Well as you can see from the puppycam below on Thursday 22 nd October Diva decided it was time to stop thundering round the garden like a giant pumpkin on legs & present us with a wonderful litter of nine puppies, this took poor old Diva over ten hours & included a trip to our vet seven miles away in Tullamore for a shot of Oxytocin to hurry things along when things started to slow down after puppy number six was born, it did that alright as puppy number seven was born in our village lay- by thanks to us having to follow a tractor & trailor containing two bellowing young Bullocks that was meandering from side to side of the road while travelling at a speedy 20 mph oblivious to the 30 assorted cars, bikes, hikers & a caravan or two all trying to pass him. After a quick rub down with a towel number seven was bundled into a warm box & rushed the final half mile home before being ceremoniously placed in the whelping box along with her brothers & sisters.
Numbers eight, nine & ten arrived one hour, two hours & three hours later, which was a bit of a shock considering our vet thought there was might only be one more & so did Diva by the look on her face, sadly number eight was stillborn & nothing could be done to revive her but the other nine were fat healthy little Bracchi all weighing between 16 & 18 ounces.
Mom gave us more than a bit of a fright on Friday as she suddenly developed a temperature & began to look more than a bit seedy ~ all the pups were doing fine so we got Diva into the car & set off back to see the vet, who was just dusting off his passport in readiness for his world cruise paid for exclusively by us & after a thorough examination it was decided that Diva had retained one or more placentas & they weren’t doing her a whole lot of good, so she had a shot of Oxytocin, a shot of antibiotics & a shot of an anti inflamatory plus a weeks worth of tablets by now the vet could afford to take his entire family plus all the surgery staff on the said world cruise.
By the time we got home she was much happier & itching to get back to her babies, thankfully by Sunday she was 100% better, I know she was because she ate half a roast chicken, a tin of rice pudding & a large sirloin steak that Mick was expecting for his dinner but as he had deserted us to go to England for the weekend I thought Diva deserved it more.
The pups are almost a week old now all thriving & very contented, Diva is a wonderful mother except when her dinner arrives & regardless of whether the puppies are attached to the milk bar or not she just stands up dumping them on the vet bed while they wail in disgust & she marches off to scoff !
We should not forget the reason behind all this chaos ~ our wonderful clown of a Bracco our boy Rocco sire of the pups who is totally underwhelmed by his growing family because they won’t play Kong with him !
puppycam
