We have seven 12 day old pups now and one seems to have an infected umbilicus. It's reddened and crusty. It's the runt, he started whining yesterday. Any help is appreciated.

Hi Ed,

I was just looking through the testimonials on your website when I came across a question submitted by a women named Lauren. She described how her pup(s) would "stiffen" up and then relax and act somewhat normal. She called them seizures. We're relatively new to breeding having only bred four litters of Mastiffs over the last 6-7 years. Our last litter of pups was a breeders nightmare. We had 9 pups at birth but our dam's milk didn't come in. We hand fed those pups milk replacer (the pups definitely weren't crazy about the store bought formula) and a fat substitute we got from the vet and for the first few days things seemed to be going okay (except for our sleep deprivation and waning energy reserves). Then one by one, the puppies started fading. We tried everything our vet suggested as well as anything else we could think of. A few of them had "seizures" as described by Lauren. The only thing our vet said was that he thought our Dam must've had an infection and passed it on to the pups at birth. When all was said and done, we were left with only three pups. I can't help but wonder if things would of turned out differently had we known about your formula.

So here we are with our fourth litter, the second one from our dam described above. Two were stillborn, tried reviving them via swinging them between my legs (I've used this method before with success). One had most probably aspirated fluid at birth and died from what I guess was pneumonia. One either had a birth defect or the Dam caused it at birth when she chewed the umbilicus. It's intestine was exposed and it faded away. And one was stepped on by the dam. We heard about this happening but didn't realize just how fast it really can happen, till now.

We have seven 12 day old pups now and one seems to have an infected umbilicus. It's reddened and crusty. It's the runt, he started whining yesterday and we don't need any more heartaches. We're taking it to the vets tomorrow in the hope that he'll say something like, "Oh, I know what that is. Give him two of these and call me in the morning." Was wondering if you've ever seen this on your pups and if you have any advice. No tenting of his skin but he's not suckling like he used to. Any help is appreciated.

Thank you,
Mark