Plum wore out

[Tink]

Diana, you brought back a memory for me of (1976) when I was breeding German Shepherds. I had AKC 3 females and my own male at the time.
One female came into heat, got bred, then disappeared. I didn't know if she'd been stolen or wandered off, but 2 weeks of hunting for her did no good.
A second female came into heat, so I bred her. Less than a week later the first female came back home.

We lived on a farm at the time and my oldest dd was about 2 yrs old. The first litter was 13 puppies. Less than 3 weeks later, we had the second litter of 16 pups! So there I was with a pre-schooler, 4 adult dogs, and 29 puppies! Talk about a circus!

The hardest part of this was that both females seemed to think that all the pups were theirs, so if they got the chance, would steal each others puppies and fight over them. To avoid this, we had to keep all of them firmly contained and separated. It wasn't too bad when they were newborns, but can you imagine what it was like when they were 4 and 6 weeks old? OMG I thought I'd go nuts. LOL

I ended up inviting friends and family over as often as possible to help me properly socialize them because there were simply too many to handle.

I was very relieved when the last of them were sold. LOL