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.

Many of the smushed-face, brachycephalic breeds need help breeding and whelping and having the puppies, but not all of them. Those tend to be the ones that we watch out for.

So the more significant thing for that is going to be if you've tried to breed them before and they didn't get pregnant, or if you're trying to breed a dog that isn't local. So if you're shipping semen, you'll need some help with that. And progesterone timing, like we already talked about, is recommended for any dog when you're breeding her on her cycle.

Here at the Animal Hospital of Statesville, we're committed to helping healthy dogs produce healthy puppies. So all of our requirements revolve around the health of the dog. We require that the mother dog has been seen regularly by a veterinarian, preferably with a visit in the last year—that they're up to date on vaccines or titers, their heartworm test, and a Brucella test, which is a sexually transmitted disease in dogs that can be passed to humans and cause infertility. So we cover our bases to make sure they have the best chance of getting pregnant and are healthy to carry the pregnancy.

Some of the things that we can do at the visit if we need to - like the heartworm test and vaccines - are not safe to give before pregnancy, so we can pull titers if we need to in order to check that they have appropriate immunity. Or we can wait a heat cycle if we absolutely have to, to make sure that everybody's healthy.

Progesterone timing is a very complex thing, but to boil it down, the premise is that you pull blood every other day about when she comes into heat and can track when she ovulates and when she's going to be most fertile. So using that to guide breeding has been shown to increase pregnancy rates, increase litter sizes, and give you an accurate due date, so you know what day to be on the watch.