Actually, you can inseminate your dog at home if you choose to do vaginal insemination. Anything more sophisticated than that requires a veterinarian's assistance, of course, but vaginal AIs are allowed. In fact, a few years ago the AKC determined that clients are allowed to do their own vaginal inseminations and still register the litter as an assisted semen breeding. So yes, you can do them as long as you're using fresh semen. Frozen semen should never be put in any way other than with transcervical or surgical because the success rate of inseminating frozen semen vaginally is about 11% as opposed to about 80% when it's put into the uterus directly.

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.