I want to tell you a little secret. And it may sound a bit weird to the average person, but in the dog breeding world its not.

As you know we are waiting for Sasha to deliver her puppies any day now. But we have a week+ window that puppies could arrive. Usually when a female is ready to breed, we’ll put her with the male a minimum of two times. I usually aim for three just to make sure we covered that window of when she ovulated and she is “ready”.

Some breeders do progesterone testing to really nail down the best date to get the two dogs together. That’s a great option especially when you’re breeding your female to an “outside” dog (meaning a dog owned by someone else and living elsewhere). If you are using someone else’s stud dog, you’re likely paying for two breedings so you want to nail down the best time to breed and not waste your money.

And sometimes we do what’s called a dual-sired litter to also “cover all the bases”. What does that mean? Well, we breed one female to two different males. What??! Why would we do that? Well it might be because you have an older dog or a young inexperienced dog and you want to let them “try” but you also want to make sure your female gets pregnant!

If you were doing this with purebred dogs, then you would DNA test puppies to prove which sire was the father. And yes, you can have a litter of puppies with some having one father and some having the other dog as the father.

In this instance, I decided to breed Sasha with Dickens and Asher.

Dickens is one of my all-time favorite dogs ever! So naturally since I’d like to keep something from this litter I wanted to breed Sasha to him. But Dickens turned eleven years old in October and who knows how much longer he’ll be able to reproduce. Trust me, even at this age he is still very interested in the girls! And yes, he had he exam in December and he still is OFA heart normal! No murmurs. That’a quite a feat for a senior Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. And also why I love having his progeny in my breeding program.

Asher is also an outstanding Cavalier and much younger than Dickens. So reproduction issues shouldn’t be a problem for him. But he’s very timid around the girls and doesn’t always know how to accomplish “the deed”.

Hence, why I decided to use them both and cover all the bases! They are both genetic and OFA tested and I would love a puppy sired by either one. Dickens bred her first (two different times) and Asher bred her a couple days later (two different times). Dickens previous pups with Sasha were pretty much solid red, and the previous Asher and Sasha litter were red also, but had more white markings. So we won’t be doing any DNA tested as we’ll likely be able to tell who the father is by the timing of the birth and the color/markings of the pups!

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