Working out the due date

Ultrasound image of a canine foetus demonstrating measurement of head diameter.

Earlier I blogged to tell that Treacle's pregnancy scan today had confirmed what I already thought by palpating her stomach, that she was in pups and roughly how many. I then got a comment, asking if she has a due date. I have already published a due date, which is around the 14th April and nothing has really changed there, as scanning with dogs is not really used to pin point a due date. It is more to confirm pregnancy and to see how many roughly a bitch is carrying. Knowing how many pups a bitch is carrying is important, as more than the size of the parents, the size of the litter conceived will have an effect on the size of the offspring being born with mammals evolved to have multiple births. You really want to see for a small medium size dog three or more pups. This will mean that they will have a lesser chance of growing to big to have to be delivered by c-section, only conceiving 1 or 2 pups means the pups have a whole lot more nourishment and room to grow in the uterus. Last time I had a bitch with only two pups, they were whoopers and had to be delivered by c-section, both lived and at adulthood were no bigger than Cavaliers with a birth size of half than theirs. 
So fertility is a very important part of reproduction. Which really goes without saying, but within the pure breeding genre of dogs it is albutt ignored. The dwindling of litter size averages should sound alarm bells. You are getting something wrong, when fertility is waning. I went to a seminar about breeding put on by a vet surgery a few years ago. Turns out it was just a vet that is basically a Pharnacutical company's whore. This vet also does a lot with the Kennel Club. She started the seminar by saying, "Pure breed dogs have problems with fertility. Fact.  I'm not here to talk about that though, I'm here to help you get your dogs to breed" and guess how you did that. By using products from a certain Pharmaceutical company. Blind leading the blind. I have a bit more of a holistic approach to breeding than that and I think forfeiting fertility is the beginning of the end for a breed.
The main issue which makes it hard to give a very accurate due date from scanning is the massive difference across the board for dogs in size. There is a lot of data for Beagles on size in uterus and that sadly reflects the fact that Beagles are the widest used dog breed for animal experimentation. If scanning a bitch without knowing her mating history you can give a rough date for time of arrival from scanning Canine and feline foetal ageing The scan today was very clear and that we could see the skeletal formation indicates taking from an earlier mating than a later one. A dogs gestation is between 58 - 68 days with around 64 days being the norm. The due date I gave her of the 14th April was taking from the middle of her mating dates and I would think it won't be far from where the apples drop still.

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