Nevertheless, when I put the puppies on her teats, Breeze let them nurse avidly even though she looked somewhat mystified as they sought the colostrum she had to offer until her milk came in, their little paws vigorously kneading and growing a bit bloody from her incision. Now they cried not at all. Just suckle, suckle, suckle. She growled only once.
Dawn spent the first night to help me, but by the second day, she had to go to work, and I was on my own. I began picking them up, and they felt good in my hands, the skin on their bodies like—as breeders are wont to say—a snugly fitting glove. The green pup looked a little skinny, so I put him on the rear teats first, where extra milk would eventually come in. I checked them at night in their cardboard box, as I slept only a bit, in a broken fashion. Breeze stayed in her whelping box, and I adjusted the heat lamp if she seemed too hot, but it had to be warm enough that I could settle them in with her every hour or so to nurse.
By the third day, she was as comfortable with them as if her pregnancy, labor, and delivery had been totally natural, and I was able to relinquish my role as guard. She became a very attentive mother. Quickly, a new nickname was bestowed: “Big Mama,” even though, of course, she had always been so petite. Her milk was late due to the medications we had given her preterm, and so I tried to supplement the puppies. While Brad sat sentry duty, I went to four stores looking for more of the recommended goats’ milk puppy formula and infant-size nipples and bottles. The one jar I’d bought previously was woefully inadequate. Or so I thought. Once I got it all home, I realized it was concentrated and that I had enough for a canine army. In any case, they spit it out and cried piteously.
The other problem was that she was refusing to truly clean them. A mother dog stimulates the urination and defecation of the pups by licking them with her tongue until they pee or poop, and then she eats it right up. To a breeder it is a welcome sign—as otherwise you have to take a warm moist cotton ball and wipe and wipe. And wipe.
It takes forever to elicit poop from that tiny opening using a cotton ball, and so I was up at night after each feeding, wiping, with sleep in my eyes, cursing at Breeze. For three days, I was at it every two hours, which was about how often they fed. I’d just finish with the last pup and then have to start over again with the first. It reminded me of breastfeeding Nathaniel and Gabe when they were infants—an endless treadmill of effort. The lack of rest caught up with me late that first week, and on July 21, my fifty-eighth birthday, the doctor informed me I had double pneumonia. I discovered I really didn’t care. Where in another time of my life I might have gone to bed and moaned, at this point, I only took the antibiotics and stayed on my feet: puppies wait for nothing and no one—not even a sick surrogate parent. And so I kept giving them the best care I could: handling them over and over, changing their sheepskin pads, weighing them, changing their rickrack, and feeding Breeze four times a day while making sure she was doing her various jobs as a mother. And when she didn’t lick, lick, lick, I wiped, wiped, wiped.
I tried to sleep at night but often found myself just sitting in the puppy pen under the glow of the ceramic heat lamp, my bottom getting wet from tiny pee spots on the sheepskin as I held the little ones in my lap. I was still amazed at their survival. Watching Breeze sleep curled around the nest of her offspring, I remembered the way she had lain on the bed on the other side of this very room while I measured the frequency of contractions during her preterm labor.
During those late nights or early morning hours, it seemed to me that sometimes things do work out the way they are meant to—though usually when I said this to myself, I was trying to rationalize something emotionally difficult or painful. I had repeated it time and time again after losing Gulliver, not understanding the sense of his death, but trying to find peace in the idea that someday I would understand why he had been taken from me. Now, fourteen months after his passing, as I sat amid the life in my puppy box, I reminded myself that the old adage applied in a positive way. This time I had gotten lucky. My babies had been born alive. The patches seemed to matter less.
By day five, the puppies had taken hold of the teats tightly enough that I didn’t have to keep them there, and Breeze’s milk began to flow. She didn’t produce copiously, but it was enough. Slowly, the pups began to gain weight, with Yellow being the hog of the box. He nursed fast and then pushed the others out of the way to find another spot. All of them yelped and struggled to find the little teats they couldn’t see and cried when I held them in my hand or cuddled them. I had forgotten that they wanted only to be with Mommy during this stage. I had forgotten so much—but the situation demanded that I remember again, and quickly. Dawn came by two or three times a week to help with some of the work, but it was my name that would precede hers as breeder on the puppies’ registration certificates, so my greater effort was only fair. Michele called weekly, checking on their progress, and we had the chance to get to know one another even better. When they were a few weeks old, she came to visit and pronounced them a lovely litter.
Myrna, however, who had listened so faithfully throughout Breeze’s pregnancy, had withdrawn into her illness as her symptoms now worsened, and though we made several dates for her to come and visit, she fell ill before each one. I called her every night to report the progress of the pups—continuing to try to distract her with news of the outside world—and invited her up to visit, but I saw at last that she just wasn’t strong enough to make the twenty-minute drive. It looked as if another surgery was imminent, imperative to reduce the size of the growing tumor. I could no longer set aside my worry for her. Maybe somehow she would survive, just the way my babies had, but for the first time, I had begun to question my own sense of hope.
•••
During that first week, they were little white piglets that did nothing but squirm onto their mother’s teats and then tumble off into a puppy pile to keep warm. Nothing but eat and sleep and cry. They looked unbelievably fragile. One thing I remembered for sure: handling them as infants was as important as making sure they were nursing sufficiently. And so I did, nonstop.
At two weeks, they weighed almost three times what they had at birth. When their color came in, they turned into a spotted band of blind and deaf little beings, crawling on weak legs around their whelping box. At day fourteen, I noticed that their eyes had started to open, just a tiny crack at first, beginning on the lid at the side nearest the nose and then slowly, over the next few days, opening outward until a tiny blue orb was visible.
It would be a little while longer before their eye color turned the normal Dalmatian brown, if it did. There was always the chance of some blue eyes in the litter, even though this was not preferable in a show dog—but it would not be a disqualification, like a patch. I could see that nose and eye trim would fill, so we didn’t have to worry about that. I kept my fingers crossed that the two girls who weren’t patched would have nice dark brown eyes and, most important, would not be deaf.
I knew they could see only big, blurry shapes, but I persisted in holding them up to my face and whispering to them even though their tiny earflaps were still sealed. I figured it couldn’t hurt. I figured I needed it for myself. Boys or girls, patched or not, they all needed me. And I needed them.
I didn’t let myself think about whether or not they heard the world around them. Maybe they could feel the vibrations of my voice. Maybe the warmth of my hands and cheeks was comforting in their brave new world. In the meantime, they kept stumbling around the pen and banging their heads into the sides. I would have to wait another ten days or so before they could track a moving ball, or really differentiate my face from its surroundings. By the third week, they were lurching around on trembling legs like little drunken sailors. And hearing was suddenly a big issue—but it was one I didn’t want to worry about. So, uncharacteristically, I didn’t.
Both Nathaniel and Gabe stopped by intermittently, drawn by their interest in the rapidly growing puppies, more interested in visiting with them than with me. Which was fine.
Over time, I simply needed all the hands I could get on the pups to socialize them. And so later, once it was safe, I welcomed each person who wanted to come and visit, no matter how inconvenient the timing, and filled in the puppies’ social calendar as fully as I could. I even imported neighborhood children I didn’t know for the cause.
One by one, I took them out of the whelping box for the first time and set them down, gently, on the floor. They cruised around the guest room. Soon I was laughing at their early attempts at investigation. Purple was a scent hound and followed her nose everywhere, getting stuck under the bed. Yellow was cautious, but thorough, winding up with a dust kitten in his mouth. Red was an explorer, examining everything I would allow him to reach, putting his face in the water dish—which I had begun leaving out even though they had yet to drink anything—and blowing great big bubbles through his nose. Green was shy, uncertain, and would only cuddle up by my side. Pink was confident, off and running as soon as I set her on the rug, and I had to watch her to make sure she wouldn’t get into the electrical cords under the side table. Blue was sleepy to start, sitting down and yawning as if unimpressed by this big new world, and then coming over to nose my hand enthusiastically.
Week four was marked by Breeze’s resistance to feeding them. Their sharp, needlelike teeth had mostly broken through their gums, and though I worried that maybe they weren’t getting enough milk, they were certainly fat and sassy. Now there was a lot of lip-smacking while they nursed, as they stripped the milk down with expert suction. It didn’t take long before the first teat was empty, and on instinct, it seemed, they began pushing each other around, fiercely hunting down one that was still full. Instinct, I thought, an instinct that lets them thrive even though one of their brothers might go hungry.
It was time to wean them and move them upstairs, out to the larger pen in the garage, where there was one area for their sheepskin rug and another with newspaper pellets for peeing and pooping. Dogs don’t like to soil the area where they sleep, so they would box-train themselves and make cleanup easier for me. This would eventually help potty and crate-train them, as they grew old enough to be more independent and ready for their new homes. The idea of those new homes weighed on me with every week that passed. Our time together was so short. It was halfway over.
Now, when Breeze finished her cursory nursing and cleaned up the box, she would run quickly to join us in the kitchen. She was ready to be a housedog again and to leave mothering behind. At first I was dismayed. What kind of a mother was she? But then I understood better: her babies were like teenagers—soon she would shoo them from the nest she had made for them, into the outside world. And I, in the meantime, took on the role of full-time mother: I would clean the pen, bring the food, and play with them in the outdoor run.
On the fourth Saturday, Brad and I made the trek to the garage, each with a puppy in our arms, over the stairs three times. We had set up the larger weaning pen there so that they would have more space to move around in. Once set down in their new home, the puppies explored their big new surroundings from corner to corner, slipping and sliding on the pellets, but after a while settled down to sleep in exhaustion. The next day, for their first real meal, I ground up premium puppy chow in the blender with water to make a thin gruel, then put it into the round stainless steel pan that looked like a flying saucer. It had an elevated middle bump and an open track around the circumference to help them avoid stepping in the food as they learned to eat it.
I had been certain they wouldn’t even go near it, but they enthusiastically chowed down and put their front paws in to get better purchase for lapping it up. Soon they were covered in brown goo, and this time, Breeze was happy to get into the pen and lick them clean. Soon the yellow puppy became the champion of the puppy pan. We were still calling him the hog of the box, as I had to hold him aloft till the others got their fill and then set him back down to gulp whatever was left.
Suddenly, we hit the five-week marker, and they were crawling up and out of the pen and landing on the other side with a resounding thump. Brad built new and higher sides.
A few days later, we raised the sides of the pen once again, so that now it looked like the Great Wall of China, and we marveled for yet another time how quickly they were growing. My stomach tightened each time Brad commented on it. They were only five weeks old and yet had begun the task of challenging themselves in their life—even if this only meant contesting the height of the walls that penned them in. There were only three weeks left.
They mouthed the toys and each other constantly. There were real toys in the pen now, like cow’s hooves, and a rubber ball, three Nylabones, and two sets of plastic keys. Anything that was good against which to grind their teeth. Their hearing looked good, but when other people, or Dawn, asked what I was thinking on that score, I still refused to commit myself, and I didn’t walk around whistling and clapping my hands, either.
I remembered the mistakes I had made with Rhiannon’s litter and had instructed myself to be more patient. It did seem that they all raised their heads and came running in a black-and-white tide when I brought over their supper and breakfast pans, calling out the high-pitched sing-song “Pup pup pup puppppy!” Nevertheless, I remained resolutely quiet on the subject. I would wait for the BAER hearing test that would be administered in our home at the beginning of the next week.
Corinne was an audiologist who worked at UC Davis doing the specialized test, and she went on the road a few days a week with her equipment. She arrived with her computer and her probes on a Tuesday morning. I had awakened early that day, just as the summer light was coming in around the shades in our bedroom. I hadn’t wanted this day to come, remembering little Purple from Ashley’s litter and how Pat had fainted at the vet’s office after we’d put the puppy to sleep. Thinking about Pat—and then, inevitably, Myrna—had made me sad, but I had shaken it off, fed the pups, and poured myself a cup of coffee. There was a lot to do on this sunny August morning.
One by one, Corinne and Dawn and I set each puppy on a towel on the top of my kitchen counter, and she inserted the tiny probes behind the neck, pushed the rubber sensor deep into the ear, and turned on the machine. Dawn and I watched the graph needle going up and down as it traced a spidery gray line. The puppies’ lives depended on that line. If it were flat, then I would have to face the terrible task ahead of me. I knew nothing more about saving and training deaf dogs than I had fourteen years before, when Ashley’s litter was born.
As we progressed from one pup to the next, double-checking each result with a second test, it became obvious that all of them could hear. As I ferried them back and forth to their pen, anxiety on the way in, relief on the way back, I kissed them on their necks and blessed them one by one. I would not have to euthanize anyone this time around. I thought of Me-Me, walking around the kitchen as the puppies surged around her ankles, banging her wooden spoon against a pot to see if they all alerted to the noise. I wondered what my parents would have done if there had been a deaf. Would it have been sent to the farm, real or imagined?
It is only now, seven months after the litter was born, that I at last begin to hear of trainers who work with deafs. Now there are some breeders who send any temperamentally reliable deaf to be so trained. It appears that, with hand signals, many deaf pups can become lovable house pets, or sometimes, even obedience or agility dogs. They glue themselves to the side of their owners in an unusual way. With such rapt and consistent attention, they are able to work successfully, and they are trained from the outset to have their owner constantly in their sightline. While they cannot run free, without a leash, it sounds like a fine trade-off to me, but I will release a deaf only to someone who specializes in training them. Many of them live with Dals and other breeds who cannot hear, and many of them have successfully placed deafs into pet homes.
Unfortunately, when Breeze’s puppies were born, the ethical guidelines for DCA (whose guidelines I had signed when I joined) still held that all deaf pups should be eutha
nized early in life, and breeders were sharply, and painfully, divided about which direction to choose. Those who favored euthanization—to err on the safe side—were horrified by and angry with those who favored training. The latter, who believed in training—to err on the compassionate side—were horrified by and angry with the former. Those who favored euthanization had arguments like “a deaf dog will run out into the street and be hit by a car,” or “deaf dogs turn and snap when startled.” The latter had arguments like “any dog can run out into the street and be hit by a car; no dog should be off leash near a road,” and “the startle reflex in deaf dogs can be conquered with a particular kind of work.”
It was a no-win situation, and I thanked God I wouldn’t have to deal with it until my next litter. In the meanwhile, I struck up a correspondence with a therapy dog trainer who worked not only with hearing dogs but also with “deafies,” as she referred to them, and her calling in life intrigued me. She gave me advice on training the average dog, her emails filled with tips and tidbits. Now that I was on the online groups ShowDals and DCA Members—the Dal breeders’ lists that discussed everything from who had won at Westminster, to how to best microchip your own dog, to the quandary of deaf puppies—I was more a part of the Dal family than ever before. Eventually she would fly to California for three days, and I would drive her a long distance to rescue a deaf puppy whose breeder had decided to surrender, rather than to euthanize. Yet, I would tell no one what I had done, except Brad and my kids. The move to save deafies was for the most part still secret, an underground railroad of sorts.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 18