How our Q litter (9 puppies) was born

Today is a good time to resume posting here as we have a new litter of pups.On March 22 Keena (FC Keena v Moosbach-Zuzelek) was bred to FC Joeri vom Nonnenschlag. We did only one mating, and Joeri and Keena were tied for one hour.

Keena's pregnancy was very uneventful. Since she has had two litters before, with seven pups in each litter, we have had some information on what we might expect. In the past her pups were quite big and even though she never had much problem with whelping them, I decided to change her diet this time around. She was fed our dogs' regular diet until her last trimester. This means - Canidae for All Life Stages dry kibble in the morning and Oma's Pride raw mixes in the afternoon. Since Oma's mixes have a lot of ground bone in them, I tried to reduce the content of calcium in the food by adding ground turkey to to the mix. In the last trimester I added one more meal - a dry kibble with a higher content of protein. This protocol seemed to have worked really well.

We knew that Keena was going to have quite a few pups, I thought that the number would be 7 or 8. We did not xray her to verify the number, so we were surprised when she delivered 9 pups in 4.5 hours.

The first pup was delivered at 6:30 this morning, and the last one at 11:05 am. This was the sequence:

1. 6:30 am Male (green) 8.2 oz/230 gr

2. 7:05 am Female (pink) 12.0 oz/340 gr

3. 7:25 am Female (yellow) 10.4/295

4. 7:50 am Male (red) 8.2/230

5. 8:25 am Female (white) 11.6/330

6. 9:10 am Male (navy) 8.8/250

7. 9:25 am Female (lime) 8.8/250

8. !0:20 am Male (blue) 10.6/330

9. 11:05 am Female (orange) 8.2/230

I took some pics at the beginning of whelping, but later things were happening too fast. When Keena and I were done with one puppy, the next one was being delivered. Actually, I have never seen anything like it.

All pups are wild boar, and all their registered names will start with the letter Q. How are we going to come up with NINE Q-names?