Does your female dog have a suspiciously large abdomen? Did she go into heat a while ago? Did she run away during the heat? Do you also have a whole male dog at home? Well, it’s possible that your dog is pregnant. It’s not 100% sure, there are many others causes of swollen abdomen in a female dog (obesity, pyometra, ascites, tumors…), but among them, especially if the dog does not show other symptoms of illness, also take into account an unwanted pregnancy. But what are the symptoms of one pregnancy in dogs?
How long does a dog’s pregnancy last?
Let’s start from length of dog pregnancy. For convenience, vets also often say that it lasts 60 days. In reality, however, pregnancy can last from 57 to 65 dayswith an average of 63 days. We are therefore talking about just over 8 weeks.
The duration of pregnancy, in turn, can depend on several factors:
An interesting fact concerns the fact that the female dog can mate, during the same heat or estrus, with multiple male dogs, becoming pregnant with different dogs. This explains why sometimes, in litters, we see puppies with decidedly different appearances. Well yes: partly it is also due to the considerable genetic variability in mixed-breed dogs, but it is often due to the fact that puppies can have different fathers in the same litter.
Pregnancy symptoms in dogs
At this point, as owners, it is good to know how to recognize the former pregnancy symptoms in dogs. This is so you don’t wake up one morning and have an unexpected surprise, that is, a dozen whimpering puppies and newborns at the foot of the bed.
The problem is that during the first few weeks of pregnancy there are no major symptoms to be seen. Usually the first symptoms begin to be clearly evident around a month and a half, when the pregnancy is already in an advanced stage. Obviously if you have seen the female dog mating and remaining attached to the male, there is a high probability that she has become pregnant.
In any case, the things you can see from the month onwards are:
Then when you get to the sixth weekhere are the symptoms that are most noticeable:
Typical symptoms of human pregnancy such as vomiting are not usually present in dogs. If you have a pregnant dog and it starts vomiting, the cause could be found elsewhere, in forms of gastroenteritis or spontaneous abortions with infection of the uterus. (READ also: Pesticides, phthalates and bisphenols found in the urine of pregnant women, the alarming study)
What about imaginary pregnancy in dogs?
Pay attention to . In the latter cases, a month and a half or two after heat, without mating having taken place, you may see the dog’s udder increase in volume. If there is imaginary pregnancy, there is also the presence of milk. In the case of pseudopregnancy, however, there is no milk, but only the increase in volume of the breasts.
In both cases, these are physiological conditions linked to the dog’s hormonal axis, but which do not result in the birth of the puppy because the bitch is not pregnant.
What to do if your dog is pregnant?
If you suspect that the dog is pregnant or you have seen some of the above symptoms, it is best to go to the veterinarian to understand if the dog is pregnant or if we are not faced with an imaginary pregnancy.
Also remember that, from a diagnostic point of view:
If the dog is pregnant, you won’t actually have to do anything for the first few weeks. Only when you reach the sixth week onwards and your belly starts to get bigger, your vet may advise you to:
What to do if you want to terminate a dog’s pregnancy?
There is a injectable drug which allows di interrupt the pregnancy of dogs. The advice is to use the drug in the early stages of pregnancy, so that you can experience a fetal resorption.
In fact, if you wait until a more advanced stage of pregnancy, you risk a abortion real.
It will then be necessary to check with ultrasound every few weeks that the drug has taken effect and that a disease has not developed pyometrathat is, an infection of the uterus.
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