ILONA, my four-year-old pedigree border collie, is my dog of a lifetime. She has looks, brains, an exceptionally sweet temperament and is the best Obedience dog I have ever owned. Plus she can find my car keys in the middle of a six-acre field, and talents like this should never be overlooked. Indeed, they should be perpetuated.
Ilona herself has pretty good breeding, stretching back over generations to renowned top working sheepdogs with names like Shep and Belle and Bill and Lass. I often look at her, snoring on the sofa with her paws in the air, and say, “Your great-great-great-grandparents knew how to put in a decent day’s graft and were happy to live in a leaking barn.” But once a family like hers gets Show Champions and Obedience Champions in its line-up, they all become a bit grand.
People who don’t know much about breeding pedigree dogs are surprised by how much of the hard work — and expense — comes before the puppies are born. There are health screens, stud fees, scans and other veterinary consultations. The whole process is reminiscent of how the English aristocracy used to fix up its offspring’s marriages, only with the focus on testing for good eyes and hips.
The first big challenge is tracking down a male dog that you feel, genetically, would be an ideal match for your bitch. Experience is also preferred because, hard though it may be to believe, some poshest-of-posh male pedigree dogs out there seemingly cannot work out which end of a female is which. Ilona ended up with a wonderfully rugged granddad called Dylan of the Dales, only because he was pulled off the subs’ bench at the last minute, after the fancier first-choice candidate proved unable to cut the mustard.
My own first choice for Ilona was a handsome suitor six years her senior. Officially he is named Grandver Joshua at Wynmallen, but the rest of the time he’s just Smokey who lives with Doreen in Feltham, Middlesex.
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Doreen and I start off by swapping pedigrees and photos. Do our dogs both have good looks and temperaments? Yes. Do they both have suitably illustrious relatives and titles in their backgrounds? Yes. Have our dogs both been tested clear for genetic disorders such as collie eye anomaly, progressive retinal atrophy, hip dysplasia and so on. Yes.
The next step is to consult acquaintances with more expert knowledge of border-collie bloodlines. You put the two pedigrees in front of them, and pray that they do not disapprove because of some sinister past familial incidence of incest, deafness, epilepsy etcetera. I’m tempted to include sporadic insanity on the list but with border collies it would be too hard to tell.
Mercifully, the match was passed at all the right levels. So then it was just a question of waiting for Ilona to come on heat. The thing about heats, however, is that there are only a few days when the bitch is truly receptive and able to conceive. You do not want to drive many harrowing hours round the M25 to Feltham, only to find that when you arrive your dog has a headache. It is wiser instead to have your vet take special swabs, to accurately pinpoint the right day or days. My dog had five of these done on different days. Talk about taking the romance out of a situation.
But finally we were cleared for take-off and I am happy to report that when Ilona eventually met Smokey, it was love at first sight. You could see he was definitely a ladies’ man, and he charmed the girl right off her paws. Doreen and I tried to find appropriate smalltalk while our dogs engaged in their half-hour mating tie.
What happened next? The answer is another bill: a trip to a vet, a month later, to give Ilona an ultrasound scan.
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“Hmmm,” he said thoughtfully. “I think there might just be one puppy in there, maybe two at most. I’m not really sure. We’re always advised not to tell owners how many pups their dogs will have.” This was odd, really, since I had just paid about £50 to find out.
You certainly need to know if your dog is having only one pup, as this can bring serious birth complications. So it was lucky that Doreen put me in touch with another specialist, Samantha Wilkinson. She spends her entire time navigating the southern motorway network with mobile scanning equipment, testing many different animals for pregnancy.
One Wednesday afternoon — in a slot somewhere between cows and sheep — she met me at a petrol station off the A2 in Gravesend. She roared up in a blue pick-up truck bespattered with glitter, slammed down the tailgate, positioned her equipment and in less than two minutes confirmed that Ilona was on course to have about five puppies. The setting was somewhat unconventional, but I could not help but feel a little frisson of delight.
As the weeks passed, Ilona got bigger and bigger and ate like a horse. As her delivery date neared, she repaid me for the predicament I had put her in by keeping me up two nights in a row digging holes in sofas and under beds in typical nesting mode, and the rest of the time lurching restlessly about with a martyrish grimace on her face. If she had wanted to make me feel bad, as well as half comatose from lack of sleep, she succeeded.
As a result of all this lengthy and hectic preamble, however, by the time the birth process began in earnest, Ilona was utterly exhausted and lacked sufficient push. I had to rush her to the vet for an oxytocin injection to strengthen her contractions, then rush her home again, as it takes only about ten minutes to begin working. Thus one male pup was more or less arriving just as we made it to the front door, and within the next couple of hours, three more strapping black-and-white males shot their way into the world. A fifth and last boy pup (well done, Sam, by the way: spot on) had to be extracted hours later and resuscitated by the vet, as he was clearly in less of a hurry.
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They have all turned out to be big, strong, glossy, beautiful puppies. I shall definitely keep one, and the quest to ensure that the others get only the best possible homes has already begun.
Just a few months ago I had but the vaguest dream of carrying on the genes of my uniquely special and beloved dog. And now that dream has become a reality, I honestly do not care — as many said I would — about the noise and mess and chaos that five male collie pups will inevitably bring to my home, because with every week and month that passes, I know I will go on seeing more and more about them that reminds me of their mother.
And there’s no money in the world that could buy you a feeling like that.
The price of good breeding
COSTS involved in breeding can rise rapidly, depending on breed, litter size and veterinary fees. Here is a rough guide based on border collies. (Add to this your cost for seven to eight weeks of full-time daily care for puppies before they are ready to go to new homes.)
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Health-screening tests on parent dog £150 plus
Fertility swabs on bitch £40
Stud dog fees £150 plus
Travelling costs to stud dog £50 plus
Pregnancy scans x 2 £100
Extra food for bitch and puppies, plus worming £75 Veterinary-assisted delivery (far more for Caesarean) £120 Bedding/indoor kennel for puppies £160
Cleaning materials £40
Registering five puppies with Kennel Club £60
Eye tests for five puppies £40
Total costs £985 plus
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Sale of pups at £400 each £2,000