My GSP Rosie whelped her first litter a month ago. We were hoping for about 6 pups. From her size in the week before delivering, most of us were guessing she'd have 8 or 9. Well, after 12 hours of whelping she ended up with 11 healthy pups.....7 girls and 4 boys. All healthy but one little female needed some supplemental feelings for the first two weeks. All of these pics were taken within the last week as we started weaning and trying to figure out how to keep the kennel the cleanest with 11 messy puppies.
Nice pups. I have no desire to do that again. I have firewood to get. After about 4 weeks, mom stops cleaning and the fun begins.
Dad was last years AKC Hunt Test Sire of the Year and mom will finish her AKC Master Hunter title and hopefully her NAVHDA Utility titles this fall. It's a stacked pedigree full of heavily titled dogs that are still just incredible bird dogs too. This was a very selective line breeding with very high expectations from these pups. This was Rosie last fall out on a training day. And here she is last week in the yard. My training pigeons were out in the field and she caught a scent. Still not looking too bad being all full of milk and such. I get a chuckle out of this picture because even with everything else she's dealing with right now, birds are still high priority for her.
4 weeks old yesterday....started weaning a week ago to try to take some pressure off of Mama and yeah...she slowed down on the cleaning after the pups probably about a week ago.....she still grooms them some though.
I'm glad women don't have 11 babies at one time, can you imagine having to pay child support for that many kids?
When do the tails get chopped? At times I wish my lab didn't have a 28ft tail. He gets excited over something and stuff is crashing all over or "bang bang bang" against the walls. I had a GSP before the lab... Great dog. Mine was mostly brown with a little bit of white.
Beautiful. We did that once. It was a lot of fun. I love handling puppies. Good thing I wasn't there. I always want to take one home. We have two dogs and two cats that keep us company. They get along so well. Thank you for sharing.
Lots of training for the formalities, but really the "bird dog" part is natural....just good genetics and a little luck. Tails docked and dew claws removed at 3 days old.
