I am curious to get some feedback on running progesterone, the timing of breeding, and litter results.

What day did you get a result of 5?
On what day(s) after did you breed?
Natural, AI, Surgical, etc?
Litter results?

Thanks!

Last litter progesterone was 5.0 on day 12. Bred on day 14 and 15 via A.I. with shipped fresh chilled semen. She had 10 puppies.

Please remember, ovulation has little to do with progesterone. It is the easier test to run over LH.

So to ask this is to ask a question which will not give you answers.

Well hell I guess we can all just stop doing the progesterone testing, waiting until they hit that magic number 5 and then waiting another 2-4 days to do insemination and then waiting another 60+ days for our puppies to arrive. Who knew?

we do quite well waiting for the progesterone to go above 5, wait 2 days, breed, wait one day breed. Very rarely miss.

I breed 2 days after I see a 5.0. I do a last progesterone level at that time if it's a maiden bitch. It's done for my own knowlege & worth spending it for future breedings. I never stop testing until she hits a 5.0 or over.

I try to breed into the low teens 1st breeding then upper teens to 20 the 2nd breeding. If we're doing 1 breeding I try to breed between 14 & 17. Some feel that's too high. I don't but it can depend on each bitch. Most of the small litters are timing errors, not the stud-dog but that's jmho.

I had a recent breeding done a little differently by the stud-dog owner. The 1st breeding was done earlier then I like and I still wound up with 8 pups; 2 weeks ago. The 1st breeding was 5.8 the 2nd breeding was 18.7 done 3 days later. Semen looked fair the 1st breeding so my guess is my girl got pregnant mostly from the 2nd breeding. We have 6 girls and 2 boys.

I bred a bitch that my friend owns the day after she hit 5.1ng and the next 3 days after that (we had the stud in hand). She had 10 puppies... if I can remember it correctly it was 5 boys and 5 girls.

I remember that Hildur. You could find the post and link them to it.

Remember when you breed, either naturally or a side-by-side AI, the semen has a significantly longer life than when you use extended semen in Clone or Chill5, etc. So breeding earlier without an extender gives you flexibility to have your girl covered that you do not have when you have semen in an extender and breed early. The window for breeding is much much smaller when using semen in an extender, thus the importance of the numbers.

There you go. This should help.

http://pub12.bravenet.com/forum/static/show.php?usernum=976632990&frmid=4&msgid=878711&cmd=show

The LH test is not as expensive as the prog. test, but it has a small window. So, we start at about day 7 or 8 - do the prog and freeze the serum for the LH until the bloodwork comes back. If it is in the 1.5 to 2.4 range, then we do up the LH test. From the LH you can figure 48 hours to ovulate - and girls can ovulate from 4.0 to about 8.0 - so the 5.0 works alot, but not 100% of the time - especially if you girl ovulates early .