4.0 (which is considered to be a good sign that ovulation is imminent); some use 5.0 (ovulation probably occurred that day); ot
hers wait until they see a rapid rise above 5.0 (ovulation probably occurred the day before the rise). However they do it, what they're trying to do is figure out not necessarily when the eggs were released but when to do the breeding. Because the bitch has one more trick up her sleeve; when her eggs are released they cannot be fertilized. They have to ripen for 48 hours or so before they can be fertilized. Once they ripen, they live for about 24 hours and die. Basically you're trying to get semen into the bitch right before and right after her eggs ripen. Hopefully the semen that went in before is still alive when they ripen and hopefully if it's not you caught her with the second insemination. This tends to be very easy if you're doing live breeding, because fresh sperm live for several days. Chilled sperm live only 24 hours at most. And, of course, the semen can't arrive instantly; it has to be collected and extended and shipped overnight. So the whole thing we just went through with Clue looks like this: progesterone level: ———0.2 ————-2.0———————————5.0—————-25.0 to 70.0 ———————————– event: ——————proestrus ———–LH surge————-ovulation is imminent—–ovulation has occurred——–pregnancy timing: ——————————————day 0 ——–day 1 ———-day 2———day 3————day 4—————————————- communication: –stud dog owner on standby——-call for first ship—– first box arrives——–second box arrives————————– dogsecks: ————————————————————————————–*  ————- * ——————– * ——————* —– When the box arrives via FedEx, it is a cardboard cube with thick styrofoam forms inside it. Deep inside the styrofoam are ice packs (the one next to the sample is fridge temperature, the outer one frozen, so that ice never touches the sample but the whole thing stays very cold) and one small vial containing 10 or 20 mls of extended semen. I unpacked it and immediately put the vial into the fridge while I got my insemination kit, which is just a 10-ml syringe – no needle, of course – with a long (ten-inch) rigid pipette that attaches to the needle end of the syringe. In both shipments there was enough volume to split the inseminations, which I did in order to get breedings over four days instead of just two. Half of the sample is pulled up into the syringe while the vial stays in the fridge. The syringe is then warmed to body temperature, which takes about five minutes, and then the pipette is inserted into poor Clue (who was actually not poor at all; she was asleep on her back, snoring lightly) until it stops. The vaginal vault on a dog is shockingly large and you usually feel like you're about in the kidneys by the time the pipette stops. Then the warmed syringe is attached to the pipette and the contents of the syringe are slowly put in. I made sure there was a little air at the top of the sample so the pipette was completely emptied. Never know if a BIS winner is hiding in the pipette! Remove the whole thing, rub dog's belly for a while, then walk away and pray that it worked. The next day, at about the same time (since chilled semen last 24 hours max), I got the rest from the fridge and repeated the same steps. What the schedule we followed *should* mean is that the first insemination was too early and the last was too late. That's fine with me because I'd rather cover my bases and because she was accepting Bramble all of those days. Now, just to be obnoxious about how much this all costs, let's do the math: – Four progesterone tests: $450 – One vaginal cytology: $25 – Shipping extender to stud dog owner: $85 – Shipping box 1 to us: $90 – Shipping box 2 to us: $75 – Shipping box 1 back to her: $50 – Purchasing and shipping box 3 to stud dog owner because accursed children drew on box 2: $75 That means we're in $850 at this point and have NO idea if she's actually going to get pregnant. That's not what I keep track of – this litter means more to me than any money could express – but for the sake of education I'm going to keep totting up the numbers so you can see how much a typical litter costs to produce. Besides the hideous amount it cost, the other thing that should strike you is that, aside from the progesterone testing, this was a DIY job. Betty Ann collected Draco, extended the semen, packed, and shipped it. I received, inseminated, sent the packaging back. When the AKC finally removed the requirement to have a vet involved, they were recognizing what was already happening AND giving breeders the respect they deserved. If a breeder can't handle any of that list of things, that's what the vet is there for. There's no real need to have her (or him) involved otherwise, and now (thankfully) the AKC has let us be up front about that instead of trying to choose between litter registration applications that say "Natural breeding" (well, no) and "AI by vet" (also no). The speed with which the AKC rules change proposal was approved and implemented – it was proposed, seconded, and voted on at November board meeting, and the rule was put into place that same day – shows how overdue and how noncontroversial the change was. When you read this we'll be less than 24 hours away from the first attempt at pregnancy diagnosis, a palpation by my vet. If she can't feel anything, either because there's no pregnancy or because Clue is shaped roughly like a fire hydrant and is about a thousand percent muscle, we'll ultrasound next week. The anticipation is killing me, but whatever happens, happens. I will, of course, keep you all updated.