hey doodle fam it's erin here we are having a great morning so far we dropped off the kids at
school we picked up a couple of our guardian dogs and we're going to go to the vet and do
an ofa test we'll explain more about that later and then we have a lot of other busy things to
do we're going to talk about progesterone testing it's time for luna and mosley to have their first
date and and then we're also going to go over puppy picking we had such a good time at puppy
picking last saturday so we're going to get into that and show you that too so a lot of people have
been asking about ofa what is it what does it mean so we're going to talk about that a little
so ofa stands for the orthopedic foundation for animals and what this means is we take all of our
dogs all of our moms all of our dads to make sure that they have good healthy joints so when they go
to the vet they get a mild sedation kind of like the human version of a colonoscopy and they have
x-rays done of their hips and their elbows and the elbows just get a pass or fail whether they
have dysplasia or not and dysplasia is like a separation of the joint it causes arthritis later
on in life for dogs and then their hips they get a grade they get excellent good fair or borderline
and then they actually could show hip dysplasia and they would if they can mark that too on the
results but they get put under the sedation they get the x-rays done and then in a couple of days
i get the results to find out what they look like wow i'm looking at all these youtube comments and
so many people have questions about breeding and how that happens and why we choose what we choose
but first we have to start at the beginning they're heat cycles
so unlike humans dogs only have their heat cycles every six to eight months depending
on the size of the dog so when that time comes as a breeder it's really important that we get
timing perfect so that way we get puppies born so we do what we call progesterone testing
and what that is is it measures the level of hormone which is progesterone in their blood
so it's a simple blood test we take them to the vet and they run it it's an in lab thing in-house
lab and then they give us the results and based on their results is when we know when to breed
so some breeders just like to choose which days they'll say like oh we're gonna breed on day eight
well day eight could be the perfect time or another heat cycle could happen and day eight
could be the wrong time we used to do that with bella and we actually missed a cycle we missed a
pregnancy because we did the same days that we bred the day at the time before and it didn't
work out we didn't get puppies so we learned a lot we had a reproductive vet in greensboro give
us a lot of education and so now we know what to do and exactly how to how to make puppies happen
so we took luna to the vet yesterday and had her numbers tested and she is ready to breed so her
and mosley will have a date later today and so people have asked how often do we do progesterone
testing and we do it every other day until the numbers meet our expectations of what we need
for them to go ahead and get pregnant so luna is an f1b and she's obviously a red curly and mosley
is an f1b but he is apricot colored so we're going to get some really pretty babies and they will be
multi-generational or also f1b and we will see what kind of colors we get it's always a fun
discovery when they have their babies to see what colors we get
make me fall in
we had such a good time on saturday at our puppy picking we got to do two litters so we met a
lot of amazing families we just wanted to tell you a little bit about how that process works
so everybody from one litter comes to our house and we do it for about an hour and people come
and we all sit down in a circle together and we put the puppies in the middle so it's like puppy
playtime extravaganza and so all the puppies we give every family the personality profiles which
has like some unique things about each one of the puppies if we've noticed something in particular
like if they're a little more dominant and adventurous or if they're laid back we put that in
their personality profile and then the other thing we talk about is if they are an apricot or a red
color and if they're wavy or if they're curly because some families have some pretty strong
preferences on what they would like so for the first 30 to 45 minutes we just play with puppies
i answer questions that people have about raising dogs about the puppies that are there right now
and then after that the fun part happens so we do puppy picking and so based on your order of
deposit is where you get to choose so if you're the first family you're just going to give me
your first choice but if you're the third family you're going to give me your top three and i get
you the closest one to the top that we can get you so sometimes it works out that everybody gets
their first choice i know it would be crazy but i've actually had that happen in a litter of 10.
and then most of the time it goes well but there are sometimes that what if the last puppy isn't
what the family wants and that's okay so we had a puppy this time mr green collar he was too curly
for the family and so they decided to pass on them so what happens to that puppy well i just go down
my master list of people that have put in deposits and i found the perfect family for him and so he
already has his perfect family all right guys the vet just called and bella grace and roo are done
with their x-rays so i am going to go pick them up and stay tuned to our next video a lot of people
have asked how we keep our nursery so clean so we are going to dive into that have a good day