I’m writing this in 2017 but the post itself was written in 2015. It was on another page which I modified and so now I’m adding this here just for historical purposes.
March 2015: Well, I put off writing this as long as I can… but we simply aren’t ready to breed Splash. On the one hand, her health tests have come back awesome – all tests A+ – but Splash had an “incident” (don’t know what else to call it) which changed the game.
Splash possibly had a seizure or something similar in Dec 2014 and it gave us quite a scare. One morning the vet came and drew blood for the thyroid test. Because more blood is required for the test than can be reasonably taken from the leg in a short time, the vet took the blood from her neck – the jugular vein. Afterwards Splash seemed fine but about 1/2 hour later I went to get her for …something, I forget… and I couldn’t find her anywhere! I panic’d! I thought she had escaped the yard somehow but, finally, after about 15 minutes of screaming her name and searching the yard (the “yard” is 1-acre so it takes a while), I found her absolutely stock still in one corner. She was standing but couldn’t walk and I had to sorta lift her and make her legs move to get her inside; once inside she stood still and her hips feel sideways nearly to the ground. It was clear she had no control over her rear end. Finally she layed down and was listless. The vet came back, we worked with her, and still she was completely listless and didn’t move. Finally, 5 hours later, she “woke up”, stood up, and was totally fine.
I hope you’ll understand, Splash means everything to us, and we simply can’t take the risk that bearing pups might trigger another seizure. It’s possible that the blood draw triggered something or hit a nerve or something completely unique happened and will never happen again. Or… not likely, but there’s a slight possibility she has something wrong with her such as epilepsy.
[…snipped some info about Marsha’s mom…]
So there you have it… we’ll wait a year… 2016… and if Splash can’t be bred in 2016 we won’t try after she hits her 4th birthday.
We are sorry that we can’t have our 2015 litter but this is just what happens in breeding – if breeding isn’t for the betterment of the breed then why do it!?! And we’ve had some severe lessons in breeding already and I can’t have another dog die on me. Ripple was such a fantastic girl and mother and her death still tears me apart.
