Surgical insemination is pretty much what it sounds like. It is surgery. The incision is made similar to a spay incision with a dog under general anesthesia. As such, we want blood work, EKG, IV fluids, appropriate anesthesia...the whole bit. We anesthetize the female and exteriorize her uterus far enough to adequately see where we want to put the semen. Then we inject a catheter or a needle with the semen into the uterus. We close the female up, suture up, wake her up, and send her home the same afternoon that she came in for the surgical breeding. But the alternative to that is transcervical insemination, and that's done with an endoscope. It's a rigid endoscope. The female is awake. There is no sedation. There is no anesthesia and there is no surgical incision. So by using the scope instead of surgical insemination, we can still deliver semen frozen, fresh, and freshly chilled directly into the uterine horns without anesthesia and without the stress of a surgical procedure.

There are sperm banks for dogs. In fact, there are many sperm banks for dogs. Some companies have franchises. There are other veterinary clinics that have independent semen banks. So there are a number of them just depending on who you're working with, but they are all across the country and the world. In fact, we get semen shipped into our semen bank from semen banks from all over the world. So there are many semen banks, many sperm banks, and depending on who they're affiliated with, there are two different kinds of semen that we work with. One is in pellets and one is in straws if we're using frozen semen, but we can ship fresh semen and frozen semen all over the country and the world.

Oh yes. There are definitely breeds of dogs that need reproductive assistance. Mostly they're the breeds that are the brachycephalics—the short-faced dogs, the Bulldogs, the French Bulldogs, the pugs, some of the other short-faced breeds, and the American bullies. Those are really large bully-type breed dogs. Then there are some other breeds as well in which it may be an age issue. It may be a hip issue. It may be some other kind of health concern. So it's not universally only Bulldogs and bully breeds that need help. Corgis don’t have great success with natural breedings. So we frequently need to intervene with some kind of insemination, collection of the semen, and insemination for the female.

You'll generally know if your dog needs help breeding if you think that one or the other, the male or the female, is accurate on when the breeding should take place and you still haven't been able to achieve a mating or a tie. You can come to our office, and we can do a progesterone test. We can have results on that back in less than an hour. At that point, we can determine if one of the dogs is correct—if the male or the female is right about the timing—and if we should proceed with the breeding. If that is the case, then we can collect semen and do one of the three different kinds of inseminations that we can do. One of them is vaginal insemination, one is transcervical insemination, and the last is surgical insemination. Our choice depends on the quality of the semen, the age of the female, her fertility, and some other issues as well.

We generally recommend waiting until dogs are at least two years old for their first breeding, primarily because that gives us an opportunity to complete their reproductive testing, such as OFA hips and elbows, and some other tests we feel are crucial to run before dogs are bred. There are some people who will breed younger. We never want to breed on the first heat cycle, although sometimes dogs plan things a little differently than we do so we want to be aware of that. In general, we also try not to breed much over the age of eight and recognize that dogs older than six tend to have about a 33% decrease in their fertility. So the older female and older male dogs have a decline in fertility as they age. Once we get past eight, we don't recommend breeding most females. The males can be continued to be bred as long as they are still able to produce sperm, and that could be well into their teens.