05/31/2026
Interesting 💡🚫
A NEW PARADIGM FOR DOG WHELPING
I have made several posts recently arguing that the main cause of stillborn or distressed newborn puppies is exposure of the bitch to light during whelping. Here I will explain the complex interactions of light, hormones, and uterine contractility that result in high mortality of newborn puppies and why light is the key.
Uterine inertia is a physiological condition in which the uterus is not contracting strongly enough or often enough to expel the puppies There are many reasons why a puppy's birth might be prolonged - stuck puppies, exhaustion of the female, large puppies, large and small litters, etc. - but uterine inertia is the specific condition of inadequate contraction strength of the uterus.
So the question is what is causing the uterine contractions to be too weak to expel the puppies? You would think natural selection would have weeded out the females with this problem long ago, because it is likely to result in death of both the dam and all her puppies. Yet we all know it happens.
To answer this question, I had to really dig around in the literature for both humans and animals, but the answer was out there.
It turns out that there are two critical hormones necessary for effective uterine contractions during labor. One, of course, is oxytocin. And we know that an injection of oxytocin will often prompt the birth of a puppy that had taken too long to appear.
But the second hormone might be a suprise to you. It's melatonin, what we think of as the "sleep hormone". It turns out that melatonin is probably the most ubiquitious molecule across life forms on earth. It occurs not just in us but in all animals, as well as all other animals and plants, and even bacteria. Clearly it's not just about sleep but is involved in many processes of life. And in animals, it plays a critical role in labor.
The key to everything is that in mammals, melatonin interacts with oxytocin to increase the strength of uterine contraction enough during labor to push the puppies out.
The essential detail you need to know is that melatonin secretion is controlled by light. In fact, this is how animals keep track of night and day and the seasons of the year. The animals know day length from the daily patterns of secretion of meatonin, and they know the seasons by monitoring when day length is increasing or decreasing. So, activity patterns, breeding season, the timing of migration, molt, and hibernation are all sensed from patterns in melatonin secretion that is controlled by ambient light.
Once I found this critical link between melatonin and oxytocin in the human physiology literature, the picture became clear to me.
I knew that breeders carefully monitor things during whelping so they can respond to anything that would have adverse effects on either mom or the pups. Such events are not uncommon during whelping, so vigilance is the rule. For this, they need enough light to be able to see.
But after I realized that light suppresses secretion of melatonin in whelping bi***es, the pieces began to fall into place. Breeders monitor whelping with lights on. But turning on the lights shuts off the secretion of melatonin, leaving the bitch without the pair of complementary hormones that are necessary for birth. The result is uterine inertia, causing the list of problems that can be expected from this - prolonged labor, stillborn and distressed puppies, puppies with fluid in their airways, rescue attempts with ventilation and CPR... you are all familiar.
After I connected all the dots, I worked with some breeders to figure out a whelping arrangement that would prevent the suppression of melation. Once we got this right, the change in the whelping experience was immediate and remarkable. Pups were born quickly with only short intervals between, none were stillborn or distressed, and mom cared for them competently without any assistance. It was like watching the birth of new life of some animal on a nature show. No drama. No emergencies. Everybody doing well and happy!
Since then, I've been working with breeders to refine the protocol, and especially to identify all the things that breeders do differently that might affect success. I learn something new from each litter, things you can and can't do, the easiest way to do things like mark the puppies as they are born so you can tell them apart without compromising the darkness of the room, and a million other things that come up in every different situation. I don't know enough about this yet to publish a paper or write a handbook for breeders. So, I continue to look for breeders that are willing to whelp a litter as part of this project so I can collect the data I need to describe this both to the scientific community and to breeders.
If you are interested in participating in our project to work out a whelping protocol breeders can follow to prevent uterine inertia, you can join our Facebook group for the project at -
https://www.facebook.com/groups/uterineinertiaindogs/
We are working on this without extramurral funding until we have enough data to convince a review panel to provide support. In the meantime, it is funded by particpating breeders. if you are interested in participating, independently or as part of a group or breed club, please get in touch. Because of the link between exposure to oxidative stress during whelping and disorders that can affect both puppies and dogs throughout their lifetime, this is a great opportunity to identify the cause of some specific disorders in your breed. Good candidates for this include renal dysplasia, cancer, and behavior disorders, but see my post about this for more -
https://www.facebook.com/carol.beuchat.9/posts/pfbid0P12HbYySKmASWTjxZLN5yTZesi4z59oqVajJZkn2DhHWcMaRkSCAdh19T1wdPvaTl
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