Yes, you can feel the puppies move in the mother’s belly. Just like human babies moving in mom's stomach, you can start to feel the puppies move as they get bigger and more “cooked” in the belly.

So a dog's pregnancy is 63 days from the day of ovulation, which is relevant, again, when you’re using progesterone time. If you go off breeding dates, it's not as accurate. You have a two-week window of when she might, which is a long window, considering her pregnancy is eight weeks. So two of those eight weeks, you don't know, which can be a gray area. But the basic answer is about two months.

The signs at the beginning can be subtle if you weren't intentionally breeding. And so then you may not notice until she's further along and starts showing her pregnancy. And usually, by the time she starts showing her pregnancy, you've got a couple of weeks until she’s due.

If you suspect your dog is pregnant, the best thing to do is get her to a veterinarian. Starting 28 days after ovulation, which is relevant if you time with progesterone, you can start to detect on ultrasound. You can actually detect sooner, but comfortably at 28 days. And that will give you an answer if she's pregnant or not. And then, if it's later in pregnancy as the puppies and their skeletons form, you can detect that on x-ray and see an accurate count of how many puppies are coming. That's always the best place to start is to confirm she's pregnant and figure out where you are in the process.

I got ahead of myself earlier, but the vaginal goes just in the vagina, and that can be anything except frozen semen. And trans-cervical can be anything. We use an endoscope to get the semen into the uterus, and it's essential for frozen semen, but it can be used with any type of semen. And trans-cervical procedures are very minor. The dog is awake, and we typically have someone holding cheese, and the dog is eating cheese, and it can take 5 to 30 minutes, depending on the dog. It’s speedy, and then they're done, and the dog walks out of here just fine.

So there are two main types of artificial insemination—vaginal and trans-cervical. So vaginal is used for fresh semen. If the stud dog is here and we're using it, or if it’s shipped chilled, if we're having it shipped across the country overnight, we can use those.

And then trans-cervical places the semen all the way into the uterus, past the cervix. And so you have to do that for frozen semen because frozen semen doesn't live as long, so that gives it its best shot to get to where it needs to go. So the shipped semen is not frozen. Shipped is chilled. It usually comes on ice, but it's ready to go from the night before. Whereas frozen could have been frozen 30 years earlier, and you can still thaw and use it.