Creating the next generation

My bitches are in season, or coming into season, and this time around it’s Evie’s turn.  My beloved first-born home-bred, whose whole life is in these pages, is now of age to bear puppies herself.  I have a terrific vet, a greyhound man, whom I hold in the highest esteem and for whose clinical reproductive technologies I gladly drive across town.  He brings the science that makes the whole process not-at-all tumultuous, unlike earlier adventures in different neighbourhood practices when I was first starting out in this game.

These days I would go to a horse vet before a neighbourhood vet if I had to; the “wait and see” methods of the tenders of family pets give most breeders apoplexy.  We want lab bloods, we want to see dog sperm swimming on a slide under the microscope, we want insemination timed as close to the moment of ovulation as possible.  Furthermore, we don’t care if such conversation clears the room at parties.  Invited to coffee this morning with Maria and a non-fiction writer of some renown, I said, “I will be there as soon as I can, but prior to the time I have to oversee a dog mating.”

Surrounded by syringes, pipettes and microscopes, Evie was this morning calm and collected, and Ashburton Jay’s fine stud dog distinguished himself, first time, in the appropriate fashion.  Tomorrow we rinse and repeat, then wait and see.  I made it to my coffee appointment a few minutes late, swapping hoodie for the kind of drapey, artful overgarment that says, though I have just been kneeling on the floor of a veterinary clinic murmuring procreatory exhortations to a young dog and his bitch, such things are from here of no note.  At coffee, biscotti dust gathered in my throat and I talked about the death of Robin Hyde.  Life is a land of contrasts.

Tagged as: breeding, dogs