Chantal van Dartel from Eindhoven and her husband couldn’t believe what they saw when their dog Deya gave birth on Friday night. They had prepared for a much smaller litter, but no fewer than eighteen arrived. “According to the vet, this is very exceptional. They don’t often experience this,” says owner Chantal.
She and her husband train police dogs and also have a Malinois at home. They thought it would be fun to breed a litter of puppies with their own dog for once. “Usually such a dog gives birth to eight to ten puppies, so I panicked when one kept coming,” says Chantal
Three puppies were born naturally. The fifteen other puppies had to be delivered by caesarean section. “The dog just couldn’t handle it,” Chantal continues. “They just kept coming. Even when the vet was already cleaning the uterus, she still felt one. In the end, the incubator was completely full of squeaky dogs.”
“We have to set the alarm again, because the dogs have to be fed every four hours.”
Because Deya herself is still too weak to take care of all her children, Chantal and her husband face a tough task. “We have to set the alarm again, because every four hours we have to feed the dogs with the bottle. We spend about half an hour on that. And mother herself also needs to be fed extra, because she has become really thin. So that will be a lot of stalls in the near future.”
It remains to be seen whether the puppies will all live. But crooks in Brabant can brace themselves for the arrival of a lot of new detectives. As soon as the dogs are allowed to leave mother Deya’s, they will get new owners who will train them to become police dogs.
