Why Artificial Insemination ? Most people are unaware that french and English Bulldogs are usually not able to breed naturally. Bulldogs are a man made breed and quite frankly they are anatomically incorrect when it comes to mating. Not only can the males “not reach” the females, often the females anatomy is such that her vulva is set very high up on her body. Our experience has been that when we allow the males to attempt a free breed they generally become exhausted, over heated and will even vomit from the strain, all in all it just isn't worth the health or well being of an expensive champion male. There are several advantages to doing AI. I have listed some of the main reasons: · When we collect the semen we can check it under the microscope to be sure it is of good quality before injecting it into the female. Problems can be detected quickly. · We are able to visually inspect and measure the amount of semen, we can also inspect the males reproductive parts for injury, bleeding, lesions or anything out of the ordinary. · Manually collecting the semen keeps the spread of disease in check, there is no way for a female to contaminate the male as they never even touch. · When performing the AI the female is manually palpated, this allows for close physical inspection of the females reproductive parts, any foul odor or discharge is noted immediately. · By using AI we prevent injury to male and female both, the dogs do not actually ever come in contact with each other. Sometimes when dogs tie naturally they will bite, fight or try desperately to pull away from each other, sometimes this can cause prolapse of the female. How do we know when to inseminate? Timing is very important when breeding by AI. Without proper timing AI is virtually useless. To determine when the timing is right we must know when the female ovulates. We can determine this by doing a Progesterone Test. This requires a blood sample. In our kennel Lonnie does the blood draw, he quite good at it. After the blood is drawn we must spin in a centrifuge, then perform the actual test using the blood serum from our sample. The results of the test tell us the Progesterone level in the female, when the Progesterone reaches a certain level we know she has ovulated. After ovulation the eggs need about 48 hours to mature, that is the perfect time to AI. We AI the female twice, once the after ovulation and then again 2 days later, we have excellent resulting litters. We do not “hit” them all, but we have an excellent record in the high 90% range of resulting pregnancies. A wonderful asset to Progesterone testing is that we can narrow the whelp date down to a 2 day window, this allows us to generally schedule our c-sections, takes the guess work out of know when the time is right.