[Carolyn Young]

In a litter of 10 last year we lost a very small pup the first day and attributed it to being too small/undeveloped to survive. Then another started to go and we rationalized it. He was also small. When the 3rd started to go at about the 3rd day we rushed him into the vet for an evaluation. He was almost gone and the vet said it was all the signs of canine herpes virus. The vet has only been practicing a few years and my regular vet who owns the clinic was not available. The young vet told me to go home and prepare to lose the whole litter.

Any bitch we plan to breed has a complete health workup including genetic testing before any breeding is done, so I don't know what could have been done with her that we didn't do.

Having nothing to lose and no knowledge of how we might handle the situation we decided that a virus won't live above about 100 degrees F and that if we raised the temperature above that we might have a chance. So we placed the 7 remaining pups in a controlled environment (moisture and 102-103 degrees). Within 4 hours the crying had stopped and the pups began to be more active. By the time they had been in these conditions for 7 hours the pups appeared to be normal. Gradually, over 2 days we took the temperature back to about 95 degrees and then by the end of the week down to 90 degrees.

The 7 remaining pups developed normally and are now 9 months old. They have had no apparent after effects.

We may have been just plain lucky, or we may have been logical. I don't know.

 

[Carolyn Young]

The setup was pretty basic. When we built our house we created a space in the laundry room for the whelping box and a sleeping bag in addition to the typical laundry room stuff. Above the whelping box area are several heat lamps that can be turned on individually to control the heat below them. To introduce moisture we put containers of water in the whelping box, but we find that running a load of laundry is equally effective. As I said, this isn't rocket science, but it apparently worked.

Back in the early '80's we had a litter that may have had the same thing. Seven pups of 9 died within a period of 24 hours on a weekend when I couldn't get to my repro specialist, Dr. Aura McConnell, but when I finally did she told me what kills a virus and what I could do about it. We'd never had the problem again until last year.

At the time we had the first problem I was working in aerospace designing expert systems (artificial intelligence) and I approached her about designing an expert system to diagnose breeding and fertility problems. The plan originally was to publish it in a book, but gradually morphed into a website. Canine herpes virus was one of the things we addressed, and this method was included. Unfortunately, Aura passed away a few years ago and all that knowledge is sitting on my shelf. We have saved the lives of several dogs over the years as a result of the information contained.

BTW -- when my regular vet returned he agreed that what I did was perfectly appropriate and was not surprised that we saved the rest of the litter.