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PUPPY LOVE
This is my favorite time with them: when all is quiet, late at night, after everyone else has fallen asleep. They wake up, make some feeble attempt at play or practice walking on their wobbly little legs before nursing and stumbling over, drunk on their mother's love. They sleep wherever they land.
They twitch in their sleep, tiny feet, ears, eyes, whole bodies spazzing out. They huddle together - one twitching, sleeping mass of sweetness. Occasionally, one looks up at me with a cloudy purple blue eye. Someone growls. They dream.
Gwennie also twitches outside of the whelping pen, opting to sleep on the cold concrete than on the soft straw with her brood. Her eyes roll back in her head as she sleep, high on oxytocin delivered to her brain during nursing. Oxytocin, it's been found, is the feel good chemical of the century. It is excreted during lactation (of humans and animals) and helps us to relax; during nursing, oxytocin is the chemical that stimulates the "let down" response in the breasts that encourages milk to flow. As I watch Gwennie, I remember feeling that oxytocin rush. Though relaxed, she still rests with both paws guarding the beef shin I bought her today at the butcher.
After all, the pups are already cutting tiny teeth through the tops of their little mouths. In a frenzy that can only be described as having the same fervor as fish spawning in shallow water, the pups rush toward their mother's nourishment, little feet scrambling clumsily, mouths tenaciously hanging on, only to have her stand abruptly and walk away.
She is not indifferent, however; she is simply teaching little future sleddogs to eat when the window opens, and eat heartily.