Gel
Sasha came into season and we started checking to see if she was ready to mate. By giving her a scratching type of pat near where her tail and body joined we could decide whether we should make a trip to the male dog, Gel. When she was ready her tail would lift and move to one side. The difficulty was making sure that Egor did not have access to her first.
Gel & Sasha
Finally the day came and we put her in the car and went to see the male. The mating came as a bit of a shock to me as I had always just assumed that the humping that I had observed in other dogs was the act. This was not the case. It was an acrobatic performance on the part of the male dog who had to manage to turn around, joined together so that they were then bottom to bottom in a straight line. There they stood stationary for over half an hour. Gel’s owners told me that if you separated a dog at this point in the proceedings both dogs would suffer injury.
Then the long wait to see if pregnancy had happened. The gestation time was 9 weeks and it usually isn’t possible to tell before 5 weeks whether the bitch is pregnant. So we took her to the vet and found out that puppies would be due in six weeks. We had the whelping box. We had our kennel name “Mathburn” approved so all we had to do was wait.
When the time came she refused to get in the whelping box. She wanted to have those puppies on the bean bag and she wanted that bean bag beside the bed. She dragged it from the lounge room and then spent a long time walking around in circles in one direction and then repeating the procedure walking the other direction, on the bean bag. She couldn’t settle. Then the first puppy was born. It was the first time I had seen the birth of anything. I don’t know how I missed out in my nursing training but watching this birth I could understand for the first time how my friends had found the witnessing of their first human births. A wonderful experience, eight times over a couple of hours. She was a wonderful mother removing them from their membraneous sacs and cleaning and warming them, eating the afterbirth. A messy business and the bean bag was never used again.
After they were all born I put them in the whelping box, designed so that injury is prevented by the mother crushing her babies against the sides should she lie on them. We had been warned to keep Egor away. Warned that Sasha would be protective of her babies and therefore aggressive towards him should he approach and that he would most likely eat the babies if he got near them. Neither of these things happened and Egor made a valiant attempt at being a good substitute father. He would have fed them if he could.
Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist) 