Having read the post about training classes and pregnant bitches, it got me to wondering.

Are we doing our dogs any favours by isolating them when they are young? Should we not give their natural immunity a chance to work on its own with some safe exposure. I'm afraid that if we raise our babies in little bubbles, we are working against natural selection and allowing puppies with genetically weak immune systems to grow up and be susequently bred, producing more genetically weak puppies.

It would be heartbreacking to lose a puppy or two from a litter, but they have litters for a reason. Would it not be the best thing for the breed to expose the puppies to a REASONABLE degree and let Mother Nature play a little role in selecting our stock?

Not judging anybody, because I'm careful with my litters too (although not as careful as some), but just curious what the long term consequences will be if we protect them a little too much.

There is a diiference in exposure and what we drag back to them...the mother has all of the very things that we immunize against and it is her immunity that prepares them. If you bring a strain of something back to the puppies AND her..you are comprimising not only the puppies immunity but hers as well. She shouldn't have to "fight" unnecessary bugs AND care for her litter as her immunity is already being taxed. I agree you can't be so over zealous that you are badgering your family all the time to "disinfect" and become hermits but why set them up for disaster?

I understand your point but everyone's puppies are exposed to regular bugs that are present in the environment just from contact with your own family and with their mother. No matter how much contact a puppy has with the outside world while they are young, they will not be able to "develop" an immunity to the more deadly and troublesome diseases. That is what people are trying to protect their litters from when they do not go to classes or restrict guests from visiting their kennel.

Your comment about natural selection does bring up one concern that I do worry about though. It may be unrelated but, I worry that with all of the extra trouble we go to in order to get some bitches bred and then whelped, are we breeding those undesirable qualities into our lines. The lengths that some people will go to in order to get a litter out of a certain bitch who may have a lot of trouble conceiving (sometimes cannot even be bred naturally for whatever reason) and then cannot free whelp or has real problems raising the litter, etc. is amazing to me. I worry that they are going to such lengths because there is some physical quality that they want to continue in their lines but while doing that they are fixing so many other problems in the lines. If it is a popular line then these problems with whelping, conceiving, mothering, etc. are actually being fixed and ingrained into our breed as a whole. Very worrisome to me.