New Puppies!

No not here, although Josie is having a false pregnancy and thinks she has puppies. She's gathered up the squeaky toys and is carefully tending them with great concern. Her puppies consist of a purple rubber dumbbell, a green rubber frog, a brown football, an orange knobbly football, and a red ball. Certainly more colorful than your standard black and liver spotted litter! Every now and then Argus will dash in and take one of the "babies" to play with, causing poor Josie great concern. She follows him around, humming to herself until she can recover her baby. Last night she got up for a drink of water and Sid plopped himself down on the cushion "crushing" the babies. Poor Josie stood and stared at him, but because Sid is the boss she did not know what to do. When she saw me laughing, she "explained" at great length what a bad situation it was (Josie makes a variety of sounds when she is excited or under stress) and asked that I get Sid off her babies. When I bribed him with a biscuit, she gently laid back down and carefully washed her babies and gathered them up close, all the while talking to herself about what bozos the boys are!

Nope, the real babies are in Florida, Argus's first litter sired by chilled semen. Hopefully Carolyn wanted a boy, because she has a lot of them. Last I heard 6 boys and 1 girl, one patched boy, pups of both colors. We only know Reggie from pictures, as she did not have to fly to Minnesota. Instead she got a series of progesterone tests so they could predict when she would ovulate, and when she should be bred. When tests indicated that the time was right, Argus went to the reproductive specialist and they did a semen collections, mixed it with an extender of some sort, packed it in ice (dry ice I think) and sent it off by plane. Carolyn picked it up early the next morning, took it to her vet, and it was surgically implanted. Because of the surgery, only one breeding was required. If artificial insemination is used, then we might have done two seperate breedings. Obviously the timing was just right, as the litter arrived on schedule, with a normal number of pups - too bad there were not a few more girls though!