Raising dogs is not for the faint of heart. It takes a lot of planning and preparing and then things don’t always go as planned. And it’s hard to accommodate everyone and what they want sometimes or when they want it. So I thought I’d try to explain a bit of the process.

First off, I’ve had several people that passed on Winter’s F1b Cavapoos, ask when the next litter of F1 Cavapoos would be arriving.

Let me go over some basic’s of raising dogs as a baseline and I’ll get back to that question.

Girls come in season aka heat approximately twice a year (every six months). But there are some who only cycle once a year, or every seven to eight months.

Boys, well, they’re always ready to “help” with the process. Although there are some (or I should say “one” in my bunch) that aren’t really aggressive breeders, but more on the passive side and don’t get things accomplished (which is frustrating when you have a small window of time with the female’s heat cycle). And as the male ages he might not be able to produce as well as he did when he was younger.

Once a female is bred her pregnancy goes for  just over two months before she has her babies. Then the puppies stay with us for another eight to nine weeks before they go to their new homes. So you’re looking at roughly four months timeframe before a batch of puppies is available to go home.

So if I have several people interested in a “spring” (aka March) puppy, that means a mom would have to come in season and be successfully bred way back in November! Which is all fine and good “if” the female I want to breed comes in season then. But what if her six month cycle is January and June? Then she’s either having puppies in March and puppies go home in May, or she’s having puppies in August with them going home in October.

Every girl has their own schedule. Sometimes they even start cycling together or one right after another. Dogs don’t read dog breeding manuals that’s for sure! They don’t make it easy for us because they’re dogs. It’s the luck of the draw sometimes.

And I only have a handful of girls so it all depends on them (mostly) We currently have in our program three Poodle girls; Lyric, Summer and Sasha. And Summer has yet to have her first litter (sometimes the first time female is a bit more challenging to get pregnant). Then we have one female Cavalier; Shiloh. So I have only four girls that can produce F1 Cavapoos.

Then we have three Cavapoo moms who produce F1b Cavapoo puppies; Cami, Winter, Indy.

I know sometimes people have vacations planned or work schedules that aren’t conducive to bringing a new puppy home. I totally get that. But we also have to be a bit flexible when we’re dealing with living, breathing animals. They’re not machines that we can program what we want, when we want it.

I hope that makes sense. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad who can’t get a puppy at a certain time. I’m just trying to explain the process and what I’m up against sometimes.

And with that being said, I did breed a female poodle for an F1 Cavapoo litter that would’ve been due at the end of this month. But at this point she does not look like she is  pregnant. Time will tell. There’s a slight chance she has a couple tucked up in her abdomen and she’ll show in a week or so. But right now, I’m thinking it’s a “no”.

Another challenge with my Poodle girls is, to make F1 Cavapoos they obviously have to be bred to a purebred Cavalier male. I have two; Dickens and Asher. Dickens is getting to be a senior citizen in regards to breeding animals. Oh, he’s willing all right, but can’t always accomplish the job. Asher on the other hand is young and athletic, but he’s very passive even around the girls that are standing in front of him, flagging their tails in invitation!

So without going into more details, you can see that dog breeding can sometimes be difficult and challenging. It’s not just as simple as throwing a boy dog and a girl dog together and letting nature takes its course.

Now another girl (Shiloh) has just come in season. My plan was to breed her to Clancy for some really nice red F1 Cavapoos puppies. But, as I mentioned above if she’s bred this heat cycle, she’ll have puppies in November and they’ll be ready to go home in January. I’m pretty sure nobody is going to want a January puppy. So unless I get a lot of people contacting me and saying they will take a January puppy, I’m going to skip breeding her this cycle and just wait for the next girl that will produce F1 puppies.

Now if I could just write a breeding manual in dog language that the dogs would read and follow! *wink*