Why the Wait for a Well-Bred Puppy Can Be Longer Than You Think
If you're hoping to add a puppy to your family sometime next year, it can feel like you're starting your search incredibly early. In reality, you may not be.
I regularly hear from families who are looking several months out. Sometimes the timing works beautifully with a litter that's already been bred or is on the ground. Other times, the next litter I'm planning hasn't even been bred yet, and that makes the timeline much harder to predict.
There's a big difference between “we're planning a litter” and “we have puppies coming.”
The Calendar Starts with the Female
Before there can be a breeding, the female has to come into season.
You'll commonly see 6 months quoted as the time between heat cycles, but that's far from universal. Some girls cycle twice a year, while others routinely go 9, 10 or 12 months between seasons. Individual females tend to establish their own pattern, but even one who has been fairly predictable can decide not to cooperate with the plans you've made for her. As we say with many things in breeding—they don’t read the textbooks!
If I'm hoping to breed a girl this winter, that doesn't mean I have a breeding date circled on the calendar. It means I have a plan for her if and when she comes into season as expected.
Once a cycle starts, there is still some waiting involved. We use hormone testing to determine ovulation and the appropriate breeding window. Once ovulation occurs, we have an anticipated due date, which informs an estimated go home date. Now we wait.
Breeding Completed Doesn’t Guarantee Puppies
We’ve spent hours planning the pairing, conducted serial progesterone tests, waited not so patiently for ovulation to occur, timed the breeding correctly and we can still end up without a litter.
Sometimes females don’t conceive. Sometimes there are only one or two puppies. Sometimes circumstances change and a planned breeding doesn’t happen at all. This is why I’m careful about how I talk about future litters. Our confidence that there will actually be puppies increase as we move from planned, to bred to pregnancy confirmed.
Until I have a confirmed pregnancy, I don’t count on puppies that don’t exists yet. Even after pregnancy is confirmed, I don’t know exactly how many puppies will be born, what sexes they'll be or the distribution of colors. We typically ultrasound around 28 days after ovulation to confirm pregnancy. You can sometimes get an idea of how many puppies you're seeing on ultrasound, but that's not really its purpose. A more reliable puppy count doesn't come until the final x-ray late in pregnancy.
From Breeding to Go Home: ~4.5 Months
This part of the timeline is much more predictable. A dog's gestation period is approximately 63 days from ovulation to birth.. Trouvae puppies typically go home around 9-10 weeks old. From breeding to go-home, we're talking about roughly 19 weeks.
If a female is bred in January, her puppies aren't going home in February or March. They're likely being born in March and going home sometime in May.
Here's what that looks like across the year:
| Breeding | Puppies Born | Go Home |
|---|---|---|
| January | March | May |
| February | April | June |
| March | May | July |
| April | June | August |
| May | July | September |
| June | August | October |
| July | September | November |
| August | October | December |
| September | November | January |
| October | December | February |
| November | January | March |
| December | February | April |
Approximate timeline based on birth about 63 days after ovulation and puppies going home around 9–10 weeks. Actual dates will vary.
A breeding that happens at the very beginning versus the very end of a month can obviously shift things, and actual reproductive timing matters more than the name of the month. As a planning tool, breeding month + about 4½ months = puppy going home gets you pretty close.
What Happens When a Breeding Doesn’t Result in Puppies
Say you've found a breeder you really like and you're hoping for a puppy from a particular female. She's expected to come into season in January. She doesn’t actually come into season until March. She's bred in March, but doesn't get pregnant. There may not be another opportunity to breed her until fall. For a female with long cycles, it could be the following spring.
That also doesn't mean the breeder will automatically repeat the same breeding on the next cycle. There may be another plan for her. The stud may no longer be available. The breeder may decide to skip a cycle.
In a small breeding program, there isn't necessarily another pregnant female waiting in the wings.
Why Not Just Have More Females and More Litters?
There certainly are breeders who maintain enough breeding dogs to have puppies available most of the year. That's not how I want to breed dogs. I breed relatively infrequently, and I'm usually breeding because there is something I specifically want to produce and evaluate for my own program. I keep a puppy, or sometimes I keep more than one for a while because I want time to see how they develop. Then I actually want to watch those dogs grow up.
I want to see what that pedigree produced beyond cute 8-week-old puppies. I want to know what I got structurally, what the temperaments look like as the puppies mature and whether the choices I made accomplished what I hoped they would.
My adult dogs also have lives outside of reproduction. I show them. I train them. They travel with me. They live here as dogs. Having a female who could have a litter isn't, by itself, a reason for me to breed her. All of that means there will be stretches when I don't have puppies.
How Early Should You Contact a Breeder?
If you've found a breeder whose dogs and program you really like, I wouldn't wait until you're ready to bring a puppy home. Reaching out 6 months ahead isn't strange. A year ahead isn't necessarily strange either, particularly if you have fairly specific preferences or you're hoping for a puppy from a particular breeding.
On the other hand, I also wouldn't assume that contacting a breeder a year ahead guarantees a puppy on your preferred timeline. There are too many variables between a future breeding plan and puppies actually going home.
For upcoming Trouvae litters, I keep a very small list of families who are seriously interested in the next planned breeding. The aren’t simply names I’ve collected from inquiries. They’ve started the puppy process, and we’ve mutually decided we’re a good fit. I don’t take deposits. The intention is that they receive a puppy from that litter, assuming the breeding is successful and the litter produces an appropriate puppy for them. What they don't have is a particular puppy assigned to them. That comes much later, after I've had the opportunity to raise and evaluate the litter.
Once the breeding occurs, I keep those families informed and check that the expected timing still works for them. Because I keep this list very small, I ask families to let me know if their plans change or they decide to move forward with another breeder while we're waiting. I understand that I can't guarantee a planned breeding will result in a puppy, but knowing when someone's plans have changed allows me to keep an accurate picture of the homes I'm expecting to have for the upcoming litter.
Sometimes everything lines up and the wait isn't very long at all. Sometimes nature has other plans.
That's breeding.