Dogs Learn Dog From Dogs

If I had to reduce this entire article to two simple ideas, they would be these.

First, puppies should spend considerably longer with their biological families than we currently expect.

Second, dogs need more opportunities to socialise regularly with other dogs throughout their lives.

Everything else in this article is really an attempt to explain why I have come to believe those two things.

In the first article in this series, I looked at what actually happens when dogs attempt to socialise in the real world. Here, I want to look more closely at why so many dogs seem poorly equipped for those conversations in the first place, and why humans so often struggle to let them happen.

The longer I spend watching dogs, both personally and professionally, the more convinced I become that dogs learn dog from dogs.

That may sound almost insultingly obvious, but I increasingly think we underestimate just how important it really is.

This is partly because the brain is still developing, but more importantly because the family provides something that is extraordinarily difficult to recreate later: a stable social world in which relationships already exist and learning happens naturally throughout the day.

Many of these same skills later seem to support cooperation with humans as well. The puppy who learns patience with siblings is often learning patience in general. The puppy who learns to respond to another dog’s boundaries is learning flexibility. The puppy who learns frustration tolerance within the family may well be developing many of the same emotional skills that later help them cooperate with people.

This is one of the reasons I increasingly believe that social fluency does not compete with cooperation. Quite the opposite. In many dogs it appears to support it.

And yet much of this education takes place during a period of a dog’s life that we often seem to treat as little more than a waiting room before collection.

The litter is not simply a group of puppies.

It is a family.

It is a miniature canine society.

It is the first social world most dogs will ever experience.

Within that family there are siblings, parents, familiar adults, repeated interactions, disagreements, reconciliations, play, rest, frustration, excitement, food, comfort, and cooperation. Relationships already exist. The puppies know one another. The adults know the puppies. Learning happens naturally throughout the day because life itself becomes the classroom.

This is profoundly different from what we often call puppy socialisation.

I do not dislike puppy classes. Bramble attended them. They helped, and many puppies undoubtedly benefit from them. They are certainly better than nothing.

But they are not the same thing.

A room full of unfamiliar puppies of the same age is not a miniature canine society. There are usually no socially fluent adults, no parents, no established relationships, no familiar individuals, and no shared history. Some puppies spend the session hiding while others spend it bouncing off one another with all the social grace of drunken toddlers.

Useful things can certainly be learned there, but they simply cannot compete with the real thing.

The litter is where dogs begin learning how to be dogs.

And in my experience, some of the richest and most important parts of that education happen after the age at which we routinely send puppies to their new homes.

The litter teaches dog.

Life provides opportunities to keep using it.

Dogs continue learning from other dogs throughout their lives, but I have never found anything that fully replaces those early weeks spent within their canine family.

Doughnut’s Mother Luna & Pups

The puppy may no longer need milk.

That does not mean he no longer needs his family.

The eight-week standard has become so familiar that many people treat it as though it represents the ideal age for puppies to leave. But eight weeks tells us very little about social readiness.

A puppy can eat solid food, survive away from the mother, and no longer require milk. Those are important developmental milestones, but they are not the same thing as being ready to leave the family.

Relationships are still developing.

Communication is still developing.

Emotional regulation is still developing.

Cooperation is still developing.

The puppy is still learning from siblings, still learning from parents, and still participating in the first and most important canine society he is ever likely to experience.

Perhaps we have spent too long asking when puppies can leave and not enough time asking when they are ready to leave.

One of the most persistent myths surrounding puppies is the idea that bringing them home younger will create a deeper bond.

I understand why people believe it. Tiny puppies feel vulnerable, dependent, and impressionable. There is something emotionally powerful about being there at the very beginning.

But dependency is not the same thing as attachment.

Neediness is not the same thing as relationship.

Removing a puppy earlier does not automatically create a stronger bond. It may simply remove him from the very environment in which he is still learning how relationships work.

My own experience has increasingly led me to the opposite conclusion. I believe that dogs who learn relationships well often become better at relationships.

The same social skills that help a puppy navigate siblings, parents, boundaries, frustration, cooperation, and communication later help that dog build richer relationships with humans as well.

A puppy does not need to leave early in order to love you.

If anything, I increasingly suspect that the dog who spends longer learning how to live successfully within his own family may also become better equipped to build deeper relationships with his human family.

Historically, the question was largely practical. When can the puppy survive without the mother? When can he eat independently? When is he physically capable of leaving?

Those are not the same questions as:

When is he socially ready?

What is he still learning from his family?

What is he still learning from his siblings?

What is he still learning from his parents?

I believe social development deserves to become an explicit consideration when puppies leave home.

Canine communication deserves to become an explicit consideration.

Family relationships deserve to become an explicit consideration.

What does social readiness actually look like?

How do we recognise it?

How do we measure it?

These seem to me to be important questions for breeders, behaviourists, trainers, and researchers to explore together.

The conclusions in this article come from decades of watching many dogs grow, learn, communicate, and live alongside one another.

But three dogs in particular have shaped my thinking more than any others.

Three Dogs

Over the years I have lived with, worked with, trained, and observed hundreds of dogs. The conclusions in this article do not come from three dogs alone, nor am I suggesting that my own dogs somehow prove the argument by themselves. They do not. They simply happen to illustrate, particularly clearly, patterns that I have been observing for most of my life.

I have known dogs who remained with their families for much longer, dogs who left very young, dogs who never really left at all, and dogs who grew up in social environments that were either exceptionally rich or almost entirely absent. Again and again I have found myself returning to the same conclusion: dogs learn dog from dogs, and the amount and quality of those early experiences seems to matter enormously.

The first dog in this particular spectrum was Rockstar.

Rockstar came to me as a 2 & 1/2 year old adult, after an extremely difficult beginning. Much of his early life appears to have taught him vigilance, self-protection, and survival rather than communication, cooperation, and trust. For a considerable period of his life he was not safe around unfamiliar dogs, and at times he was not safe around unfamiliar people either. There was a court case, a suspended destruction order, and years of careful management and rehabilitation.

He improved enormously. He learned. He adapted. But social interactions often remained difficult for him, and much of his social life seemed to require conscious effort. Relationships did not come naturally, communication frequently felt uncertain, and he spent much of his life trying to navigate a world that had never properly taught him how to participate in it. Even so, with carefully chosen dogs he knew and trusted, Rockstar was able to develop genuine canine friendships, something I will come back to later.

Between Rockstar and Doughnut sits Bramble, and in many ways I think she is the most important example of all.

Bramble came to me considerably younger than I would have chosen.

From the moment she arrived I tried to compensate for that as much as I possibly could. She attended puppy classes, had play dates, met other dogs, experienced carefully managed social opportunities, and grew up with somebody who had already spent decades obsessing over canine behaviour.

She had opportunities, support, training, and experiences, and much of it worked.

Watch the puppies. These dogs are already old enough to have left their canine families weeks ago, yet look at how little social fluency they actually have. There are no skilled curved approaches or careful greetings here. Some rush straight in, some hover uncertainly, some retreat to humans, and some barely interact at all. They are interested in one another, but they are remarkably socially clumsy.

Had 14-week-old Doughnut walked into this class, I suspect the difference would have been startling. He was already approaching unfamiliar dogs confidently, adjusting his behaviour in response to them and communicating in ways I simply do not see in these videos.

At the time, I saw this as Bramble learning to socialise. Looking back now, I see something rather different: a group of puppies who had already left the dogs from whom they were best placed to learn these skills, trying to learn them from one another.

Bramble is affectionate, intelligent, reliable, and deeply bonded to her family. She works as my psychiatric assistance dog, accompanies me into public spaces, and causes very few of the problems that people often associate with poor socialisation. She is not aggressive, she is not reactive, and she does not start fights.

Most people who meet her would probably describe her as exceptionally well socialised.

I increasingly think that our standards for social success are often far too low.

Humans tend to judge dogs by the problems they do not cause. Dogs may judge social success rather differently.

She is not afraid of other dogs, but she appears to gain very little from them. She does not seek new canine friendships, rarely wishes to continue social interactions beyond the initial greeting, and seems entirely content to leave much of the social work to somebody else, very often me.

If another dog steals her ball, she asks me to intervene.

If another dog wishes to continue the conversation, she often politely withdraws from it.

She speaks enough dog to remain safe, enough to remain polite, and enough to avoid conflict. Beyond that, however, her participation in canine society appears remarkably limited.

This becomes particularly obvious when she spends longer periods around unfamiliar dogs. She frequently remains beside me, watches other dogs rather than joining them, and sometimes appears jealous of their fun. She occasionally asks other dogs for space, not aggressively or fearfully, but simply because she does not seem especially interested in continuing the interaction.

She is not a problem.

She is not unhappy.

But I increasingly believe she is missing an entire world.

At the opposite end of the spectrum sits Doughnut.

Doughnut remained with his family until approximately fourteen weeks of age.

He also came from an unusually large litter of around fifteen puppies, giving him an extraordinary number of siblings with whom to play, negotiate, disagree, communicate and practise being a dog.

He entered the same household, received many of the same opportunities, and shared the same guardian as Bramble. Yet his relationships with other dogs have always been extraordinary.

He does not simply enjoy other dogs.

He seems to understand them.

He approaches differently depending upon the confidence of the dog he is meeting. He slows down for nervous dogs, makes himself smaller if another dog appears uncertain, backs away when he senses discomfort, and often seems to alter his entire behaviour to make himself easier to understand. Watching him interact with other dogs often feels less like watching a pet and more like watching somebody speaking a language fluently.

When Doughnut sees another dog, he sees possibility. A game, a conversation, a relationship, or perhaps even a new friend. While Bramble generally returns to me, a ball, or whatever else she would rather be doing, Doughnut is usually off building relationships, playing, and negotiating.

And I cannot escape the conclusion that the single greatest difference between them is not love, effort, opportunities afterwards, or the quality of their guardian. Since coming to me, both dogs have had the same person trying to teach them, similar opportunities to learn, and the same encouragement to interact with the world.

The profound difference between them appears to be that Doughnut spent approximately fourteen weeks learning how to live with dogs, while Bramble spent approximately six.

Those extra weeks seem to have given Doughnut access to an entire social world that Bramble never fully entered. Whatever they gave him, I have never been able to recreate the same thing for her afterwards.

What Social Fluency Looks Like

Doughnut only 16 weeks old, off lead, confidently greeting an unfamiliar dog we'd encountered on a walk. Even at this age, he was comfortable approaching, investigating and communicating with dogs he'd never met before.

The clearest example I have ever seen of Doughnut’s social fluency came from watching him interact with a Romanian rescue.

The other dog was frightened and socially uncertain. He clearly wanted contact, but he did not seem to know how to achieve it. He would approach, hesitate, retreat, circle back, and then withdraw again. He appeared caught between curiosity and fear.

Doughnut changed his behaviour almost immediately.

He slowed himself down. He stopped approaching directly. He made himself less physically imposing. When the other dog retreated, Doughnut let him go. When he approached again, Doughnut responded, but without overwhelming him.

The interaction unfolded slowly.

Doughnut repeatedly invited contact without demanding it. He allowed the other dog to control the distance between them, adjusted when he saw discomfort, and kept offering opportunities for interaction without forcing the issue.

Eventually, the other dog began to play.

That interaction stayed with me because Doughnut was not simply being “friendly”. He was adapting.

He appeared to recognise that this particular dog needed something different from him, and he changed his own behaviour accordingly.

Bramble was there too.

She was perfectly polite. She was not frightened, aggressive, or reactive. But when the Romanian dog attempted to interact with her, she simply declined. She moved away and returned to me.

There was nothing wrong with that response. Dogs are allowed to say no.

But watching the three of them together illustrated something I had been noticing for years.

The Romanian rescue was socially uncertain.

Bramble was socially limited.

Doughnut was socially fluent.

Those are not judgements about their worth, temperament, intelligence, or happiness. They describe what each dog appeared able to do within that particular social interaction.

Social fluency is not simply enjoying other dogs.

It is being able to communicate with them.

It is recognising when another dog is confident or nervous, interested or uncomfortable, playful or overwhelmed. It is knowing when to approach, when to retreat, when to soften an invitation, when to increase the excitement, when to stop, and when to try again.

It is the ability to negotiate.

And, just like fluency in any other language, there seems to be an enormous difference between knowing enough to get by and being genuinely skilled.

Bramble speaks enough dog to navigate canine society safely. Doughnut seems able to participate in it.

He can reassure, negotiate, adapt, encourage, respond to discomfort, and alter his behaviour according to the individual standing in front of him.

That does not mean he never makes mistakes. Social fluency does not mean social perfection.

But it does mean he has a remarkably rich set of tools available when those mistakes happen.

And those tools did not appear from nowhere.

They developed within relationships, through thousands of interactions with other dogs.

When Dogs Stop Speaking Dog

Leaving the family early is only the first half of the problem.

Dogs continue learning from other dogs throughout their lives. But once puppies enter human society, we often begin restricting the very interactions through which that learning continues.

A curved approach becomes a recall.

A play bow becomes a tightened lead.

A greeting becomes, “Come on, leave it.”

A warning growl becomes, “He’s aggressive.”

We are often so frightened of conflict that we interrupt communication before dogs have had the opportunity to finish it.

And communication is not always pretty.

Dogs growl. They posture. They tell one another to back off. They refuse invitations. They correct rude behaviour. They occasionally misjudge situations and annoy one another.

None of those things automatically means that an interaction has gone wrong.

A correction is information.

A growl can be information.

Walking away is information.

Freezing, avoiding, turning the head, changing posture, increasing distance, or choosing not to engage are all part of the conversation.

That does not mean humans should never intervene. Some dogs are frightened, overwhelmed, socially inexperienced, or genuinely unsafe around others. Sometimes intervention is absolutely necessary.

The point is not to stand back regardless of what is happening.

The point is to become better at distinguishing communication from conflict, so that our intervention is based upon what the dogs are actually telling us rather than simply upon what makes humans uncomfortable.

One consequence of restricting interaction is something I see surprisingly often: the happy but socially clumsy dog.

These dogs may desperately want to interact. They bounce, rush, bark, pull, stare, or launch themselves towards other dogs with enormous enthusiasm, but appear to have very little idea what to do once they get there.

They want the conversation.

They simply do not speak the language particularly well.

Unfortunately, that clumsiness often causes humans to restrict their interactions even further. The dog becomes difficult around other dogs, so the guardian avoids other dogs. Because the dog encounters fewer dogs, there are fewer opportunities to practise. Because there are fewer opportunities to practise, the dog’s social skills remain poor.

Poor social skills create fewer opportunities.

Fewer opportunities create poorer social skills.

Fearful dogs can become trapped in a similar cycle.

Protecting a frightened dog from experiences they cannot cope with is sensible. Protecting them from every opportunity to learn is something else entirely.

A frightened dog does not necessarily need no social experience. They need the right social experience: appropriate dogs, enough space, the ability to withdraw, and interactions in which their communication is noticed and respected.

There is also an important difference between a dog with significant social fear and a puppy or inexperienced dog who is simply apprehensive because meeting unfamiliar dogs is new. A little initial uncertainty is not necessarily a reason to end the experience. Given an appropriate dog and the chance to investigate at their own pace, that uncertainty may be exactly what experience teaches them to overcome.

Small dogs and puppies are particularly vulnerable to another form of well-intentioned interference.

When a larger dog approaches, guardians understandably worry about physical safety. But repeatedly lifting a small or young dog away from interactions can also remove their ability to communicate for themselves. The dog cannot approach, retreat, investigate, refuse, negotiate, or learn because the human has physically removed them from the conversation.

Again, this does not mean never picking up a small dog. Sometimes that is exactly the safest thing to do.

It means recognising that safety and social development are both legitimate needs.

The aim is not maximum interaction.

It is appropriate interaction.

Rockstar was an extreme example of why that distinction matters. For much of his life, it simply was not safe to allow him to interact freely with unfamiliar dogs. Even after enormous progress, particularly as he grew older, he could sometimes mistake another dog’s perfectly reasonable request for space as the beginning of a fight.

But that did not mean he had to have no canine social life. Throughout most of the time he lived with me, Rockstar had at least one dog he knew and trusted. For a while he even had a loving girlfriend, Dita.

At other points there were individual dogs with whom he developed safe friendships, including my friend’s Sprocker, Sparky, with whom he could happily play-fight.

Back in Bedford, when he was still young, once I had managed to teach Rockstar to play bow, there were particular dogs he regularly played with there too, even in Rushden.

When allowing him to interact freely in public wasn’t safe, we could arrange time somewhere enclosed with a dog we already knew he understood. Rockstar couldn’t safely socialise with every dog, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t have canine relationships.

Those are two very different things.

Dogs need opportunities to meet compatible dogs, build relationships, make small social mistakes, receive feedback, try again, and continue refining the skills they began learning within their families.

The observations I described in the first article in this series were a particularly stark example of this. Again and again I watched dogs show interest in one another, begin communicating or start playing, only for humans to end the interaction. Play bows, barking, wrestling and growling could all become reasons to intervene, even when the dogs themselves appeared perfectly capable of continuing the conversation.

But even without that kind of interference, later opportunities cannot completely recreate the education lost when puppies leave their families too soon.

Later relationships can continue that education, but they cannot necessarily recreate the foundations that were never laid.

That is why I think these are not two separate problems.

We shorten the puppy’s first social education, and then too often restrict the continuing education that might at least help them build upon what they learned.

If dogs are going to become socially fluent, they need both: a strong foundation within their first canine family, and opportunities to keep speaking dog afterwards.

What Dogs Lose, What We Lose

One of the problems with the way humans think about socialisation is that we tend to measure success by the absence of problems.

The dog does not fight.

The dog does not bark excessively.

The dog can pass another dog in the street.

The dog comes when called.

The dog can sit quietly in a café.

Those are all useful things. But they tell us remarkably little about the richness of that dog’s social life.

Bramble is a perfect example. By almost every conventional measure, she is exceptionally well socialised. But, as we have already seen, that is not the same thing as social fluency.

The question is not simply whether a dog can exist around other dogs without creating problems.

It is also what they can do with them.

Can they build friendships?

Can they negotiate?

Can they adapt their behaviour to different individuals?

Can they cope when another dog says no?

Can they communicate their own boundaries clearly?

Can they join a game, change the rules, repair a misunderstanding, or help another dog feel safe?

Can they participate fully in canine society?

When those skills are missing or limited, dogs lose something important.

They lose relationships.

They lose opportunities for play, companionship, communication, learning, negotiation, and all the tiny social experiences that make up a life shared with others of their own species.

For an intensely social animal, I think that matters enormously.

But humans lose something too.

The skills dogs practise within relationships with other dogs do not exist in isolation. Many of them are also foundations for training, cooperation, and successful life within human society.

That does not mean that a socially fluent dog will automatically be perfectly trained, or that a dog with limited canine social skills cannot become an extraordinary companion. Bramble herself rather spectacularly disproves that.

It means that these different areas of development can support one another.

A richer social education can provide stronger foundations from which everything else can be taught.

And that makes the way we currently approach canine social behaviour particularly frustrating.

We restrict interactions because we are frightened of poor social skills.

Dogs receive fewer opportunities to develop those skills.

Their communication becomes harder for humans to understand.

We become more frightened of allowing them to communicate.

And the vicious circle continues.

The result is a culture in which a dog can be considered beautifully socialised while having remarkably little social life.

I do not think the answer is to force every dog to interact.

Some dogs genuinely prefer very little canine company. Some have histories that make interaction difficult. Some require careful management, and some individual dogs simply do not like one another.

Social freedom must include the freedom to say no.

But it should also include the opportunity to say yes.

The goal is not to produce dogs who want to greet every dog they see.

It is to give them the education and opportunities that allow them to make those choices competently.

Because the benefits of social fluency do not stop at dog-to-dog interactions. They reach into the complicated human world in which we ask dogs to live.

And if, as a society, we want dogs who can be trusted with greater freedom, then helping them develop those skills seems an extraordinarily sensible place to start.

What Can We Do?

Unlike many of the welfare issues I write about, this one does not require new legislation, government intervention, or years of campaigning before anything can change.

The dog community can begin changing it today.

If enough of us start valuing canine social development as highly as we value physical health and early training, breeders will have to start valuing it too. Prospective guardians have considerably more power here than we might realise.

We can start asking different questions.

Not simply, “When can I collect my puppy?”

But, “How long are you prepared to keep the puppy with their family so they can continue their social education?”

And if the answer is eight weeks, we can ask for longer.

If a breeder is unwilling to provide that, we can go elsewhere.

If enough prospective guardians begin asking for puppies who have been allowed more time to develop socially within their families, supply will eventually have to respond to demand. Breeders will have an incentive to keep puppies longer, to pay greater attention to their social development, and hopefully, in time, to become better at recognising when individual puppies are socially ready to leave.

Until we understand canine social development better, I do not think anyone can confidently claim to know the perfect age for every puppy, every breed, or every circumstance.

But uncertainty about the optimum should not be confused with uncertainty about whether eight weeks is enough.

I do not believe it is.

Based on everything I have observed so far, I would currently recommend aiming for at least fourteen weeks, and longer where the puppy still appears to be benefiting from remaining within the family.

I am not claiming fourteen weeks is a scientifically established magic number. It isn’t. It is my best practical recommendation in the absence of the research I would like to see.

I would like breeders, behaviourists, veterinarians and researchers to start paying much more attention to social readiness itself.

What does it look like?

How does it develop?

Does the optimum period vary according to breed, size, litter composition, family structure or individual puppy?

How can breeders learn to assess it?

Those questions deserve proper investigation. In the meantime, however, I would much rather see puppies given several additional weeks of social education than continue treating eight weeks as an automatic collection date simply because that is what we have traditionally done.

But keeping puppies with their families longer is only the first change.

Our responsibility does not end when puppies finally leave home.

We also need to reconsider the way we think about dogs’ relationships with one another.

For generations we have invested enormous time and effort into improving the relationship between dogs and humans. We have become remarkably good at teaching dogs to focus on us, work with us, and ignore other dogs when necessary.

Those are valuable skills. I am certainly not suggesting we abandon them.

Dogs are one of the most intensely social species on Earth. They are capable of forming deep, lifelong emotional bonds not only with one another but with an entirely different species. If they are capable of relationships that profound with us, why would we assume that rich, meaningful relationships with other dogs are somehow optional?

Perhaps we have simply overlooked them.

In fact, I think allowing dogs a richer social life can make those skills easier rather than harder.

A dog who knows that interaction with other dogs is something they regularly get to enjoy does not necessarily have to treat every passing dog as a rare opportunity that must be seized immediately. There is an enormous difference between I am never allowed to do this and I am allowed to do this, but not right now.

The ability to ignore another dog when necessary is valuable.

So is having other dogs worth ignoring them for now rather than forever.

These are not competing goals.

They reinforce one another.

A richer canine social education supports richer relationships with humans. Stronger foundations for learning support better training. Better social skills support greater trust. Greater trust makes greater freedom possible.

As somebody who regularly argues that dogs deserve more freedom, fewer unnecessary restrictions, and greater opportunities simply to be dogs, I think that last point matters enormously.

If we want dogs to enjoy greater freedom within human society, we need dogs who are better equipped to use that freedom responsibly.

Better social skills will not solve every behavioural problem, but they can leave dogs better equipped to navigate both canine and human society.

Everybody benefits.

And the second part of this change is something individual guardians can begin working on immediately too.

We can give dogs regular opportunities to spend time with compatible dogs, to build genuine friendships, communicate, make mistakes, resolve disagreements and continue learning from one another. We can arrange play dates and provide safe spaces where dogs have enough time and freedom to communicate properly.

We can also become better at understanding what they are saying.

That last part matters, because asking people to interfere less with canine communication comes with a responsibility. I am not suggesting that people simply throw dogs together and hope for the best. Knowing when to allow a conversation to continue and when a dog genuinely needs help requires us to become better at recognising canine communication ourselves.

That is too important, and too complicated, to squeeze into the end of this article.

So that is where the next article in this series will go.

I want to look much more closely at what dogs are actually saying to one another: how play differs from conflict, what consent and withdrawal can look like, how dogs ask for space, what corrections mean, how to recognise when one dog has had enough, how to choose appropriate canine company, and how to create opportunities for dogs to practise these skills without simply leaving them to fend for themselves.

Because if dogs learn dog from dogs, perhaps the next step is for us to learn a little more dog ourselves.

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By Monday morning, I had a plan.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a particularly ambitious plan. I wasn’t asking for eight uninterrupted hours of sleep, a shower and breakfast in bed. At this point, three hours of unconsciousness sounded positively decadent.

Oli was coming over so I could teach him The System.

And by now, there really was a system.

Eight bottle-fed newborn puppies meant formula to mix, temperatures to check, bottles to prepare, puppies to feed, puppies to toilet, equipment to clean, warming pads to keep warm and eight tiny bodies to monitor.

Then you started again.

The hope was that if I could teach Oli to do all of that safely, he could take over for perhaps four hours and I could get three hours of actual sleep.

More importantly, I was beginning to worry about what not sleeping was doing to my judgement.

I didn’t want to be asleep.

The last thing I wanted was to surrender consciousness and be separated from the puppies for three hours. I wanted to be right there, watching them.

What I desperately wanted was a clear head again.

I was frightened that I was becoming too tired to tell the difference between something genuinely being wrong and an exhausted brain finding danger in every strange noise a newborn puppy made.

Before things started to go wrong, though, I actually felt fairly confident.

I’d spent the previous day learning this strange new skill myself. Now I knew how to mix the formula, how to check its temperature properly with a thermometer, how to hold and feed the puppies, how to toilet them afterwards and how to keep the whole operation moving.

Now I needed to teach somebody else.

And it was lovely seeing Oli with them.

Pączek was the puppy we’d been imagining might eventually become part of his family. Watching him learning to care for her and her siblings wasn’t just practical. There was something rather wonderful about it.

Unfortunately, Oli and I both have ADHD and share a slightly optimistic relationship with the passage of time.

Somehow, despite spending hours on it, time ran out.

Oli had to go home before either of us was confident enough for me to leave him solely responsible for the puppies.

So much for my three hours’ sleep.

The Milk Bar is Finally Fully Closed

There was one significant improvement that Monday.

Bramble’s new surgical suit arrived.

Readers of the previous Pupdate may remember the increasingly ridiculous battle involving Bramble’s ancient puppy-sized surgical vest, two exposed nipples and eight determined little milk-seeking missiles.

The properly fitting version finally meant the Milk Bar really was fully closed.

Thank fuck.

Stopping the puppies from drinking Bramble’s milk had been practically a full-time job in itself. Now she could finally lie with her babies without me constantly having to detach determined little customers from her nipples.

That didn’t mean I could stop watching them.

Not remotely.

I was constantly counting.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Okay.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight.

Okay.

One-two-three-four-five-six...

Where’s seven?

I’d immediately start groping around underneath Bramble.

Lift a leg.

Bramble would growl at me.

Feel around behind her.

And there you are.

One perfectly content puppy, tucked into some apparently impossible little pocket beneath her thigh.

Okay.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight.

All present.

Other times I’d hear an urgent little squeal and immediately start feeling around behind or beneath her, gently but quickly retrieving whichever puppy was complaining.

There were guardrails around the whelping pen for a reason, but they weren’t infallible.

And with puppies now squirming and crawling around increasingly enthusiastically, counting to eight had become something I did approximately nine million times a day.

The bakery itself was becoming increasingly mobile.

Beignet and Zeppole seemed particularly committed to training for the Pup Olympics, spending considerably more time crawling around than some of their siblings.

Andagi and Pączek weren’t far behind.

Even Bombolone and Churro were getting about.

Although you wouldn’t necessarily have known it from watching Churro.

I’d look over and there he’d be, asleep on his back beside a warming pad.

Feed somebody.

Toilet somebody.

Make another bottle.

Look back.

Churro was now at the opposite end of the whelping pen.

On his back.

Asleep.

Clearly some locomotion had occurred.

I simply never seemed to witness it.

The peaceful little dude we’d already come to know was apparently conducting his athletic training strictly between naps.

Their ears were changing too. They were beginning to open and flop, and I wondered whether they might be starting to hear us.

They were still tiny, helpless newborns.

But every day there seemed to be something new.

And Bramble was changing the way she interacted with them too.

I became particularly conscious that day of how much attention she was giving tiny Pączek.

She would pick her up and move her closer to herself.

Sometimes she’d pick her up and bring her to me.

Her carrying technique wasn’t always elegant.

Once she appeared to have Pączek by the head.

Another time, a leg.

Pączek would make her opinion of these arrangements extremely clear.

Sometimes Bramble would carry her onto the sofa, put her down and curl herself around her.

Which was adorable.

Except now I had a tiny puppy on a sofa who might crawl off the edge, disappear into the internal workings of the furniture, or simply be picked up and rearranged by her mother again.

I didn’t want to interfere unnecessarily with Bramble mothering her own babies.

I also didn’t particularly want Pączek disappearing inside my sofa.

So eventually I’d put her back in the pen.

Or give her another little while riding around in my boobs, warm and safely beyond Bramble’s enthusiastic rearranging.

I assumed Bramble might simply be paying extra attention to her because she was the runt.

I couldn’t know.

But Pączek wasn’t the only puppy Bramble seemed particularly concerned with.

She brought Mandazi to me too.

Several times.

And Mandazi was already the puppy I was watching particularly closely.

Mandazi

The previous night’s weigh-in had been overwhelmingly reassuring.

Seven puppies had gained between 32 and 62 grams.

Mandazi had gained one.

One gram was still technically a gain, and I knew a number that tiny could change depending on whether a puppy had just eaten, weed or pooed.

He was warm.

He was feeding.

He slept with his siblings.

So I’d told myself I couldn’t turn every tiny irregularity into a catastrophe.

But I was watching him.

He’d always seemed more sedate than some of the others. He did move and crawl. I have videos of him doing it.

But I also remember looking at him that Monday and thinking he seemed a little skinny.

Not quite the same shape as the others somehow.

Then, late that morning, something happened that frightened the life out of me.

Mandazi was in the whelping pen with Bramble and his siblings when he suddenly sneezed.

Formula came out of his nose.

Not a bubble.

Not a tiny dribble.

A stream of liquid.

And he hadn’t even been feeding at the time.

I immediately went into emergency mode.

I followed advice I’d previously been given for clearing fluid from a puppy, supporting his head and performing a movement a little like flicking down a thermometer.

I now know that technique is outdated and isn’t recommended.

At the time, I was trying to do absolutely anything I knew that might help him.

Then I used the aspirator bulb.

Then, because I was frightened I hadn’t done enough, I got the other type of aspirator and tried that too.

When I’d done everything I could think of, I started listening to their lungs through their backs.

I thought I could hear a crackle in Mandazi’s lungs.

And then there was Pączek.

She’d made several horrible little wet-sounding coughs that day.

I listened to her lungs too.

Was that a little pop?

Was it nothing?

Was I hearing things because I was terrified?

Was something wrong with both of them?

I didn’t know.

So I took them to the vet.

They’re Fine

This time I went to my local practice in Devizes.

I explained what had happened with Mandazi, including the amount of formula that had come from his nose and the fact that he hadn’t been feeding when it happened.

I explained what I’d done afterwards.

And I asked the vet to examine Pączek too because of the noises I’d heard from her.

He listened to their hearts and lungs and examined them.

They looked healthy.

He couldn’t hear anything wrong with their breathing.

He couldn’t hear anything wrong with their hearts.

He agreed that what I’d described sounded like Mandazi had aspirated some formula and that the amount coming from his nose was concerning.

He explained that the flicking technique I’d used was outdated and wasn’t ideal, but reassured me that Mandazi seemed fine now.

He even said that, although the technique wasn’t recommended, what I’d done may have saved his life.

I went home enormously relieved.

Thank Gods.

I’d frightened myself again.

This was becoming the battle inside my head.

Something’s wrong.

You’re exhausted and hypervigilant. Stop panicking.

But what if something really is wrong?

You’ve taken them to a vet. The vet says they’re fine.

See? You’re worrying too much.

I desperately needed to trust my instincts because these puppies depended on me noticing when something wasn’t right.

But I also desperately needed to recognise that I’d barely slept and couldn’t treat every cough, squeak and strange movement as a catastrophe.

The vet had examined them.

Mandazi was okay.

Pączek was okay.

I could calm down.

So I went home and carried on.

Mandazi

A couple of hours later, I looked into the pen.

Mandazi was very still.

I picked him up.

I couldn’t hear him breathing.

I couldn’t hear a heartbeat.

And then I realised he wasn’t as warm as the others.

Bramble watched me examining him.

I don’t know what she understood before that moment. I don’t know exactly what dogs understand about death, and I don’t want to put thoughts into her head that I cannot possibly know were there.

But she watched.

And she sniffed the little lifeless body in my hands.

Mandazi was gone.

I was alone.

And I was devastated.

Of all eight puppies, Pączek and Mandazi were probably the two I’d bonded with most by then.

Not because I’d chosen favourites.

They’d simply needed more individual attention.

I’d spent so much time the previous day carrying them against my skin, including walking around with tiny puppies tucked inside my bra to keep them warm.

And Mandazi was Mandazi.

Our impossible eighth puppy.

The tiny black baby Oli had somehow discovered upstairs in my floordrobe after we’d all been absolutely certain the litter was complete.

I’d rushed him to a vet.

I’d done everything I knew how to do.

I’d been told he was okay.

And now he was dead.

I was heartbroken.

I was angry with the vet for telling me he was fine.

I was angry with myself for allowing myself to believe it.

And almost immediately that terrible pendulum inside my head swung the other way.

I hadn’t been worrying too much.

I hadn’t been paranoid.

Something had been wrong.

So why had I tried to convince myself otherwise?

Why hadn’t I trusted myself?

Had I missed something?

What else was I missing?

And then there were seven other puppies who still needed feeding.

There wasn’t time to collapse.

A Little Place for Mandazi

I found a box for him.

I put a bottle inside with him and chose a pretty semiprecious stone whose colour somehow made me think of Mandazi.

I can’t explain that much better than that. It was a synaesthetic sort of association.

It simply felt like his.

I added some herbal incense and a few little things that felt appropriate as burial gifts.

There wasn’t a prescribed Pagan or Buddhist ritual I was following.

I wasn’t trying to perform the “correct” ceremony from either part of my spiritual practice.

Our baby had died.

This was simply what felt right.

I put his little box on my altar, lit a candle and some incense, and gave him a place there while I went back to caring for his brothers and sisters.

Because they still needed me.

Seven

By now I was becoming seriously concerned about sleep.

I still didn’t want to sleep.

I wanted to stay with the puppies. I wanted to watch them and feed them and know immediately if anything changed.

What I wanted was the clear, rested brain I needed to do those things properly.

But there was no way to get that without eventually surrendering a few hours of consciousness.

And I knew that if I continued much longer, my body was eventually going to make that decision for me.

I’d tried to train Oli so somebody else could safely take over.

We’d run out of time.

I still wasn’t comfortable leaving the puppies solely in his care, and that meant I still couldn’t sleep.

So I necked energy drinks and carried on.

Formula.

Temperature.

Bottle.

Feed.

Toilet.

Warm.

Count.

Listen.

Watch Bramble.

Check the warming pads.

Microwave another.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Okay.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven.

Okay.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven...

Where’s eight?

Oh shit.

There wasn’t an eight anymore.

...

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven.

Okay.

Carry on.

At midnight, it was time for the weigh-in.

And after everything that had happened that day, I desperately needed some good news.

Zeppole: 384g. Up 36g.

Malasada: 406g. Up 42g.

Bombolone: 436g. Up 32g.

Andagi: 383g. Up 49g.

Churro: 436g. Up 36g.

Pączek: 269g. Up 25g.

Beignet: 366g. Up 26g.

Every single one had gained weight.

And little Andagi had absolutely smashed it.

Forty-nine grams.

More than any of her brothers and sisters.

She was still considerably smaller than great big Churro. He weighed 436 grams to her 383.

But that day Churro had gained 36 grams.

Andagi had gained 49.

Malasada, the next biggest gainer, had managed 42.

My tiny Japanese competitive eater had officially topped the day’s leaderboard.

And this time it wasn’t merely Nana projecting a personality onto a newborn puppy.

I had receipts.

Or at least scales.

Seven growing puppies.

Seven reassuring numbers.

Mandazi was still on the altar.

My heart was broken.

I was frightened, grieving and desperately in need of the clear head that only sleep could give me.

But his seven brothers and sisters were warm.

They were fed.

They were gaining weight.

For that night, that was enough.

Go gently into your next adventure, little one.

You were so very loved in this life.

May you know even more love in the next.

I went on holiday.

But I’d already been thinking and writing a great deal about dogs, socialisation, and the ever-growing list of places and circumstances in which they’re expected to be restrained, controlled, separated or simply excluded.

And Brean turned out to be an interesting place from which to look at that question.

During the summer, dogs are banned or restricted on huge stretches of British coastline. Brean is different. Dogs are welcome. Many are off lead. On the busiest day, you could stand on the beach and see perhaps fourteen or fifteen dogs at once, with more constantly arriving and disappearing into the distance.

Over the course of four days, that meant hundreds of dogs sharing the same stretch of beach.

In other words, if giving dogs that much freedom really does create the problems people fear, this ought to be an excellent place to find them.

Listen to the language surrounding dog controls and the same concerns appear again and again.

Dogs fouling where they shouldn’t. Guardians failing to clean up after them. Persistent barking. Dogs bothering people. Dogs approaching other dogs when they shouldn’t. Poor recall. Fearful or aggressive behaviour. Resource guarding. Dogs being insufficiently supervised or controlled. Dogs fighting. Dogs biting people.

And presumably, at the other end of the scale, we’d hope to find the things responsible dog guardians are constantly told they should be aiming for.

Dogs who greet appropriately. Dogs who communicate clearly. Dogs who listen when another dog says no. Dogs who play successfully. Dogs who share space and resources without conflict. Dogs who come back when called.

I wasn’t carrying a clipboard. There was no pre-designed data sheet, no controlled observation period and certainly no carefully constructed methodology. I was on holiday with Robert, Bramble and Doughnut, not lurking behind a windbreak with a stopwatch and a grant from the Department of Canine Bottom Sniffing.

The numbers in this article are therefore observations and retrospective estimates, not scientific data.

But as the encounters accumulated, a pattern became increasingly difficult to ignore.

Because after spending four days surrounded by exactly the kind of freely moving dogs that so much regulation is designed to protect the public from, the behaviours causing the most trouble weren’t quite the ones I’d been told to look for.

This is what happened.

Day One: An Unexpectedly Promising Start

We arrived at Brean Beach in the afternoon after spending most of the morning packing and travelling.

Rather than heading straight into the beach car park, we pulled into the large grassy field on the opposite side of the road. It was a good place to stop for the afternoon, plenty of open space, the beach just across the road, and room for the dogs to stretch their legs after the journey.

There was only one other camper van in the field.

And it came equipped with two glorious golden-tan Spaniels.

They were already outside, running around together, when we arrived.

Doughnut saw them.

The Spaniels saw Doughnut.

And within moments, my entirely accidental observations of Brean’s canine social life had begun.

Doughnut approached in a curve, play-bowed, and the three of them fell almost immediately into a running game.

No drama. No uncertainty. No growling or rough-and-tumble on this occasion. Just three dogs racing around in great sweeping circles, changing direction, chasing and being chased.

And the Spaniels deserve their credit here.

Their recall was about to prove spectacularly unsuccessful, but their canine social skills were excellent. All three dogs appeared perfectly capable of reading one another. Nobody was overwhelmed. Nobody needed rescuing. Nobody was pestering a dog who wanted to disengage.

It was simply beautiful, fluent dog play.

Then the whistles started.

The Spaniels ignored them.

More whistles.

Still playing.

Then came the clickers. (strange choice, that’s not how I thought clickers were normaly used)

Still playing.

Eventually their names were being called.

The Spaniels remained deeply committed to the position that none of this had anything whatsoever to do with them.

Their guardians were becoming increasingly frustrated.

Eventually I thought I’d better remove the obvious competing attraction, so I called Doughnut.

Doughnut came back.

The Spaniels were collected and taken back to their van.

Now, there was a very tempting conclusion available to me.

Doughnut gets regular opportunities to interact and play with other dogs. Perhaps being called away from a game isn’t particularly devastating to him because another opportunity will come along. Perhaps, if these Spaniels didn’t often get opportunities like this, playing with a new dog was simply far more valuable at that moment than anything their humans could offer.

I certainly wondered about it.

But that’s all it can honestly be: a possibility.

I knew Doughnut’s history. I knew nothing about theirs.

There could have been any number of reasons why two otherwise apparently well-trained dogs suddenly developed profound hearing loss.

What I could say was much simpler.

Three dogs met.

All three displayed excellent social behaviour.

All three wanted to play.

The play was reciprocal and apparently enjoyable.

And the humans ended it.

And then the Spaniels disappeared

At first, I didn’t think very much of their being taken back to the van.

If your dogs have just spectacularly ignored whistles, clickers and repeated calls because they’ve found something more interesting, it’s entirely understandable that you might want to regain control of the situation.

What became striking was what happened afterwards.

Or rather, what didn’t.

Their camper van remained there.

Their guardians remained there.

We remained there.

Doughnut and Bramble remained there.

But for the rest of that afternoon, I never saw those two Spaniels out in the field again.

We heard them bark from the van once or twice. But the dogs who had been happily running around outside before we arrived, and who had just demonstrated perfectly good social behaviour with Doughnut, did not reappear.

I don’t know why.

Perhaps their guardians no longer trusted their recall while another dog was nearby. Perhaps they exercised them somewhere else. Perhaps there was some completely unrelated reason I couldn’t see.

And perhaps they specifically didn’t want another round of the game we’d just witnessed.

I can’t know.

But something about the situation had changed.

When we arrived, two Spaniels were running freely in a grassy field.

They met Doughnut and played beautifully.

Their guardians tried repeatedly to recall them.

The dogs didn’t come.

The play ended.

And I never saw them outside again.

For the first afternoon of an entirely accidental field study, it was a surprisingly neat little result.

The dogs had behaved beautifully with one another.

The problem we’d encountered wasn’t that they couldn’t socialise.

It was that, once they did, the socialising wasn’t allowed to continue.

Day Two: Hundreds of Dogs and Nobody to Play With

The next morning we woke in the beachside car park.

The plan for the day was simple. We were going to spend it on the beach.

Before Robert was up and ready, I took Bramble and Doughnut for a walk.

It was still relatively early and the beach wasn’t particularly busy yet, but over the course of roughly an hour I’d estimate Doughnut made around ten attempts to interact or communicate with other dogs.

Most were completely unremarkable.

Some dogs ignored him. Some exchanged a brief greeting and moved on. Some were on leads and their guardians clearly weren’t comfortable with him approaching, so I called him away.

There was no sustained play.

But there was one encounter that was considerably more memorable.

The Rottweiler

We were heading down the concrete ramp towards the beach when Doughnut suddenly noticed a Rottweiler nearby.

He hadn’t seen him coming.

Doughnut startled.

There was a sudden movement towards the other dog and some barking. It wasn’t Doughnut’s finest piece of social communication.

But almost immediately, he seemed to turn his own startled response into a play bow.

The Rottweiler himself appeared remarkably unconcerned.

He didn’t bark. He didn’t growl. He didn’t respond aggressively. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t interpreted Doughnut’s behaviour as an attack at all.

Unfortunately, he never really got the opportunity to respond.

His guardian pulled him sharply away.

Then she began shouting about why Doughnut wasn’t on a lead.

I tried to explain that there had been no attack and that Doughnut had moved into a play bow, but this wasn’t really a conversation.

She continued shouting.

I walked away.

She continued shouting.

I kept walking.

She continued shouting.

Eventually I got far enough away that her voice simply faded into the distance.

It was an interesting start to the day.

Doughnut’s approach had been clumsy. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Had the Rottweiler been a more reactive dog, being suddenly startled like that could potentially have produced a very different interaction.

But it hadn’t.

One dog had startled, barked and then play-bowed.

The other dog had apparently taken no offence whatsoever.

The only sustained aggression I observed came from one of the humans.

Setting up camp

Once Robert was up, we gathered our things and headed down to the beach properly.

Our chosen spot was almost directly in front of where the van was parked, but getting there sensibly involved walking roughly 200 metres to the ramp and then another 200 metres back along the sand.

The alternative was crossing the large boulders between the car park and the beach.

I wasn’t doing that.

Robert and Bramble, however, apparently considered the signs advising people not to climb on the rocks to be more of a philosophical suggestion.

Bramble, who cannot read and is approximately 40 percent mountain goat, had no objections whatsoever.

So we carried the first load the sensible way, I settled in with Doughnut and started making camp, and Robert and Bramble made several much shorter trips across the rocks to collect the remaining bits and pieces.

We put up our little shelter, spread out a rug, got the dogs’ water sorted and established ourselves for the day.

And then I started noticing just how many dogs there were.

At the busiest points, I’d estimate you could stand up and see perhaps fourteen or fifteen dogs at any one time.

But those weren’t the same fourteen or fifteen dogs.

People were constantly arriving, leaving, walking past, heading towards the sea and disappearing along the beach.

Over an entire day, there must have been hundreds.

Surely, somewhere amongst all those dogs, Doughnut was going to find someone who wanted to play.

The dogs next door

Two groups with dogs were camped reasonably close to us.

One had two dogs who appeared to live together.

One of their human was playing fetch with them.

What struck me was how little the dogs appeared to play with each other while I was watching.

If Robert throws a ball for Bramble and Doughnut, there are really three games happening simultaneously.

There is the human game of fetch.

There is Bramble’s passionate conviction that the purpose of existence is to retrieve the ball as quickly and efficiently as possible.

And there is Doughnut’s equally passionate conviction that the purpose of existence is if he dosen’t get to the ball 1st, to mug his wife on the return journey.

He’ll tackle her for the toy. She’ll tease him with it. He’ll play keep-away. They chase and body-barge and turn the fetch game into another game between themselves.

These two dogs didn’t do that.

During the time I observed them, they seemed to be playing two separate games of fetch with the same human.

Both chased the toy. One returned with it. The other returned without it.

Then the human threw it again.

Doughnut, naturally, kept trying to join in.

He would run alongside them as they chased the toy. He never stole it. He just seemed delighted to have discovered what looked like a potential group activity.

One of the two dogs showed particular interest in him.

The dog would approach, appear friendly, get reasonably close, and seem as though there was an urge to interact, but without quite knowing what to do next.

Doughnut would offer social signals and invitations to play.

Nothing really developed.

I don’t know why.

I don’t know those dogs, I don’t know their history, and I only know what I saw during those hours on that beach.

But I heard their humans discussing Doughnut and saying that they thought their dogs were frightened of him.

That mattered.

I didn’t observe what I would have interpreted as clear fearful behaviour, but their guardians believed their dogs were uncomfortable. They hadn’t actually asked me to remove Doughnut, but once I realised that his repeated attempts to join their game were worrying them, I clipped him up.

And for a considerable part of the day, while we were sitting at camp and those dogs were playing nearby, Doughnut remained tethered.

Not continuously.

We’d unclip him to take him for walks or go down to the sea and play fetch away from them. But when we returned to camp and those dogs were playing nearby, I prevented him from repeatedly trying to join them.

I think that distinction matters.

I have strong opinions about dogs being allowed suitable freedom and opportunities to socialise.

That doesn’t mean my dog gets to impose himself on somebody else’s dog because I disagree with their interpretation of the situation.

If another guardian genuinely believes my dog is frightening theirs, I’m not going to insist upon conducting an impromptu behavioural demonstration until they change their mind.

So Doughnut lost some of his freedom for a while.

The dogs continued playing fetch.

Separately.

“Oh, have you made a friend?”

As the day went on, I found myself developing a sort of running commentary designed primarily for other humans.

Whenever another dog approached Doughnut, I’d call out cheerfully:

“Oh, have you made a friend?”

It wasn’t really for Doughnut.

It was for the person fifty feet behind the approaching dog who had just noticed what was happening and was beginning to look concerned.

It meant:

Your dog is welcome. Mine is friendly. I am not angry that your dog has approached us. Nobody needs to panic.

If another dog joined our game of fetch, I’d say they were welcome to play.

If a dog approached our water bowl, I’d immediately tell the guardian that our dogs were happy to share.

One dog wandered over and drank from it and was promptly told off by their human.

I quickly reassured them that it was fine.

Nobody was guarding the water.

Nobody cared.

The dog was thirsty.

Drink away.

When people apologised because their dogs barked, I started replying with some variation of:

“Oh, you’re all right. You’re just talking, aren’t you?”

Sometimes people apologised simply because their dog had come over to say hello.

The sheer frequency of the apologies became part of what I was noticing.

These weren’t people allowing their dogs to rampage unchecked while everyone else suffered.

Quite the opposite.

Again and again, people seemed worried that perfectly ordinary canine behaviour might be considered unacceptable by the humans around them.

And increasingly, I found myself trying to signal permission.

Your dog can bark.

Your dog can say hello.

Your dog can drink the water.

Your dog can chase the ball.

Your dog can play with mine.

It’s all right.

The family further along the beach

Another family camped nearby had a dog who very clearly kept wanting to interact with Doughnut.

The family themselves were perfectly pleasant. At one point Doughnut wandered over and received fuss from them. Robert chatted with them while getting ice creams.

There was no hostility towards us and no obvious dislike of Doughnut.

Their dog and Doughnut repeatedly approached one another.

They’d curve towards each other. They’d get close. They’d sniff. Sometimes they seemed right on the verge of doing something more.

And then the other dog would be recalled.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I don’t know why.

Perhaps there was something about their dog that I didn’t know. Perhaps play tended to escalate. Perhaps the recall was part of training. Perhaps they simply didn’t want their dog playing with unfamiliar dogs.

They didn’t owe me an explanation.

But from Doughnut’s point of view, the pattern was remarkably consistent.

Potential playmate appears.

Potential playmate approaches.

Potential playmate is removed.

Fetch, interrupted

It happened with passing dogs too.

Robert loves throwing toys into the sea for Bramble and Doughnut.

Occasionally another dog would spot the game and run over to join in.

And frequently, almost as soon as their guardian realised what was happening, the dog would be recalled.

Again, I can understand some of the anxiety.

Balls can be resources.

Some dogs guard them.

If you don’t know my dogs, you don’t know whether your dog grabbing their toy is going to start a fight.

But mine don’t care.

Other dogs have stolen their balls before. Bramble and Doughnut generally look at me as though I have failed administratively and expect me to retrieve their property.

So whenever possible, I started announcing that too.

“They’re happy to share!”

Another little piece of human translation.

Another attempt to keep a canine interaction alive long enough to see what the dogs themselves actually wanted to do with it.

The Staffie

One dog did get a proper chance.

A Staffie met Doughnut and the two of them absolutely hit it off.

This wasn’t gentle little sniffing and trotting.

They wanted to wrestle.

They play-bowed. They chased. They body-barged. They mouthed. They rolled around together. They swapped roles. They came apart and went back in.

Doughnut was delighted.

So was the Staffie.

This went on for considerably longer than most of the interactions I’d seen that day.

Then I noticed a man running towards us.

I wasn’t initially sure why.

He reached the dogs, grabbed the Staffie and hit him hard around the head.

I was horrified.

I tried to say that they were only playing, but the interaction was over.

I want to be completely explicit here because I don’t want the description mistaken for neutrality.

I do not approve of physically striking dogs.

This wasn’t a tiny tap or an absent-minded correction. He hit his dog hard enough that I found it genuinely upsetting to witness.

I also can’t know exactly what the man believed he was punishing.

Perhaps he thought the play was a fight.

Perhaps he had been trying to recall his dog and I hadn’t heard him, and the punishment was for ignoring the recall.

I don’t know.

What I do know is what I had been watching immediately beforehand.

Two dogs playing.

And once again, the canine interaction ended because a human ended it.

Bramble, meanwhile

Bramble was having a rather different social experience from Doughnut.

Almost every dog interested in Doughnut was likely to investigate her too. She was perfectly capable of exchanging a polite greeting, but that was generally as far as she wanted things to go.

If another dog tried to turn the greeting into something more complicated, Bramble’s preferred strategy was usually avoidance.

She’d turn away. Disengage. Come back towards me. Wander off and do something else.

Essentially: Hello. Yes, lovely to meet you. No, I don’t want to play. Thank you.

If another dog’s investigations became rather too intimate, however, she could be considerably clearer.

An overenthusiastic sniff around her rear end might earn a growl. A nose getting too close while chasing the same ball might get an air snap.

And that was generally all it took.

These communications of hers haven’t ever developed into fights. The other dog backs off or gave her more space, and everyone carries on with their day.

Bramble wasn’t demonstrating that successful canine socialisation means wanting to socialise with everybody.

Quite the opposite.

She was demonstrating that dogs also need to be able to decline an interaction, and for another dog to understand what that means.

What was missing

By the end of the day, I was genuinely astonished.

We had spent virtually an entire day on a dog-friendly beach.

At busy periods there were perhaps fourteen or fifteen dogs visible at once. Across all those hours, with dogs continually arriving and leaving, Doughnut must have encountered or attempted to communicate with dogs well into three figures, although there is no honest way for me to reconstruct an exact number retrospectively.

There had been greetings.

There had been play bows.

There had been dogs joining games of fetch.

There had been dogs approaching our camp.

There had been dogs sharing water.

There had been dogs who wanted nothing to do with Doughnut.

There had been dogs who appeared interested but socially uncertain.

There had been dogs who very clearly wanted to play.

And yet, after an entire day surrounded by hundreds of dogs, Doughnut had not managed one sustained play session that was simply allowed to run until the dogs themselves naturally finished it.

The closest he came was the Staffie.

That ended with the Staffie being hit.

Hundreds of dogs had shared that beach throughout the day.

Finding dogs who wanted to socialise hadn’t been difficult.

Finding humans willing to let them was another matter.

Day Three: When Communication Looks Like Aggression

The following day was quieter.

We spent most of it back in the grassy field where we had parked on the first afternoon, rather than setting up camp on the beach again.

Dogs came through the field occasionally, but there was nothing particularly remarkable about those encounters. Most guardians simply kept their dogs at enough distance that no interaction developed.

We did, however, take several walks along the beach.

And this was the day when another pattern became particularly difficult to miss.

Dogs were communicating with each other.

Humans kept thinking they were fighting.

The miniature poodle

One of the first memorable encounters was barely an encounter at all.

Robert had gone into the beach shop while I waited with Bramble and Doughnut at the top of the concrete ramp.

I was throwing the ball down onto the sand for them.

Doughnut retrieved it and was trotting back towards me with the ball in his mouth when he passed a woman walking a miniature poodle.

He wasn’t approaching the poodle.

He wasn’t trying to greet the poodle.

He wasn’t even particularly interested in the poodle.

He had his ball and was heading back to me.

The woman saw him coming, bent down, picked up her dog and held her protectively against her chest.

Doughnut trotted past.

Only once he was safely halfway up the ramp did she put her dog back down.

I found it funny.

There are videos online of people seeing someone pick up their tiny dog as a Cane Corso approaches, so the Cane Corso’s guardian solemnly picks up their enormous dog too.

Doughnut is only just over twenty kilos, but he does have Cane Corso ancestry and the brindle colouring to go with it.

I told Robert that Doughnut had apparently just undergone a Cane Corso rite of passage.

Someone had picked up a small dog because he walked past.

Funny, yes.

But also rather sad for the poodle.

Because nothing had actually happened.

The Alsatian

Later we met a young Alsatian.

The Alsatian play-bowed at Doughnut and barked.

Doughnut was on the lead and immediately jerked forward, apparently very keen to accept the invitation.

The Alsatian’s guardian reacted as though something had gone terribly wrong.

She appeared genuinely frightened and extremely distressed by her dog’s behaviour.

From what I observed, however, her dog had done something completely ordinary.

Play bow.

Excited bark.

Invitation.

Doughnut had understood perfectly.

The human hadn’t.

I tried to reassure her.

They’re communicating. It’s all right. They want to play.

But she was already far too upset for that to make much difference.

Her dog was removed.

Another potential interaction ended.

The Border Collie

Then there was the Border Collie.

This one got slightly further.

The dogs play-bowed first.

Then the Border Collie mounted Doughnut as part of the opening rough-and-tumble. Doughnut twisted around, the two began wrestling and there was growling.

This sounds much longer written down than it actually was.

The whole thing happened in seconds.

Their body language had remained playful. There had been mutual play bows. They were wrestling. The growling I heard was normal play growling.

Then the other guardian intervened.

The moment the interaction became noisy and physical, she apparently believed it had turned nasty.

The dogs were separated.

Again.

And I think this distinction matters enormously.

Growling isn’t automatically aggression.

Mounting isn’t automatically sexual behaviour.

Mouthing isn’t automatically biting.

Chasing isn’t automatically hunting or bullying.

A dog putting their mouth around another dog’s neck does not automatically mean one dog is trying to injure the other.

Context matters.

Sequence matters.

Body language matters.

Role reversal matters.

What happened immediately before and afterwards matters.

Dogs can make an astonishing amount of noise while having an absolutely wonderful time.

And if every interaction is stopped at the first growl, bark, body-barge, mount or open mouth, dogs lose an enormous part of the vocabulary available to them during play.

Corrections are communication too

Bramble provided the quieter version of the same lesson throughout the trip.

She generally wasn’t interested in playing with unfamiliar dogs.

Other dogs would approach.

She’d greet them.

They might try to continue the interaction.

And Bramble would decline.

Sometimes that was simply disengaging.

Sometimes, if another dog got too close or persisted, particularly around her rear end, she might give a warning growl or an air snap.

The message was not subtle.

Give me some space.

And, overwhelmingly, the other dogs did.

They backed off.

Nobody needed to intervene.

Nobody got hurt.

Nobody had to be punished.

One dog communicated a boundary.

The other dog understood it.

Conversation concluded.

This is one of the things that makes human fear of every growl particularly troubling.

A growl can be part of the very system that prevents conflict.

Suppressing every warning doesn’t necessarily create safer dogs.

Sometimes you’re punishing the dog for using the communication that keeps everybody safe.

A beach full of interrupted conversations

Once I started noticing it, it was everywhere.

Dogs would lie down as another dog approached and be warned not to move.

Dogs would begin approaching one another and be recalled.

Dogs would bark and their guardians would apologise.

Dogs would show interest in joining another dog’s game and be stopped.

Some dogs simply weren’t interested in socialising, and that was fine.

Some appeared socially awkward.

Some were beautifully fluent.

Some were clumsy.

Some were exuberant.

Some were cautious.

In other words, they behaved like a population of individuals with different personalities, histories, preferences and social skills.

But so many interactions were being stopped so quickly that the dogs themselves rarely got the opportunity to negotiate those differences.

And this was happening on a dog-friendly beach.

Not in a restaurant.

Not in a children’s playground.

Not in a crowded shopping centre.

Not somewhere dogs were required to remain under close physical control because free interaction would be inappropriate.

This was one of the increasingly rare stretches of British beach where dogs were specifically welcome.

Yet even here, ordinary dog behaviour seemed to make humans profoundly uncomfortable.

Moving to the holiday park

That evening we left the beach side and drove to a nearby holiday park.

We needed an electrical hookup and various camper-van facilities, and the park had a pet-friendly section with a designated dog exercise field almost immediately beside our pitch.

After we arrived, I took Bramble and Doughnut into it.

A man entered with a Yorkie.

The Yorkie saw my dogs and started barking.

My two ignored him completely.

The man looked embarrassed and apologised.

By this point, I had my standard response ready.

“Oh, it’s fine. You’re just talking, aren’t you, little man?”

The Yorkie was on a lead. My dogs weren’t approaching. Nobody was in danger. And, of all possible places, we were standing in the designated dog exercise field.

If a dog can’t bark there, where exactly is he supposed to bark?

But instead of continuing his walk around the field, the man turned around and left.

He had barely made it inside.

Again, I don’t know why.

Perhaps he wanted to let his dog off lead and didn’t feel it was safe with mine there.

Perhaps he knew something about his dog’s behaviour that I didn’t.

Perhaps he simply felt embarrassed.

I hope he found somewhere else suitable for his dog to exercise.

But I couldn’t help thinking about what the Yorkie had actually learned from the interaction.

He saw two unfamiliar dogs.

He barked.

And he was immediately removed from the situation.

By the end of Day Three

By now, the categories I might have expected to matter were becoming almost comically unhelpful.

Dog-on-dog fights: still none.

Dog-on-human aggression: none.

Injuries caused by dogs: none.

Resource-guarding conflicts: none.

Dogs terrorising the beach because irresponsible humans had given them too much freedom: remarkably difficult to find.

Meanwhile I was accumulating an entirely different set of observations.

Play interrupted by humans.

Normal canine communication interpreted as aggression.

Dogs removed from social situations for barking.

Dogs prevented from approaching one another.

Guardians apologising for ordinary dog behaviour.

And increasingly, dogs being prevented from practising precisely the social skills humans complain that dogs don’t have.

The problem emerging from Brean wasn’t that dogs had been given so much freedom that canine society had descended into chaos.

It was beginning to look rather more like the opposite.

Day Four: The Dogs Finally Get Their Turn

Our final morning at the holiday park started badly.

We were packing up the van and getting ready to leave. I was sitting outside waiting for my morning painkillers to kick in while Robert dealt with various camper-van chores.

The previous evening, a woman had walked past our pitch with a HUGE Dogue de Bordeaux.

She’d stopped briefly to compliment how well behaved Bramble and Doughnut were off lead and mentioned that she couldn’t trust her own dog with that sort of freedom.

The dogs hadn’t interacted.

The following morning, she and the Dogue de Bordeaux passed us again.

This time, Doughnut noticed them.

The Dogue de Bordeaux

They appeared suddenly from behind some bushes, already quite close to our pitch.

Doughnut bounced towards them, barking.

It wasn’t his best approach.

And unlike some of the encounters I’d watched over the previous few days, I can’t confidently tell you exactly what Doughnut meant by it.

At one end of the spectrum, he might simply have been excited to see another dog and attempting to initiate an interaction extremely badly.

At the other, he may have been guarding our little camp and telling an unfamiliar dog who had suddenly appeared close to it to move away.

There may have been elements of both.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that the behaviour frightened the woman.

She screamed.

I immediately called Doughnut back and he came.

The Dogue de Bordeaux didn’t attack him. He didn’t bark or lunge. From what Robert and I could tell, he seemed mostly confused and may have backed away a couple of steps.

But Doughnut had frightened his guardian.

That was enough.

I apologised.

We secured Doughnut on the tether inside the van so that she could see he couldn’t approach again.

I reassured her that it wouldn’t happen again.

And I think it’s important to say plainly that we were in the wrong.

Whatever Doughnut’s intention had been, he had rushed towards a dog who was on a lead and frightened the person walking him.

That’s not behaviour I’m going to defend simply because I believe dogs deserve more social freedom.

Doughnut has good social skills.

He does not have perfect social skills.

He can be clumsy. He can be startled. He can bark at dogs he doesn’t like. He can guard a space and chase another dog away from it.

He is not the Dalai Lama of dogs.

What he has never done is physically harm annother being.

And on this occasion, the moment I called him away, he came.

The canine part of the incident was over.

The human part wasn’t.

Human aggression: now apparently a category

The woman continued shouting.

She threatened that she would kill me if Doughnut had hurt her dog.

We continued apologising.

Doughnut was secured.

There wasn’t really anything else we could do.

Eventually she walked back towards her own pitch, still extremely upset, and we could hear her loudly telling her partner what had happened.

Then he came marching over.

He looked angry.

He headed directly towards Robert.

Robert stood up.

And the man’s manner changed noticeably.

I don’t know why.

Perhaps seeing Robert properly made him reconsider how confrontational he wanted the conversation to become. Perhaps he could see we were already preparing to leave and felt there was no reason to escalate it. Perhaps he’d simply calmed down during the walk over.

I can’t know.

What I do know is that his tone changed.

Robert remained calm, apologised again, explained that Doughnut had been secured and reassured him that it wouldn’t happen again.

And that was the end of it.

By this point, my retrospective field notes had acquired a category I certainly hadn’t expected to need quite so often.

Human-on-human aggression: three incidents.

The woman with the Rottweiler who shouted after me until I was too far away to hear her.

The guardian of the Dogue de Bordeaux threatening to kill me.

And her partner marching over to confront us.

Dog-on-dog physical aggression: still zero.

That contrast was becoming difficult to ignore.

Human-on-dog aggression, again

Before leaving the holiday park, I took Bramble and Doughnut back into the dog exercise field.

At the far end, Doughnut met a small bully-type dog.

The two dogs became enormously excited about one another.

They play-bowed and began the sort of exuberant rough-and-tumble Doughnut loves.

Wrestling. Mouthing. Body contact. Excited, energetic dog play.

Then the other dog’s guardian intervened.

He grabbed his dog.

And using the dog’s own rubber ball on a rope, he repeatedly struck him over the head.

Again, I want to be completely unambiguous.

I don’t approve of physically hitting dogs.

And again, this wasn’t a tiny token tap.

I had now spent four days looking for the dangers supposedly created when dogs were allowed too much freedom.

I had seen no dog fight.

I had seen no dog injure another dog.

I had seen no dog injure a human.

But I had now watched two humans physically strike their own dogs during social interactions.

The dogs weren’t the only animals on this trip whose behaviour was becoming interesting.

Back to The Beach

We left the holiday park, sorted out the last of the practical camper-van jobs, and headed back to the Beach for one final visit to the beach before going home.

By this point, I wasn’t expecting much.

Doughnut had spent four days surrounded by dogs.

He had met dogs who wanted to play.

He had invited dogs to play.

Dogs had invited him.

There had been greetings, play bows, brief chases and aborted wrestling matches.

But apart from those two golden Spaniels on our first afternoon, virtually every promising interaction had been cut short.

Then a little curly-haired terrier appeared.

And everything changed.

The little curly-haired terrier

We were already some distance down the beach.

Robert was throwing the dogs’ floating toy into the sea while Bramble and Doughnut chased it, retrieved it and conducted their usual secondary game of trying to steal it from one another.

The little terrier joined us.

Doughnut was delighted.

And, wonderfully, nobody came running over to stop him.

The terrier wasn’t as confident in deeper water as Bramble and Doughnut, so sometimes the game naturally broke apart.

My two would charge into the sea after the toy.

The terrier would follow so far, decide that was quite enough ocean for one small dog, turn around and toddle off.

And that was fine.

Nobody had to manage it.

Nobody had to decide that the interaction was over.

Nobody had to recall anyone.

A little while later, the terrier would reappear.

There’d be a bark.

A play bow.

A wagging little body.

I’m back. Chase me.

And Doughnut would be off again.

This happened repeatedly.

They played.

They separated.

They did other things.

They found one another again.

They played some more.

The interaction breathed.

For once, the dogs themselves were allowed to decide its rhythm.

And then there were four

At one point another dog joined them.

Then another.

For a brief period there were four dogs running together across the sand.

No wrestling this time.

Just chase.

They ran and dodged and curved around one another along the edge of the water.

Then one of those dogs was recalled. A golden lab

And what happened next upset me far more than it probably sounds as though it should.

The dog came back immediately.

Beautiful recall.

No hesitation.

No repeated shouting.

No whistle symphony.

The dog had been playing, his guardian called, and he returned.

Exactly the behaviour humans say they want from an off-lead dog.

He was clipped onto a lead.

And then he stayed there.

His guardian remained standing with a small group of people and other dogs while the game continued nearby.

The playing dogs occasionally circled right around them.

So the dog who had just demonstrated excellent social behaviour and excellent recall stood on a lead watching the others continue playing.

I remember turning to Robert.

“Did you see that?”

I was genuinely upset.

The dog had done everything right.

He had interacted appropriately.

He had returned immediately when called.

And the consequence of that excellent behaviour was losing his freedom and watching everybody else continue the game.

It felt spectacularly unfair.

Bramble joins the party

The remaining dogs carried on running.

And then something happened that was unusual enough to be memorable in its own right.

Bramble joined them.

Not for long.

She didn’t suddenly become a social butterfly.

She didn’t start wrestling or exchanging elaborate invitations to play.

She simply got caught up in the sheer joy of the chase.

For one glorious lap, Bramble ran with the group.

Then, apparently satisfied that she’d done quite enough socialising for one lifetime, she peeled away again.

It was the closest she came during the entire trip to playing with unfamiliar dogs.

And nobody had needed to make her do it.

What happens when nobody interferes

Eventually the larger group naturally dissolved.

One dog dropped back, presumably because we’d moved too far from their guardian.

The little curly-haired terrier continued appearing and disappearing.

Doughnut continued being thrilled every time his new friend returned.

Sometimes they barked at each other.

Sometimes they play-bowed.

Sometimes they chased.

Sometimes Doughnut went back to playing with Bramble.

Sometimes the terrier wandered away and did something else.

There was no dramatic ending.

That was rather the point.

The dogs didn’t have to be separated.

Nobody had to decide they’d had enough.

Nobody had to rescue anybody.

Nobody had to punish anybody.

Nobody got frightened.

Nobody got hurt.

Eventually, the interaction simply stopped because life moved on.

We kept walking.

The little terrier went wherever the little terrier was going.

And eventually, we went home.

After four days of watching humans repeatedly interrupt, prevent, misinterpret and sometimes punish canine social behaviour, the most remarkable interaction of the entire trip was remarkable for one very simple reason.

Nothing went wrong.

Absolutely. Here is the complete revised closing section as one clean replacement for the master copy.

So, What Did Four Days Actually Show?

This was never a scientific study.

I didn’t arrive at Brean with a clipboard, predetermined categories and a carefully designed observational protocol. I arrived with two dogs, a camper van and a head already full of questions about the way human society manages canine behaviour.

The field report came afterwards.

Once I got home and started writing down what I’d seen, I realised just how consistently the same patterns had repeated themselves.

So I don’t think there is much value in pretending the numbers are more precise than they are.

There were hundreds of canine encounters across those four days. On our busiest day alone, Doughnut must have had three figures’ worth of opportunities to greet, communicate with or attempt to play with other dogs. I didn’t count every play bow. I didn’t record every polite sniff. I certainly can’t retrospectively reconstruct every failed recall or every interaction that ended before it really began.

But some numbers are clear enough to matter.

Across four days in places densely populated with dogs, many of them off lead, I saw no dog fights.

I saw no dog injure another dog.

I saw no dog injure a human.

I saw no resource-guarding conflict, despite dogs sharing water, toys and games of fetch.

I saw no persistent antisocial barking.

I saw no dog mess left behind, and no evidence of it having been left behind before we arrived.

What I did see, repeatedly, was dogs being prevented from interacting.

Dogs recalled from play.

Dogs apologised for simply for approaching another dog.

Dogs removed because they barked.

Normal play mistaken for aggression.

Normal warnings and communication treated as misbehaviour.

Dogs who clearly wanted to interact but didn’t seem to know quite how.

And twice, I watched humans physically strike their own dogs during social interactions that had caused no injury to anyone.

There were also three occasions when human behaviour towards other humans became threatening enough that I found it significant.

The only thing I had gone looking for that I never actually saw was genuine dog-on-dog aggression.

That does not prove that dog fights don’t happen, that nobody ever leaves dog mess behind, or that every dog should simply be released onto a beach and left to get on with it.

Of course it doesn’t.

But if the dangers created by dogs having too much freedom are as ubiquitous as the rules surrounding them suggest, four days amongst this many dogs ought to have produced something.

Instead, the pattern I kept seeing was almost the reverse.

Some dogs were perfectly capable of interacting appropriately, but weren’t given the opportunity.

Some humans appeared frightened of perfectly ordinary canine communication and intervened because they believed something was going wrong when it wasn’t.

Sometimes people may simply have been cautious because they didn’t know the unfamiliar dog approaching theirs. Sometimes they may have known something about their own dog that I couldn’t possibly know.

And some dogs clearly wanted social contact but didn’t seem to have the skills to make it work.

There will undoubtedly have been dogs on that beach whose guardians had perfectly good reasons for not allowing them to freely interact with unfamiliar dogs.

But what struck me wasn’t any single interaction. It was the absence created by all of them.

Hundreds of dogs passed through that beach.

At its busiest, I could stand up and see perhaps fourteen or fifteen dogs at once. Dogs were everywhere. Many were off lead. Many showed interest in one another.

And yet sustained social interaction was astonishingly rare.

What Comes Next?

Four days at Brean left me with questions I couldn’t answer simply by watching what happened.

How much of what I saw was caused by human fear or misunderstanding of perfectly normal canine communication?

How much was because guardians knew their own dogs genuinely weren’t equipped to manage those interactions safely?

And that leaves a much bigger question.

Why do so many dogs have inadequate social skills?

Why do dogs seem to be forgetting how to speak dog?

That’s the question I’m going to examine in the next article in this series.

One Last Thing...

There is one obvious weakness in everything you’ve just read.

I only realised I was conducting a field study after I came home.

So now I’m rather tempted to go back.

A real clipboard this time. A proper observation sheet. Predetermined categories. Actual tallies. Both Bramble and Doughnut’s interactions recorded as they happen.

Perhaps one concentrated day at Brean while there’s still some sunshine left in the season.

Would you be interested in reading the results?

And, perhaps more importantly, what would you put on the clipboard?

If there is something about canine interactions, human responses or dog behaviour you think I should be recording, tell me.

If enough of you want me to do it, I’ll go back and conduct the Great British Dog Beach Survey properly.

For now, though, four days at Brean left me with one question I haven’t been able to shake:

If dogs aren’t allowed to be dogs even in the spaces specifically set aside for them to be dogs, where exactly are they supposed to do it?

A quick note before we begin:
This pupdate describes the veterinary advice I was given and the techniques we used at the time, as I experienced them. I later learned that some of that advice was wrong, and some of it was dangerously bad. I’m deliberately not interrupting the story every time this happens, because I want to tell these events in the order in which I experienced and understood them.

Please don’t use anything described in this pupdate as instructions for feeding or caring for newborn puppies. I’ll explain what I learned, and what I would do differently, as that knowledge enters the story.

I’d always planned to weigh the puppies again around midnight.

It was partly practical and partly because, after staying awake through Bramble’s labour and then spending the whole of Saturday staring adoringly at puppies, I thought I might finally get a few hours’ sleep.

Thursday night was now the last time I’d slept.

So far, though, that was mostly funny.

I’d expected puppies to involve some sleepless nights. I was tired and increasingly bedraggled, but I was also still riding those glorious golden bubbles of happiness from the day before.

Then I put the puppies on the scales.

Zeppole had been born at 310g.

Now he was 289g.

Malasada had gone from 326g to 304g.

Bombolone from 369g to 352g.

Andagi from 293g to 276g.

Churro from 354g to 338g.

Beignet from 334g to 308g.

Mandazi from 301g to 276g.

And tiny Pączek — already dramatically smaller than everybody else — had gone from 212g to just 200g.

Every single puppy had lost weight.

That frightened me.

They had been feeding all day. Bramble had spent hours lying with them, cleaning them, toileting them and generally being the wonderful mother I’d always somehow felt sure she would be.

So why were all eight losing weight?

There was one obvious thing they all had in common.

Bramble.

I took her temperature.

39.7°C.

That was a fever.

Suddenly the scales weren’t something I could reassure myself about and check again later.

Something was wrong.

The five o’clock phone call

I called the out-of-hours emergency veterinary hospital in Chippenham.

They told me to bring Bramble and all eight puppies in. They also said that if I had puppy formula and bottle-feeding equipment, I should make some formula and start trying to get milk into them.

Thank every available deity for my tendency to prepare for disasters that haven’t happened yet.

I’d bought formula as part of the whelping supplies, hoping it would remain unopened until eventually being thrown away.

Instead, at around five in the morning, I was mixing my first puppy formula.

I rang my friend Robert.

Readers of the pregnancy updates may remember my ludicrously expensive Metallica ticket. I’d already accepted that I couldn’t go because of the puppies, so Robert was supposed to use my ticket instead.

Instead, he got a five-a.m. phone call from me.

He came straight over.

We gathered Bramble, all eight puppies, blankets, heat pads, formula, bottles and anything else I could imagine suddenly needing. The puppies travelled together in their box, carefully kept warm.

Doughnut came too. I certainly wasn’t going to leave him behind while his entire family disappeared in the middle of the night.

And off we went to Chippenham.

The emergency vet

The vet examined Bramble and told us that she had an infection, probably a uterine infection following the birth.

She needed antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.

Then came the part that changed everything.

We were told that Bramble’s milk had dried up because of the infection and that if any milk returned while she was taking the anti-inflammatory medication, it would be poisonous to the puppies.

That was the word used.

Poisonous.

So they absolutely must not drink it.

I asked when it would be safe for them to feed from her again, assuming her milk came back.

The answer was that Brambles milk was unlikely to come back but if it did we’d need to wait a good ten days after Bramble had finished the anti-inflammatories before her milk would be safe for the puppies to drink.

Ten days.

These puppies were only 1 day old.

So this wasn’t going to mean supplementing them for a feed or two while Bramble recovered.

As far as I understood it, I was now bottle-feeding eight newborn puppies for the foreseeable future.

Every two hours.

Day and night.

I’d never bottle-fed a newborn puppy in my life.

So I asked the vet to show me.

And then I asked again.

And again.

And again.

By the time we left, I had asked five separate times if somebody could please actually show us how to bottle-feed the puppies.

Nobody did.

That bothered me then.

These weren’t healthy older puppies I was casually experimenting with. Every single one had already lost weight. They were completely dependent on someone getting enough milk safely inside them, and I had just become that someone.

Robert was already trying to feed one while we were there.

He had the puppy cradled in his arms in the sort of position you might use to bottle-feed a human baby — not lying completely flat on its back, but reclined backwards, belly upwards.

He was having trouble getting the puppy to take the formula and said something about finding that gently putting a little pressure on the bottle helped the milk come out.

The vet was watching.

She saw the position.

She heard what he said about applying pressure to the bottle.

She nodded and reassured us that we’d be fine.

I was also told that at this age you couldn’t really overfeed them. The danger was accidentally drowning them.

That was rather a terrifying sentence to hear immediately before taking eight newborn puppies home to bottle-feed without ever having been shown how.

But I trusted the reassurance.

Why wouldn’t I?

I’d brought them to an emergency veterinary hospital. I’d repeatedly asked for help. A vet had watched what we were doing and told us we’d be okay.

So we went home.

Closing Bramble’s milk bar

There was an immediate practical problem.

Nobody had explained to the puppies that their mother was now apparently poisonous.

They still needed Bramble. She needed to clean them, stimulate them to wee and poo, keep them warm, respond to them and generally continue being their mum.

They just couldn’t be allowed to drink her milk.

Then I remembered Bramble’s old surgical vest.

When she was about six months old, she’d needed surgery and had come home wearing a little post-operative bodysuit to stop her licking and chewing at her stitches.

I’d kept it. I keep everything, bad habit really.

Several years and one litter of eight puppies later, it was not what anybody could reasonably call Bramble-sized.

I managed to get it onto her, but there was no chance of fastening it properly underneath her. It simply didn’t reach far enough, and her bottom two nipples remained completely exposed.

Still, it covered the others.

For the moment, that was something.

I ordered a new one in her actual adult size to arrive as quickly as possible.

Meanwhile, eight determined little milk-seeking missiles continued doing exactly what evolution had designed them to do.

They’d wriggle towards Bramble.

Find one of those two exposed nipples.

Latch on.

I’d spot them and gently detach them.

Pop.

Offer a bottle.

Turn around.

Another puppy had found one.

Pop.

Bottle.

Another hopeful customer.

Pop.

I generally intercepted them before they managed to crawl any further underneath the vest, so it was those bottom two nipples that became the constant problem.

I felt desperately sorry for Bramble.

As far as she was concerned, she had babies and babies needed feeding. She continued trying to mother them exactly as she had before.

The only person suddenly interfering with this perfectly sensible arrangement was Nana.

Unfortunately, Nana was following doctor’s orders.

And there was another problem.

The puppies didn’t want my bloody bottles.

They knew where milk came from.

Milk was warm.

Milk smelled like Mum.

Milk came from soft, familiar nipples attached to the enormous warm creature they’d spent their entire lives snuggled against.

Milk did not come from some weird cold rubber or silicone thing that Nana kept trying to shove into their mouths.

They turned their heads away.

They pushed the teat out with their tongues.

They squirmed.

They complained.

They tried to find Bramble instead.

And I hated persisting.

There was something horrible about repeatedly putting something into the mouth of a tiny creature who was doing everything it could to reject it.

It felt cruel.

But they had all lost weight.

They had to eat.

So we kept trying.

And eventually, with some of them, I discovered the trick.

Get the teat into their mouth.

Let the tiniest drop of warm formula touch their tongue.

And suddenly:

Oh.

There’s milk in this thing.

Pączek and Andagi both seemed initially outraged by the entire concept.

Then they tasted the formula.

That changed matters considerably.

Tiny Pączek went from get this thing out of my face to attacking the bottle with the same ferocity she’d previously brought to Bramble’s nipples.

Andagi discovered what it contained and began feeding with gusto.

She was the second smallest puppy in the litter, yet seemed entirely unaware that this ought to have any bearing whatsoever on the amount she could eat.

My tiny Japanese competitive eater had found her event.

Zeppole was harder to convince.

He really didn’t like the unfamiliar teat, and knowing that he’d already lost weight made every failed attempt increasingly stressful.

At one point Robert abandoned the bottle altogether, put little droplets of warm formula onto his bare chest and let Zeppole lick and suck them from his skin.

It wasn’t exactly the sophisticated neonatal feeding system I’d imagined acquiring when I assembled my whelping supplies.

But there was milk going into Zeppole.

That was what mattered.

Then as I was filming it he finally accepted a bottle. YESSS!

And while Robert kept working his way through reluctant puppies, I sat down and started trying to better research how on earth to do this properly.

Videos. Breeders. Guides. Anything I could find online from somebody who appeared to know how to bottle-feed newborn puppies.

Very quickly, I discovered that there seemed to be an astonishing number of different opinions about how to do it.

Especially when it came to bottles.

One breeder recommended one type.

Another seemed to think it was hopeless.

Different bottles.

Different teats.

Different flow rates.

Different ways of encouraging a reluctant puppy to latch.

Every time I thought I’d found the answer, I’d find somebody equally experienced-looking recommending something else.

So I started ordering alternatives.

More bottles.

More teats.

Anything that looked as though it might make feeding eight newborn puppies safer or easier.

There was one thing, however, that seemed remarkably consistent in the videos I watched.

The puppies weren’t being fed reclined backwards like human babies.

They were facing forwards, their bodies tilted towards their bellies rather than backwards towards their spines.

That caught my attention immediately.

Because that wasn’t how we’d initially been doing it.

Robert had fed a puppy reclined backwards in front of the vet.

She’d watched.

She hadn’t corrected him.

I’d already fed puppies that way myself. In fact, I have a photograph of me bottle-feeding Bombolone during those first attempts, cradling him in that same backwards-tilted position.

That was my second little niggle about the emergency consultation.

The first had been asking five times to be shown how to bottle-feed and leaving without anybody actually showing me.

Now I was watching demonstration after demonstration in which the puppies were positioned differently from the way they had been feed in front of the vet.

I didn’t yet know what significance that had beyond the obvious:

We should change what we were doing.

So we did.

From then on, forwards rather than backwards.

And I kept learning.

One subject that particularly frightened me was milk coming from the nose.

Every now and then during a feed, I’d see a tiny bubble of formula appear at a puppy’s nostril.

I found that extremely disconcerting.

One of the breeder videos I watched said that the occasional little bubble of formula from the nose could happen during bottle-feeding. Their advice was essentially: stop feeding immediately, wipe the puppy’s nose, give them a moment, and then continue once everything was clear.

That was reassuring.

Sort of.

Because other videos seemed considerably more concerned about it.

Those talked about aspirators and making sure there was no milk left around the nasal passages.

So the bulb aspirator rapidly became part of my feeding equipment.

It lived beside me.

Bottle.

Formula.

Records.

Puppy pads.

Bulb aspirator.

Every feed.

If I saw even the slightest bubbling from a nostril, I’d immediately stop. I’d wipe away the formula, give the puppy a moment, then use the bulb to give a little suction over each nostril and make sure there wasn’t anything sitting there that might subsequently be inhaled.

Then, once I was satisfied their nose was clear, we’d continue.

We saw those little bubbles quite a lot.

And every single time, they terrified me.

But I was also desperately trying not to be terrified.

Several breeder videos had described occasional bubbling as something that could happen when bottle-feeding newborn puppies. I’d been told at the hospital that we’d be fine. I was already becoming aware that different sources had different opinions about almost everything.

So I did what seemed like the most cautious version of the advice available to me.

Stop.

Wipe.

Suction.

Check.

Then carry on.

There wasn’t time to sit around agonising over every contradiction.

Eight puppies needed feeding every two hours.

And getting through one round could take almost the entire two hours.

Sometimes, by the time everybody had eaten, been toileted and cleaned, I’d written down what they’d taken, washed what needed washing and got everything ready to go again, I might have fifteen minutes left.

Then it was feeding time again.

So while Robert was there, we divided the work.

He fed while I researched.

I fed while he did other things.

We compared what seemed to work.

Changed bottles.

Changed techniques.

Tried again.

And slowly, feed by feed, puppy by puppy, we started winning them over.

Each reluctant puppy who finally stopped fighting the teat and began to suck felt like a victory.

Every single one needed to eat.

Eventually, every single one did.

All eight puppies successfully bottle-fed.

And that was the moment everything changed.

Not dramatically.

Nothing magical happened.

I just gradually realised that I wasn’t spending every feed wondering whether I would actually manage to get milk into everybody anymore.

The puppies were learning what the bottles were.

I was learning the puppies.

The panic started turning into a routine.

Mama and Nana’s production line

It became almost meditative.

Sterilise everything.

Mix formula.

Pick a puppy.

Feed.

Record how much they’d taken.

Present puppy to Bramble.

Bramble enthusiastically handles the toileting department.

Puppy pad underneath.

Clean puppy.

Settle them down.

Next.

Feed.

Record.

Bramble.

Next.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Then wash everything and start preparing to do the whole thing again.

Bramble and I became a little team.

She couldn’t provide the milk, but that was essentially the only part of motherhood she’d surrendered.

After I’d fed each puppy, I’d hold them up for her and she’d immediately start licking and stimulating them to wee and poo. She’d clean them afterwards, check them over and remain completely involved in everything that was happening.

I fed.

She toileted.

Together, we worked our way through the litter.

I loved that.

I wasn’t taking her puppies away and hand-rearing them separately from her.

They were still Bramble’s babies.

She was of course still their Mama and primary care giver.

I was Nana, temporarily responsible for catering.

And we were raising them together.

Doughnut had chosen a rather less labour-intensive parental role.

He mostly kept himself around the stairs nit the sofa like usual.

The bottom of the stairs brought him close to the front door, where he could keep watch while enjoying the cooler air. From the top, he could still see the front door while catching the breeze coming through my open bedroom during the heatwave.

He seemed very deliberately to give Bramble space.

Every now and then he’d come over and carefully sniff a puppy, always watching Bramble closely and never barging into the nest.

And periodically, while I was wandering around feeding them, I’d take one over to his guard post and present him with one of his children.

He was wonderfully tentative.

A careful sniff.

A little inspection.

Perhaps another sniff.

Then generally a tactful retreat.

I couldn’t know exactly what was going through his head, but everything about his behaviour was gentle and cautious.

He seemed quite content to admire the puppies without getting involved.

Which, frankly, was probably sensible.

Somewhere, Metallica were playing

Robert stayed for most of Sunday.

The Metallica concert he was supposed to attend using my ticket came and went without him.

The ticket went completely unused.

About £500.

Gone.

Under almost any other circumstances, I’d have been devastated.

That day?

I barely cared.

Robert had stayed because we had eight newborn puppies who needed feeding and we’d been thrown into a situation neither of us had expected.

He put a huge amount of love, patience and effort into helping me get through those first feeds.

A concert simply wasn’t more important than that.

Eventually, though, evening came and he went home.

And for the first time since that five-o’clock phone call, the responsibility was mine alone.

Eight puppies.

One recovering Mama.

One extremely tactful Daddy.

Feeding records.

Formula.

Bottles.

A bulb aspirator that now never left my side.

And another feed rapidly approaching.

Oddly, I wasn’t daunted by it.

By then, everybody had successfully taken the bottle.

I knew the routine.

I knew what came next.

And somewhere during that chaotic Sunday, the whole thing had begun to feel strangely natural.

I slipped into what I can only describe as a blissful, sleep-deprived feeding trance.

Feed.

Record.

Bramble.

Next puppy.

Warm little body in my hands.

Tiny mouth working at the teat.

Check the nose.

Another feed recorded.

Another puppy settled.

Start again.

Thursday night was disappearing further and further into the past as the last time I’d actually slept, but at this point the lack of sleep still wasn’t bothering me particularly.

Mostly, I found it funny.

I’d expected puppies to interfere with sleep.

They had apparently decided to abolish it altogether.

Fine.

Coffee existed.

Energy drinks existed.

Matcha existed.

And there was something unexpectedly wonderful about the fact that I now had a legitimate reason to be constantly holding puppies.

Before all this, I’d deliberately tried not to bother them unnecessarily. However desperately I wanted to cuddle them, they were newborns. They needed to spend most of their time feeding, sleeping, snuggled against Bramble and doing whatever mysterious developmental work turns a tiny furry hamster into a recognisable dog.

Now holding them was part of the job.

I got to learn how each tiny body felt in my hands.

Who wriggled.

Who settled.

Who attacked the bottle.

Who needed persuasion.

Andagi continued feeding with gusto, making those wonderful little contented noises as she drank.

Pączek remained astonishingly fierce for something so tiny.

And Mandazi...

Mandazi was feeding.

But not quite like the others.

There wasn’t one dramatic thing I could point at.

He was warm.

He slept.

He cuddled with his siblings.

He did drink.

He just didn’t seem to drink with quite the same enthusiasm as everybody else.

I couldn’t decide whether that meant anything.

After the morning we’d had, perhaps I was simply watching too closely.

Pączek had the opposite problem.

There was no particular reason to think anything was wrong with her now that she was feeding so enthusiastically.

She was simply tiny.

At 200 grams, she was dramatically smaller than everybody else.

So I wanted to keep a closer eye on her too.

Fortunately, I discovered an extremely convenient monitoring system for two tiny puppies while simultaneously feeding their six siblings.

I put them in my bra.

Mandazi and Pączek spent much of the rest of Sunday tucked safely inside my bra while I got on with everything else.

Not in the cups, before anybody gets an unnecessarily strange mental image.

They nestled in the warm space between my breasts with my top making a soft safety wall, there I could keep them warm, close to my body and know exactly how they were doing.

Ok .Technically this is Churro & Zepolle on an earlier day but you get the idea

It was practical.

I could keep a constant eye on them.

And I could feed one of their brothers or sisters, mix formula, update my records or wander around doing whatever else needed doing without leaving the two puppies I was most concerned about somewhere I couldn’t immediately see or feel them.

But I also absolutely loved it.

I’d walk around the house with these two tiny warm bodies tucked against my chest.

Sometimes I’d put them together on the heat pad instead, and they seemed to love curling up with one another.

Then, when they were back inside my top, Pączek would occasionally decide she was hungry.

She’d start rooting around in that little hollow between my breasts, enthusiastically sucking at my skin in search of a nipple that simply wasn’t there.

Tiny nose nudging.

Tiny mouth searching.

Warm little suckling movements against my chest.

I knew perfectly well she wasn’t kissing me.

She was looking for milk.

But it felt like hundreds of tiny warm puppy kisses just for Nana.

I adored it.

By this point I was joking that if I spent much longer feeding newborns every two hours and carrying them against my chest, perhaps I’d start lactating myself.

Thankfully, I never did.

That would have complicated matters considerably.

The scales again

Eventually, it was time to weigh everybody.

And suddenly the blissful trance developed a small crack.

Those scales were the reason we’d ended up at the emergency vet that morning.

Now they were going to tell me whether everything we’d spent Sunday doing had actually worked.

Zeppole had fallen from his birth weight of 310g to 289g.

Now: 348g.

Up 59 grams.

Oh, thank fuck.

Malasada had dropped from 326g to 304g.

Now:364g.

Up 60 grams.

Bombolone had gone from 369g to 352g.

Now: 404g.

Up 52 grams.

Andagi had fallen from 293g to 276g.

Now: 334g.

Up 58 grams.

Apparently feeding with gusto had paid off.

Churro had dropped from 354g to 338g.

Now:400g.

Up 62 grams.

Then came Pączek.

My tiny Polish bandit had been born at only 212g and dropped to exactly 200g.

Now: 244g.

Forty-four grams.

My tiny runt had put on more than a fifth of her body weight.

All that furious feeding had worked.

Beignet had gone from 334g to 308g.

Now: 340g.

Up 32 grams.

Seven puppies.

Seven substantial gains.

Then I put Mandazi on the scales.

He’d been born at 301g.

He’d dropped to 276g.

Now: 277g.

One gram.

I stared at the number.

Everyone else had gained between 32 and 62 grams.

Mandazi had gained one.

And there was that niggle again.

He wasn’t feeding as enthusiastically as the others.

That was why I’d been keeping him so close to me.

But he was feeding.

He was warm.

He slept.

He cuddled with his siblings.

And, technically, the number had moved in the right direction.

I also knew that a gram was tiny enough to be affected by whether a puppy had just eaten, weed or pooed. I couldn’t interpret every little fluctuation as catastrophe or I’d drive myself mad.

So I took the win.

He hadn’t lost more.

He’d gained a gram.

I’d keep watching him.

Of course I’d keep watching him.

But every puppy had gained weight.

It was working

The relief was enormous.

Seven hadn’t merely stopped losing weight. They’d piled it on.

Tiny Pączek had shot from 200g to 244g.

Andagi was thriving.

Zeppole, Malasada, Bombolone, Churro and Beignet were all substantially heavier.

Even Mandazi’s number had finally crept upwards.

The bottles were working.

We were getting formula into them.

They were keeping warm.

Bramble was being treated.

She was still mothering them.

And I was beginning to think:

I can actually do this.

It wasn’t the first few days with the puppies I’d imagined.

I certainly hadn’t pictured Bramble wearing a surgical vest she last fitted into as a six-month-old while I sat beside her with a bottle and bulb aspirator constantly pulling puppies off her exposed 2 nipples.

I hadn’t expected spreadsheets-worth of feeding records.

I hadn’t expected to learn the peculiar terror of seeing a tiny formula bubble appear at a puppy’s nostril.

I hadn’t expected eight feeds every two hours to somehow occupy almost every minute of those two hours.

And I definitely hadn’t expected two of the puppies to spend much of the day living between my boobs.

But I was happy.

Completely, ridiculously happy.

It was gruelling and relentless, but it was also an excuse to spend virtually every waking moment loving on the puppies.

Before all this, I’d tried not to handle them unnecessarily. However desperately I wanted to cuddle them, they were newborns. They needed Bramble, milk, warmth and sleep much more than they needed Nana constantly picking them up because she couldn’t believe how soft they were.

Now?

Now holding them was my job.

I got to learn the feel of each tiny body in my hands.

Who wriggled.

Who settled.

Who needed coaxing.

Who attacked the bottle as though it had personally offended them by not producing milk quickly enough.

I got to watch Bramble clean each puppy after I fed them.

I got to carry Mandazi and Pączek against my skin.

I got to introduce Doughnut to his children one at a time at the bottom of the stairs.

And every couple of hours, I got to do it all again.

Somewhere in amongst the formula and feeding records and caffeine and puppy piss, the golden bubbles had come back.

Not quite the untouched golden bubbles of Saturday.

These had worry mixed into them now.

And responsibility.

And exhaustion.

But they were still bright and warm and shining, bubbling up through me until I felt overwhelmingly joyous again.

I was blissfully content.

Our little family had been handed its first crisis.

And, as Sunday slipped into Monday, I genuinely believed we’d gotten through it.

All eight puppies had gained weight.

Bramble was being treated.

Doughnut was guarding the household.

Mama and Nana had found a rhythm.

Thursday night remained the last time I’d slept, and at this point that fact still seemed considerably funnier than it did alarming.

Sleep could wait.

The puppies couldn’t.

So I checked the records.

Mixed the formula.

Reached for the next warm little body.

And started another feed.

I thought everything was going to be okay.

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A Very Happy & Tiered Couple of Matriarchs & Their Charges

The puppies had all arrived safely. Bramble had astonished me by taking to motherhood with what looked like effortless instinct. Mandazi, our tiny surprise eighth puppy, had been discovered upstairs and reunited with his family. After the whirlwind of labour, the house had finally settled into something wonderfully peaceful.

I’d originally planned to spend Saturday catching up on a little sleep between puppy cuddles.

Then I remembered that this Saturday was poker day.

For a brief moment it crossed my mind that I probably ought to cancel it. Realistically, though, it was far too late for that. Instead, I quickly messaged everyone to explain that the puppies had arrived, there wouldn’t really be a poker game that day, and if anyone still wanted to come over they’d need to expect a much quieter house than usual.

To my relief, everyone completely understood.

Ollie had stayed over after helping me through the birth the previous day, so by Saturday morning he was already very much part of the bakery.

A little later Uncle Ashton arrived to meet the puppies for the first time.

Milky arrived later still. He was one of the newer additions to our ever-growing little fur family, a wonderfully kind young guitarist who’d only recently started joining our poker nights. He immediately fell in love with the puppies, just as everyone else had.

There would be no noisy poker tournament that day.

Instead, Fortnite was played with the volume turned almost all the way down.

Conversations naturally became quieter whenever somebody wandered over to admire the puppies.

One of my favourite memories of that afternoon is the soundtrack. Sometimes Milky quietly played along with whatever Alexa happened to be playing. Other times he simply improvised his own melodies. There was something incredibly joyful and soothing about it. It became the soundtrack to one of the happiest afternoons I can remember. Even now, when I think back to that Saturday, I hear Milky’s guitar before I remember anything else.

Without anyone ever really discussing it, the entire house seemed to understand that eight tiny new lives had quietly become the most important people in the room.

Bramble nursing all eight puppies.

Any thoughts I’d had about catching up on sleep had quietly disappeared by then.

Not because I was already desperately sleep deprived—I wasn’t, not yet—but because I simply couldn’t drag myself away from the puppies.

Hours drifted by while I sat beside the whelping pen, completely mesmerised.

I’d expected newborn puppies to be completely helpless little creatures. The books had left me with the impression that, apart from smelling Mum and finding a nipple, they had almost no control over their own bodies during those first few days.

That wasn’t what I found at all.

Their eyes were tightly closed.

Their ears were still sealed shut.

Yet all eight puppies were constantly flailing their tiny legs, wriggling, pushing and somehow managing to propel themselves around the pen.

I’d somehow come away from all the books with the impression that newborn puppies could barely move their limbs at all. Seeing those tiny legs paddling away in every direction came as a genuine surprise.

They couldn’t crawl properly yet.

They certainly couldn’t walk.

But they could wriggle themselves exactly where they wanted to go, and they did so with far more determination than I could ever have imagined.

Zeppole, in particular, absolutely fascinated me. All four little legs worked furiously at once, reminding me of a baby sea turtle making its determined dash towards the sea. From the moment he was born, he seemed convinced he had somewhere terribly important to be.

I could happily have spent the entire afternoon doing nothing except watching them.

Overhead photographs of the puppies around the whelping pen.

By the end of that first full day, I already felt as though I was beginning to get to know them as individuals.

Not just “the litter.”

Eight tiny personalities, each starting to reveal little hints of who they might become.

Zeppole never seemed to stop moving. From the moment he was born he attacked life with all four legs flailing, as though determination alone might somehow make him crawl faster. Looking at his little white socks, I knew that if I ever kept him, his name would become Socks.

The name has amused me ever since I was tiny. One of my earliest memories of Mum helping me learn to read was a children’s book about a dog called Socks. At five or six years old I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I laughed so hard over that poor dog that the name has stayed with me ever since. Ever afterwards, whenever I met a dog with little white socks, part of me hoped that one day I’d have my own Socks.

Marla was already making herself heard. She was one of the most vocal puppies in the litter and had developed the funniest way of getting around, tucking her front legs neatly beside herself while pushing herself along using only her back legs. She reminded me so much of the Crawling Titan from Attack on Titan that I couldn’t unsee it. Every determined little expedition made me smile.

She also looked much more chocolate than I’d expected. Natalie confidently predicted that she, Churro and Pączek would all grow into brindle dogs, but I wasn’t completely convinced. Marla already reminded me of the supposed chocolate Labrador somewhere back in Bramble’s family tree.

Malasada In her Chocolate Glory

Bombaloni was exactly what you’d hope the biggest puppy would be.

Round.

Content.

Healthy.

He was one of what I immediately started affectionately calling the three fatties: Bombaloni, Churro and Marla. Somewhere during those first few days I finally understood why so many cultures celebrate gloriously chubby babies. Every wonderfully rotund tummy felt like proof that somebody I loved was thriving.

Bombaloni Trying on a new pretty but far too large “small whelping” collar

Churro seemed perfectly content with life. Most of the time he simply drank, slept and looked wonderfully peaceful. Natalie thought he’d probably grow into another brindle dog, but to me he looked much more caramel than brindle. Time would tell which of us was right.

Then there was tiny Pączek.

Half the size of some of her siblings, with the beginnings of a little dark mask around her eyes, she very quickly became The Polish Bandit.

Once she’d worked out how to feed properly she did so with astonishing determination. For somebody so tiny she certainly wasn’t short of enthusiasm.

Michelle, Uncle Ollie’s mum, had already told me that if she eventually chose one of the puppies she’d almost certainly want the smallest. By then I’d already started quietly imagining tiny Pączek growing up with Michelle, Uncle Ollie, his little sister Ariana... and, if everything went to plan, perhaps even making friends with Yoda.

Yoda, Ollie’s cat, had never quite forgiven Doughnut for enthusiastically chasing him out of Ollie’s bedroom during one of his earlier visits. Ollie wasn’t at all convinced Yoda would ever willingly befriend another dog.

I wasn’t so sure.

I liked the idea that if a puppy arrived while it was still smaller than the cat, perhaps the two of them might become friends before size ever became an issue.

I gently suggested that choosing a puppy by temperament probably made more sense than simply choosing the smallest.

Michelle remained completely unconvinced.

Tiny Pączek

Andagi was the second smallest puppy in the litter, but absolutely nobody had told her that.

She attacked every meal with the enthusiasm of one of those tiny Asian competitive eaters who somehow manage to out-eat people several times their size. She drank with absolute commitment, producing the sweetest little contented grunts that constantly reminded me of bottle-feeding my baby brother years ago.

I adored those tiny noises.

Preciouse lil Andagi about to crawl over Bomba

Beignet quickly became Andagi’s twin in my increasingly sleep-deprived brain.

Both were black puppies with little white chest markings.

Andagi’s was a bold splash.

Beignet’s a neat little dash.

If I’m honest, they weren’t actually that easy to tell apart. More than once we found ourselves turning them over just to check the exact shape of the little white patch on their chest before confidently announcing which puppy we were holding.

Beignet was slightly chunkier.

Andagi was noticeably smaller.

Even so, they somehow just belonged together in my mind.

Beignet practicing his superman pose

And then there was Mandazi.

Every time I looked at him I still couldn’t quite believe he’d almost been left upstairs.

Our little miracle.

Perhaps because of the circumstances surrounding his arrival, I found myself checking on him just that little bit more often than the others.

He seemed so peaceful.

So tiny.

So impossibly precious.

Mandazi snoozing on a heated pad

I spent hours simply watching them.

Sometimes they’d all wriggle themselves into one enormous puppy pile.

Sometimes they’d spread themselves across the blankets in every conceivable direction.

Every now and then one would let out a tiny squeak that sounded uncannily like a human baby.

Other times they’d squeak exactly like Sweep from The Sooty Show.

Either way, they were completely adorable.

At that stage they still looked more like tiny hamsters than recognisable puppies, but every hour seemed to reveal another little glimpse of the dogs they might one day become.

I couldn’t wait to find out what the weeks ahead would bring.

Watching Bramble become a mother was almost as fascinating as watching the puppies.

Once she’d greeted everybody and satisfied herself that all her visitors had been properly welcomed, she spent almost all of her time in the whelping pen.

I remember feeling quietly relieved.

I’d always had a feeling that Bramble would make a wonderful mother. I couldn’t really have explained why; it was just one of those instincts you have about someone you know so well. There wasn’t any real evidence for it before the puppies arrived, just a quiet confidence that motherhood would suit her.

I was right.

She fed them.

She cleaned them.

She patiently gathered wandering puppies back into the pile whenever one managed to wriggle away.

Every tiny squeak earned an immediate response.

Well...

Almost every squeak.

Every now and then one would suddenly let out an indignant protest because Bramble had accidentally sat on it.

With eight puppies all determined to disappear underneath their mum at once, it was hardly surprising. Usually all it took was me gently lifting her up or encouraging her to shuffle a few inches, and a very offended little puppy would emerge from underneath looking thoroughly put out with the whole experience.

She also hadn’t quite mastered the concept of waiting until feeding time was over before greeting visitors.

Whenever Uncle Ollie finally came downstairs after a well-earned night’s sleep, Bramble would immediately grab the nearest emotional-support toy and proudly trot over to greet him.

She did exactly the same when Uncle Ashton arrived.

And again when Milky came through the door.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t always considerate enough to warn the puppies first.

Every now and then she’d leap to her feet mid-feed, charging off to say hello while eight tiny puppies were left making a chorus of indignant squeaks and little popping sounds as they were all simultaneously detached from the milk bar.

It was impossible not to laugh.

Apart from the occasional over-enthusiastic greeting and the odd puppy that needed rescuing from underneath her, she was everything I’d hoped she’d be.

Calm.

Patient.

Gentle.

Completely devoted to her babies.

Bramble having special 1 on 1 girl time with Malasada

Doughnut approached fatherhood rather differently.

He seemed quietly curious about the whole affair but was equally determined to give Bramble all the space she needed. Whether that was instinct or simply his own gentle nature, I couldn’t say, but he never once tried to interfere.

He did, however, seize every opportunity to admire his children.

Every now and then I’d carry one of the puppies over for introductions.

He’d lower his enormous brindle head with extraordinary gentleness, give one long, careful sniff, then quietly step back again as though terrified he might accidentally tread on somebody.

He seemed fascinated by these tiny little creatures that smelled so unmistakably of his family.

It was impossible not to smile.

Doughnut meeting Mandazi.

One of my favourite photographs from the whole weekend is of Ollie holding Mandazi.

Knowing that he’d been the one to find our little surprise puppy only hours earlier somehow makes the picture even more special.

Oli Proudly Presenting Mandazi

Later that afternoon I took another photograph to send to Michelle.

She’d already told me that if she eventually chose one of the puppies she’d almost certainly want the smallest, and by then I’d started quietly imagining tiny Pączek growing up with Michelle, Uncle Ollie, his little sister Ariana and—if everything went to plan—even making friends with Yoda the cat.

Looking back now, I think that second photograph captured something else as well.

By then Uncle Ollie had completely fallen in love with the bakery.

He’d somehow gone from holding one puppy...

...to two...

...to having almost the entire litter asleep across his lap.

Judging by the grin on his face, I don’t think he minded in the slightest.

Ollie buried beneath puppies.

The afternoon drifted by in the most wonderfully ordinary way.

People chatted quietly.

The puppies wriggled.

Bramble fussed over them.

Doughnut quietly kept watch nearby.

And all the while there was the soft sound of Milky’s guitar filling the room.

Sometimes he played along with whatever Alexa happened to be playing.

Other times he simply made up his own music as he went.

It was joyful.

It was soothing.

It became the soundtrack to one of the happiest afternoons I can remember.

Even now, when I think back to that Saturday, I hear Milky’s guitar before I remember anything else.

I spent far more time simply holding the puppies than I probably should have.

Not for long. They belonged with Bramble, feeding and sleeping in a warm little heap beside their mum, and I was very conscious that they didn’t need me constantly picking them up.

But every now and then I’d gently lift one into my hands.

I couldn’t get over how impossibly warm they felt.

Or how unbelievably soft their fur was.

Then I’d quietly tuck them back where they belonged and find myself simply watching them all over again.

Time seemed to stop.

Every time I thought I should probably get up and do something useful, another tiny wriggle, another little squeak or another determined attempt to crawl somewhere would catch my attention, and another twenty minutes would quietly disappear.

Looking back, what I remember most isn’t any one particular moment.

It’s the feeling.

I felt blissfully content.

As a synaesthete, my memories are often wrapped up in colours and sensations just as much as words. That afternoon, every puppy seemed to create a tiny, warm, bright golden bubble of happiness somewhere deep inside me. One after another they floated gently upwards through my body until they burst into the world like little pops of sunshine.

It’s difficult to explain to anyone who doesn’t experience the world that way, but that’s genuinely how it felt.

It’s the closest I’ve ever come to feeling physically made of joy.

There was an overwhelmingly joyful peace to that afternoon that I’ve never quite managed to put into words. Everyone was smiling. Milky’s guitar drifted gently through the room. Bramble quietly cared for her babies. Doughnut watched over his little family from nearby. Eight tiny puppies wriggled, squeaked and slept in front of me.

For those few precious hours, life felt absolutely perfect.

I have never felt so blissfully content.

Or so overwhelmingly joyful.

Eventually everyone headed home.

The house became still.

It was just Bramble.

Doughnut.

Eight sleeping puppies.

And one very happy Nana.

I’d planned to weigh everyone around midnight before finally trying to get a little sleep.

It was supposed to be nothing more than another routine check.

One by one I placed each puppy on the scales.

The first had lost weight.

“That’s odd,” I thought.

The second had lost weight too.

Then the third.

Then the fourth.

By the time I’d finished weighing all eight puppies, the knot in my stomach had become impossible to ignore.

Every single one of them had lost weight.

That wasn’t what was supposed to happen.

Newborn puppies should be gaining weight.

Not going backwards.

I tried to reassure myself that perhaps I’d simply made mistakes recording their birth weights.

After all, I’d never done this before.

Maybe I’d written a number down incorrectly.

Maybe I’d misread the scales.

Maybe I was panicking over nothing.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right.

If eight puppies had all lost weight...

...there had to be a reason.

I reached for Bramble’s thermometer.

Poor girl, who by this point had already tolerated more indignities than any dog reasonably should, patiently accepted one more.

39.7°C.

I stared at the thermometer.

She had a fever.

Suddenly those weight losses didn’t feel like an isolated problem anymore.

At five o’clock on Sunday morning, I picked up the phone and called a friend.

I knew we needed help.

To be continued...

Mandazi snuggled up with Pączek showing off her bandit mask

Temperatures climbed as high as 37°C, and despite spending around £120 on what was advertised as a portable air conditioner, it turned out to be little more than a very expensive fan with a water tank.

Pleasant? Yes. Effective? Not in the slightest. The room temperature barely moved.

Keeping Bramble comfortable became the priority.

We’d bought cooling mats for the dogs and, true to form, Doughnut immediately worked out exactly what they were for. The moment I placed the 1 st one on the floor he happily sprawled across one looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

Bramble, on the other hand, needed a little more convincing. Once she realised it actually helped, she was more than happy to make use of it whenever the heat became too much.

Poor Bramble was heavily pregnant in 37°C temperatures.

We didn’t yet know quite how many passengers she was carrying.

We just knew she looked wonderfully...

...magnificently...

...rotund.

Trying to stop Bramble overdoing things during those final days of pregnancy became a full-time job.

Normally she’s a complete parkour ninja, happily jumping onto walls, balancing on impossibly narrow ledges and launching herself over obstacles that make me instinctively reach for the panic button.

Pregnancy hadn’t convinced Bramble to stop being a parkour ninja.

It had merely made her a rather more rotund parkour ninja.

One of her favourite daily manoeuvres involved launching herself from the back of the sofa, clearing the altar and the coffee table in a single leap, and landing by the front door whenever somebody knocked.

Under normal circumstances it was spectacular.

Watching her attempt it whilst heavily pregnant nearly gave me heart failure.

After witnessing it once, I decided that particular stunt was officially retired until after the puppies were born.

The one thing Bramble did reluctantly concede was that gravity had become slightly less cooperative.

She has always adored swimming and the hot tub, so in an effort to help everyone survive the heatwave, we filled it with cool water instead.

Normally she’d simply launch herself into it without hesitation. In fact, before she became pregnant we’d actually had to teach her not to leap into the tub unless invited.

Being gloriously rotund, however, had slightly altered the laws of physics.

Bramble somehow appearing to lose most of her pregnancy beneath the surface of the water. I can assure you the puppies were all still very much on board.

One of my favourite photographs from those final days is this one.

Thanks to the way the water refracts the light, Bramble suddenly looks remarkably slim again.

She wasn’t.

A gloriously rotund Bramble attempting what can only be described as an Olympic high jump towards her floating tennis ball.

Unfortunately, she still hadn’t quite accepted that.

Normally she’d have launched herself effortlessly into the tub.

Instead she repeatedly performed these adorable little hops, seemingly unable to work out why gravity had suddenly become so unreasonable.

Eventually I gave in and lifted her into the water.

She looked at me as though she’d planned it that way all along.

Unfortunately, the expensive “air conditioner” had one rather significant flaw.

It didn’t actually cool the room.

Despite our best efforts, the nursery remained the hottest room in the house, and with Bramble heavily pregnant in the middle of a heatwave, I wasn’t prepared to risk it.

So, before labour even began, we dismantled the carefully prepared nursery and moved the entire whelping pen downstairs into the living room, right beside the sofa.

It wasn’t quite the peaceful, secluded maternity suite I’d imagined.

But it was cool.

And, as it turned out, it was exactly where we needed it.

Despite the weather, I was watching something else just as closely.

Her temperature.

Every morning and evening we went through what had become our now-famous anal thermometer negotiations. Neither of us particularly enjoyed the experience, but it was the one piece of advice every vet had agreed on: when her temperature dropped, puppies were likely to arrive within about twenty-four hours.

Then, the day before Bramble went into labour, it happened.

Her temperature dropped to 36.9°C.

An hour later it had climbed back up again.

I was convinced it was the temperature drop we’d been waiting for.

ChatGPT, however, had me wondering whether the first reading might simply have been an anomaly.

Twenty-four hours later...

...Zeppole arrived.

Looking back, though, Bramble had been trying to tell us long before the thermometer did.

For almost eighteen hours, she repeatedly dug in exactly the same corner of our L-shaped sofa.

She’d dig furiously for a while...

...settle down...

...wander off...

...then come straight back and dig in exactly the same place again.

After watching this repeat over and over, I finally admitted defeat.

The carefully prepared nursery was ready.

The whelping pen was ready.

There was just one small problem.

Bramble had absolutely no intention of giving birth in the whelping pen.

I’d even bought a new mattress and spent the previous couple of weeks trying to persuade Bramble that the nursery was the perfect place to sleep. I’d been sleeping in there beside her, much to the dismay of both my back and my osteopath.

None of that mattered.

Bramble had already chosen her maternity ward.

She was absolutely determined to have her puppies tucked into the deepest corner of our £3,500 L-shaped sofa, whether I approved of the idea or not.

Thankfully, Molly had given us several old duvets to use as nesting material.

One of them was promptly sacrificed to the cause and spread across the sofa.

By the time everything was over, that duvet had earned an honourable retirement, decorated with the sort of spectacularly vivid green afterbirth stains that only canine birth seems capable of producing.

Eventually Bramble settled.

She spent long periods lying quietly, panting hard, then would suddenly get up and wander around as though nothing whatsoever was happening.

I’d read all about contractions.

I’d read all about straining.

I’d read all about obvious pushing.

I was watching carefully for all of it.

If Bramble was doing those things, I simply never consciously recognised them.

Instead she’d pant heavily for a while, settle again, occasionally lick herself...

...and every time she did, I’d instinctively glance over.

Then, suddenly...

...there it was.

A large translucent bubble beginning to appear beneath her tail.

I knew instantly what I was looking at.

“It’s happening.”

By pure luck, I happened to have my phone in my hand, so I captured part of Zeppole’s arrival on video.

Zeppole’s arrival.

Moments later, Bramble calmly opened the birth sac herself and immediately began cleaning her first puppy from nose to tail.

Bramble wasn’t just my little baby girl anymore.

She was somebody’s mum.

A quick note about the collars...

During their first night, the puppies wore mostly handmade rainbow collars so I could tell them apart before they’d officially received their bakery names. The following morning they all graduated to personalised name collars. So if the collar colours change between photographs, don’t worry—it’s still the same puppy.

🩵 Zeppole
First born – approximately 2:00 pm
310 g

First-night collar: ❤️ Red
Name collar: 🩵 Blue

Zeppole was the puppy who changed everything.

A handsome black boy with white socks, a white collar and a neat white blaze running up his nose, he transformed our little family in an instant.

Zeppole’s first few minutes in the world, still attached to Mum by his umbilical cord.

Before we’d really had time to process the fact that Bramble was now a mum...

...along came puppy number two.

💜 Malasada
Second born
326 g

First-night collar: 🧡 Orange
Name collar: 💜 Purple

Our beautiful chocolate girl.

Malasada decided to make her entrance hind legs first.

I’d read that gentle traction can sometimes help with a breech puppy if Mum is contracting, but standing there with a tiny pair of back legs in front of me and actually putting that knowledge into practice felt very different.

You can see in the video that I very tentatively hold the birth sac and try to give the gentlest little assistance.

Looking back, I was probably being over-cautious.

At the time, though, I was simply terrified of hurting her.

Malasada’s birth.

Our beautiful chocolate girl, only minutes old.

Two puppies.

Two healthy little doughnuts.

Zeppole and Malasada enjoying their first feed while a friend and I enthusiastically witter away in the background. Please don't mistake our ramblings for verified knowledge—we were simply two excited dog people watching tiny miracles happen.

And we were only just getting started...

❤️ Bombaloni

Third born • 369 g

First-night collar: 💛 Yellow
Name collar: ❤️ Red

After Zeppole and Malasada arrived in fairly quick succession, things suddenly slowed down.

We waited.

And waited.

Natalie,Hayden's mum, who'd raised a litter of her own a few years earlier, was fairly convinced there was probably only one large puppy left.

She gently felt Bramble's abdomen and thought it seemed as though there was just one big puppy still waiting to make an appearance.

Given the long pause after the first two births, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

When he finally decided to make his entrance, it was immediately obvious why he’d taken his time.

Bombaloni wasn’t exactly small.

At a hefty 369 grams, he immediately claimed the title of heavyweight champion of the bakery.

Bombaloni, our heavyweight champion.

With three healthy puppies safely here, it finally felt like the right moment to move everyone into the carefully prepared whelping pen we’d moved downstairs.

One by one, I carried the puppies over.

I half expected Bramble to protest.

Instead, she simply got up and followed them.

Wherever her babies were...

...that’s where she intended to be.

For weeks I’d been trying to persuade her that the nursery was the perfect place to have her puppies.

In the end, she compromised.

The first three puppies would be born on the sofa...

...the rest would mostly arrive in the whelping pen.

💛 Andagi

Fourth born • 293 g

First-night collar: 💚 Green
Name collar: 💛 Yellow

What surprised us both most wasn’t the birth itself.

It was Bramble.

I’d expected her to lie quietly recovering between puppies.

Natalie—Hayden’s mum, who’d raised a litter of her own a few years earlier—kept comparing everything to her own bitch, Alice, who’d barely moved during labour.

Bramble, meanwhile, seemed perfectly happy to get up, wander around the room, follow me if I left, then calmly return to the whelping pen as though nothing particularly unusual was happening.

It was so quintessentially Bramble that, in hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at all.

And then...

...along came Andagi.

Our beautiful black-and-white girl with the distinctive white patch on her chest.

Andagi, already easy to recognise thanks to the white patch on her chest

🧡 Churro

Fifth born • 354 g

First-night collar: 🩵 Blue
Name collar: 🧡 Orange

Churro followed not long afterwards.

Unlike the long wait before Bombaloni, these Andagi & Churro arrived in fairly quick succession.

By now the bakery was growing at quite an alarming rate.

Natalie had joked throughout Bramble’s pregnancy that there were probably eight puppies hiding in there.

Hayden had happily joined in.

I, meanwhile, had been quietly hoping for four.

Four had always sounded like the perfect number.

Six had always seemed the most likely.

By the time Churro arrived...

...I was beginning to suspect everyone else might have been right.

Another wonderfully chunky puppy who looked every bit as sturdy as Bombaloni only in a caramel colour.

Every new puppy brought exactly the same emotional conflict.

Absolute delight...

...followed immediately by the thought,

“Please, Bramble... no more!”

Not because I didn’t want them.

Far from it.

But because every extra puppy represented another lifetime commitment, another carefully chosen family to find and another little life I’d promised myself I’d protect.

Churro, wonderfully chunky from the very beginning.

For the first time all afternoon there was a chance to breathe.

The first five puppies were all happily feeding from Bramble, getting their first precious colostrum, while I finally had chance to sit back and simply watch.

The first five puppies feeding from Bramble.

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of looking at that photograph.

It was the first moment I’d really been able to stop rushing around and simply appreciate what had just happened.

🩷 Pączek

Sixth born • 212 g

First-night collar: 💙 Indigo
Name collar: 🩷 Hot Pink

Then came the tiniest member of the bakery.

At just 212 grams, Pączek weighed barely 57% of Bombaloni’s impressive 369 grams. I’d expected quite a range of birth weights given the size difference between their grandmothers, but seeing them side by side was still remarkable.

By now we’d reached six puppies.

Secretly, that was the number I’d expected all along.

When Natalie had suggested earlier that there might only be four, I’d been surprised but quietly delighted. Four had always sounded like the perfect number to me. Six was what I’d genuinely expected.

So when Pączek arrived...

...I really hoped she would be the last.

She was absolutely tiny.

Her little coat already hinted at the beautiful brindle colouring she would grow into, and across her eyes she wore what looked like a dark brown little bandit mask.

She was, quite simply, adorable.

It took her a little longer than her brothers and sisters to work out how to latch on for her first proper feed, and naturally I worried.

Then something seemed to click.

Once she started feeding, she did so with astonishing determination.

For such a tiny puppy, she fed with remarkable enthusiasm, as though she intended to make up for lost time.

I remember smiling and thinking,

“There you go, little one.”

Tiny Pączek, complete with what looked like a little bandit mask.

💚 Beignet

Seventh born • 334 g - Approximately Midnight

First-night collar: 💜 Violet
Name collar: 💚 Green

Just when I’d convinced myself the bakery had finally finished expanding...

...along came Beignet.

He arrived surprisingly quickly after Pączek, as though he didn’t want his little sister to have all the attention for herself.

A handsome black little boy with a neat white dash on his chest, Beignet was another beautifully healthy puppy who wasted no time joining his brothers and sisters for his very first feed.

Seven puppies.

Now it really had to be over.

Surely.

I finally allowed myself to believe that the bakery was complete.

Beignet, our handsome seventh arrival.

The original seven together. At this point we genuinely believed the litter was complete.

For the first time all day...

...everything was quiet.

Seven tiny puppies slept contentedly beside Bramble.

I’d weighed them all, scribbled down my notes and finally allowed myself to believe the excitement was over.

The bakery was complete.

Or so I thought.

Oli had headed upstairs to bed while I stayed downstairs a little longer.

After months of planning, weeks of preparation and one of the most extraordinary afternoons of my life, I simply wasn’t ready to leave them.

I sat there watching Bramble.

Watching the puppies.

Trying to take it all in.

I honestly can’t remember how much time passed before I heard footsteps coming back down the stairs.

Oli walked into the living room...

...holding a puppy.

Not one of the puppies.

A puppy.

For a split second my brain simply refused to process what I was looking at.

Then my first thought was that one of the dogs must somehow have carried one of the puppies upstairs.

I immediately counted them.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

They were all there.

Every single one of them.

Which meant...

...Oli was holding an eighth puppy.

He’d climbed into bed when he’d heard the faintest little squeak.

Following the sound, he’d eventually discovered a tiny black puppy wrapped in one of my shirts on top of my floordrobe.

To this day, I still don’t know exactly where he belongs in the birth order.

Bramble hadn’t been upstairs for hours by the time Beignet was born. It’s entirely possible Mandazi had actually arrived much earlier during one of her surprisingly energetic wanderings between puppies and simply gone unnoticed amongst all the excitement.

I suppose we’ll never know.

What I do know...

...is that had Oli not heard that tiny little squeak...

...our story could have ended very differently.

Instead, we warmed him up, introduced him to Bramble and, to my enormous relief, he latched on and fed beautifully.

🖤 Mandazi

Our Unexpected Eighth? Puppy • 301 g •

Only collar: 🖤 Black

Mandazi was our handsome solid black little boy.

Wrapped in one of my shirts, discovered entirely by accident and immediately earning his place in the bakery, he arrived with perhaps the most extraordinary birth story of the entire litter.

Mandazi’s portrait taken once the sun came up

Suddenly...

...there weren’t seven.

There were eight.

Eight tiny puppies.

Eight little doughnuts.

Eight brand new lives.

Bramble with all eight puppies together with their new Name Collars on.

I kept thinking I should probably go to bed.

I never did.

Every time I looked at Bramble, or at one of the puppies stretching, wriggling or feeding, I found another excuse to stay exactly where I was.

So I simply sat there.

Watching.

Listening.

Trying to take it all in.

Eventually morning arrived.

Oli came back downstairs.

And our first full day as a family of ten dogs began.

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve disappeared to... this is why.

I haven’t published anything since before Bramble gave birth.

At first, that was simply because there wasn’t time.

The last weeks of Bramble’s pregnancy became a blur of temperature checks, puppy kicks, preparations and excitement. Then, almost overnight, that became caring for eight newborn puppies. When Bramble became unable to feed them normally, it became bottle feeds every two hours, day and night, with barely enough time to think, let alone write.

Then life took a direction I never imagined it would.

Within nine days, I’d lost them all.

Afterwards, I disappeared for a while.

I took Bramble and Doughnut away into the countryside because I couldn’t bear to stay inside the house where everything had happened. I needed quiet. I needed trees. I needed somewhere to begin processing the most painful loss I’ve ever experienced.

Eventually, when I came home, I opened the birth update I’d been writing.

It was full of joy.

It celebrated Bramble becoming a mother.

It introduced eight beautiful puppies to the world.

And I realised I had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

For days, I went backwards and forwards over whether I should publish it at all.

It felt wrong to write about healthy newborn puppies when I already knew none of them would grow up.

It felt wrong to ask people to celebrate lives that ended so quickly.

But it also felt wrong to throw those nine days away.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I was looking at it backwards.

Those updates aren’t valuable because they tell the story of how the puppies died.

They’re valuable because they’re the only record I have of how they lived.

For nine precious days, they were here.

They had names.

They had different markings.

Different birth weights.

Different little personalities beginning to emerge.

They had a mum who adored them.

A dad who gently introduced himself to each of them.

Friends and family who celebrated them from the moment they arrived.

Those days mattered.

Those little lives mattered.

I don’t yet know exactly how I’m going to tell the rest of this story.

Some parts will be joyful.

Some parts will be incredibly difficult to write.

There are things I learned that I think are important enough to share, particularly about neonatal puppy care, but I’m not ready to write about those yet. I want to understand them properly before I do.

What I do know is this:

I don’t want the only story these puppies leave behind to be the story of how they died.

I want there to be a record that they were here.

That they were loved.

That, however briefly, they lived.

So, after a great deal of soul-searching...

I’ve decided to share their story after all.

So...

The next post is the one I almost never published.

It’s the day eight tiny puppies came into the world.

I hope you’ll come and meet them.

The scan made them real.

The nursery made them imminent.

But feeling & seeing them move makes them undeniably, viscerally REAL.

Until recently, the puppies existed largely as ultrasound images, measurements, educated guesses, and increasingly ridiculous doughnut-themed names.

Now they kick.

Some movements are little more than fluttering taps beneath Bramble’s ribs.

Others are full-bodied stretches and sudden thumps that leave absolutely no doubt whatsoever that somebody is in there rearranging the furniture.

It is, I have discovered, both extraordinary and slightly unsettling.

Bramble herself appears considerably less surprised by this development than I am.

Her principal concerns remain food, airflow, and whether the household might reasonably be persuaded to provide additional meals.

The answer to that last question has, unfortunately, become yes.

Following discussions with Natalie, and taking into account both Bramble’s increasing appetite and the growing puppies, her meals have increased considerably.

What began as two meals a day became three.

Three meals became four.

And this does not include the entirely separate economy surrounding the anal probe negotiations.

At this point Bramble receives four meals of puppy food every day, plus approximately half a meal’s worth of kibble during temperature checks.

Doughnut, naturally, also receives supplementary compensation kibble, because feeding one dog in front of another would apparently violate several household treaties.

Bramble remains extremely enthusiastic about this arrangement.

She has not reached the stage where food appears difficult, inconvenient, or optional.

If anything, she has become more determined than ever that all available food should become Bramble.

She is currently, to use the technical veterinary term, an absolute gannet.

The Mattress Wars

The nursery mattress and I have, unfortunately, experienced some creative differences.

The entire point of purchasing a new mattress was to preserve what remains of my increasingly temperamental spine during several weeks of sleeping in the nursery.

My normal mattress, while excellent, is approximately the size of a small continent and was not available for relocation.

The replacement seemed ideal.

It arrived.

It looked comfortable.

It felt comfortable.

I lay down upon it and thought, rather smugly, that I had solved the problem.

Several hours later my body informed me that I had not.

The first few nights were spectacularly unsuccessful.

My back hurt.

My shoulders hurt.

My hips hurt.

Most of my body appeared united in its belief that I had made a terrible mistake.

By three or four o’clock in the morning I was often abandoning the nursery altogether and retreating to my own bed for a few hours of recovery sleep before the day began.

Fortunately the situation has improved somewhat.

Most of the widespread bodily complaints have gradually subsided.

Only my left hip continues to protest loudly enough to justify summoning osteopathic reinforcements.

My usual osteopath could not see me before my next scheduled appointment, but another osteopath at the same clinic has now agreed to come to the rescue on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, friends have been recruited to assist with breaking in the mattress.

This has involved them enthusiastically bouncing upon it.

I am not entirely certain whether this is recognised within the scientific literature as an evidence-based intervention, but it is difficult to deny that it feels productive.

At the very least, it is considerably more entertaining than simply glaring at the mattress.

The latest few nights do appear to have helped.

The widespread rebellion from the rest of my body has mostly subsided, leaving only one particularly furious left hip continuing the protest.

Whether this represents genuine progress, simple exhaustion, or Stockholm syndrome remains unclear.

The Great Cooling Experiment

While the mattress was attempting to murder my hips, Bramble continued conducting her own independent review of the nursery.

The nest itself remains acceptable.

The room remains acceptable.

The concept of sleeping in the nursery remains acceptable.

The specific location in which Bramble would most like to sleep appears to be approximately two feet away from the nest on the coolest available piece of flooring.

Most mornings I wake to find her either beside the nest, in the doorway, or lying on the cool floor just outside the room where the airflow is strongest.

Initially I worried that this meant she disliked the nest.

Increasingly, I suspect she simply dislikes being warm.

The puppies are now large enough that I can feel them moving.

She is carrying around several small mammals who appear to spend much of their time practising gymnastics somewhere beneath her ribs.

It may simply be that she is hot.

The latest addition to the nursery, therefore, is a fan.

At this point the room contains:

• one heavily pregnant spaniel,

• one nest,

• one increasingly expensive mattress,

• one digital thermometer,

• one fan,

• and one human attempting to keep both a dog and a spine operational.

The experiment continues.

Bramble still spends time in the nest.

She still settles there when asked.

She still eats her meals there.

But when left to make her own decisions overnight, she frequently chooses the coolest spot available.

For now, I am inclined to trust that choice.

After all, she is the one carrying the puppies.

Meanwhile, Doughnut appears to have solved his own accommodation difficulties entirely.

The large, comfortable chair beside the mattress became covered in spare bedding removed from the nest.

Doughnut promptly discovered that it was soft, elevated, very close to Mum, and entirely his.

He can lie beside me without risk of being rolled on, kicked by flailing limbs, or displaced by a heavily pregnant spaniel.

In other words, he has discovered what he believes to be the greatest piece of furniture ever created.

This has had the additional benefit of freeing up more space on the mattress.

Unfortunately, Bramble quickly noticed this development and briefly argued that the existence of spare bed space should surely invalidate the previous ruling preventing her from sleeping there.

She was informed that it did not.

Fortunately, only one appeal was required.

The Summer Solstice Handfasting

The Summer Solstice seemed an appropriate time for a handfasting.

The Wheel turns.

The seasons change.

Puppies become adults.

Adults become parents.

And, in Bramble’s case, one can apparently arrive at one’s own wedding already heavily pregnant.

Traditionally weddings are followed by babies.

Bramble has never shown much interest in doing things in the traditional order.

The ceremony took place beneath the summer sky, attended by family and friends.

Bramble wore a sort of veil/wedding dress & Doughnut a bow tie for the occasion.

Oli served as Doughnut’s best man, a role that felt particularly appropriate after Doughnut’s extended stay with him during hump week.

Ashton, Alex, Derryn, Hayden and I all attended.

I acted simultaneously as officiant, priestess, and mother of the couple, which feels like a fairly accurate description of my role in their lives generally.

The ceremony itself was, perhaps surprisingly, taken far more seriously by the bride than by the groom.

Doughnut approached the occasion exactly as one might expect.

He wandered.

He circulated.

He greeted people.

He investigated the surroundings.

He appeared pleased that everybody had gathered together, although I remain uncertain how much of this he attributed to the significance of the handfasting and how much to the possibility of snacks.

Bramble, meanwhile, sat almost motionless throughout much of the ceremony.

She looked up at me continuously while I spoke.

This surprised me.

She was heavily pregnant.

The weather was warm.

She was wearing a wedding dress.

The puppies were moving.

And yet she appeared entirely focused upon what was happening.

It was as though she had decided that whatever strange human ritual was taking place, it was clearly important and therefore required her complete attention.

The bride behaved impeccably.

The groom behaved like Doughnut.

Both performances felt entirely authentic.

The flower Rings I wove from nearby wild vines and flowers were exchanged.

The vows were spoken.

The treats were accepted.

And by powers recognised by absolutely no government whatsoever, Bramble and Doughnut became husband and wife.

The marriage was witnessed by family and friends.

The handfasting was completed beneath the summer sky.

And at some point during the ceremony, one of the puppies kicked.

This means that, technically speaking, the next generation attended the wedding as well.

The youngsters have become parents.

The puppies have become adults.

And another page has turned.

Seven weeks

Two weeks to go.

The nursery is finished.

The whelping pen is assembled and in use, although from this point forward I think we’re going to call it the nest. It feels more appropriate.

At this point, a remarkable amount of my life appears to revolve around preparing for creatures I have not yet met.

The nursery is ready.

The supplies are arriving.

The sleeping arrangements are under active negotiation.

And the puppies have somehow managed to take over a substantial portion of the household despite not technically having arrived yet.

Metallica vs Puppies

There is, however, one casualty of the impending puppies that I am finding rather harder to accept.

Metallica.

The puppies are due at almost exactly the same time as a concert I have been looking forward to for over a year.

The decision itself is not difficult.

If Bramble needs me, I will be here.

That was never really in question.

The frustrating part is what this particular concert represents.

Metallica are my favourite band.

This would have been the biggest Metallica show I have ever attended.

With the best seats I’ve ever bought.

Star marks the seat in the green circle

I bought the ticket almost a year ago, shortly after my uncle died.

He left me £1,000 in his will and, in what felt like a perfectly reasonable decision at the time, I spent half of it on a Metallica ticket.

At around £500 (roughly $650), it was by far the most expensive concert ticket I have ever purchased.

The previous record holder cost somewhere around £200.

Unfortunately, the resale market appears to have formed a rather different opinion about its value.

The ticketing platform offers three suggested resale prices: a quick sale, a maximum suggested sale price, and something in between.

The maximum suggested sale price is the optimistic option.

Even then, it estimates that I might sell the ticket for around £165 and receive approximately £130 after fees.

The other suggested prices are lower.

Significantly lower.

I will probably attempt to sell it elsewhere and hope somebody else’s valuation of Metallica is rather closer to my own.

My hopes, however, are being carefully managed.

To make matters even more entertaining, I do not currently possess the ticket.

Apparently this is normal.

The ticket exists somewhere in the digital ether and will not actually be released until approximately three hours before the concert begins.

This means that even if I successfully sell it, I will be unable to provide the buyer with their ticket until only 3 hours before the event.

I am assured this is a perfectly sensible modern system.

I remain unconvinced.

Every time I mention missing Metallica to somebody, they immediately start trying to solve the problem with logistics.

Perhaps the puppies will arrive early.

Perhaps they will arrive late.

Perhaps Bramble will have finished whelping by then.

Perhaps somebody could cover for me for a few hours.

For a brief moment, every suggestion produces a small flicker of hope.

Then reality reasserts itself.

The problem is not that I might miss the birth.

The problem is that I don’t want to be anywhere else.

Regardless of exactly when labour begins, I want to be there before it starts, while it is happening and afterwards.

I want to be there for Bramble.

I want to be there for the puppies.

Even if everything went perfectly and the puppies arrived several days beforehand, the idea of disappearing for an entire day during their first week of life simply doesn’t feel right.

So the decision itself is easy.

The disappointment is not.

I am genuinely gutted.

I will be staying home.

I will almost certainly be doing the right thing.

I reserve the right to be sad about it anyway.

The Great Nest Negotiation

The sleeping arrangements have required considerably more strategy than I initially anticipated.

Bramble’s preferred sleeping location has always been straightforward.

Wherever Mum happens to be.

This presented a problem because while the puppies need Bramble to become comfortable sleeping in the nursery, Bramble has absolutely no interest in voluntarily relocating away from the family sleeping pile.

The nursery was therefore never really intended to be an attractive alternative to Mum.

It was intended to contain Mum.

This is an important distinction.

Molly generously donated approximately five old duvets for nesting purposes, which immediately transformed the room into what Doughnut considered luxury accommodation.

The first successful occupant of the nursery was therefore Doughnut.

One morning Bramble and I awoke in bed just the 2 of us, upon investigation we found he had happily installed himself the in the Nursery, amongst the blankets and appeared entirely convinced that the whole arrangement had been created for his personal benefit.

The first night Bramble actually slept in the nest was considerably less straightforward than the final outcome might suggest.

In fact, she spent most of the evening exploring every possible alternative.

I would point to the nest and tell her to go to bed.

She would go into the nest.

Lie down.

Stand up.

Turn around several times.

Leave the nest.

Go downstairs.

Come back upstairs.

Check whether there was room next to Mum.

Discover there was still a large Doughnut occupying the available space.

Return to the nest.

Lie down.

Stand up.

Reconsider her options.

Go downstairs again.

Return.

Inspect the mattress.

Inspect the nest.

Inspect me.

Inspect the mattress again.

At one point she abandoned the entire exercise and curled herself up on the floor outside the nest instead.

This felt like useful feedback.

Clearly the nest was not yet sufficiently attractive to outweigh either the floor or the possibility that Doughnut might somehow evaporate and leave room for her on the mattress.

I therefore added another duvet and three or four additional blankets to the nesting area.

The revised version received a somewhat warmer reception.

Eventually, after several hours of inspections and repeated attempts to locate a better option, Bramble appeared to conclude that the nest was the least objectionable sleeping arrangement available.

I am choosing to regard this as success.

Given that this was only her second night in the nursery and the first night she had actually spent in the nest, I am counting even reluctant acceptance as progress.

Night two brought further developments.

Having spent a significant amount of time contemplating both the duration of the upcoming nursery residency and the increasingly alarming consequences for my already damaged spine, I briefly panicked and purchased a replacement mattress.

In my defence, there is a reasonable chance I will be sleeping in the nursery for more than a month.

After 32 years of back problems, I have become rather cautious about ignoring early warning signs.

The first couple of nights produced enough ominous creaking and complaining from my lumbar region that a replacement mattress suddenly seemed like a very sensible investment.

There was one brief period during which I wondered whether I might have overreacted.

My spine has since clarified its position.

The replacement mattress is now expected with considerable enthusiasm.

The bigger surprise, however, was Bramble.

Throughout the night I repeatedly found her sleeping beside the nest rather than in it.

At other points she chose the carpet.

By morning she had relocated herself entirely and was asleep on the cooler vinyl flooring outside the nursery.

Bramble looking considerably more plump

Initially I wondered whether this represented a renewed protest against the sleeping arrangements.

Then I realised there was another possibility.

The room was warm.

Very warm.

I had, after all, been preparing it with future puppies in mind rather than a heavily pregnant spaniel.

As an experiment I removed some of the extra bedding, flattened the nest somewhat and opened a window.

After an early-morning trip downstairs, during which Bramble enthusiastically supervised the rolling of a 5 am emergency smoke, she returned upstairs and promptly spent the next several hours sleeping comfortably in the nest.

Coincidentally, the room had cooled considerably by then.

My current theory is therefore that the problem may not have been the nest at all.

The problem may have been that I had accidentally made it too cosy.

Night three went considerably better.

The room was cooler, the window remained open and Bramble seemed much more settled overall.

She still made several attempts to negotiate her way back onto the mattress.

Every so often I would wake to find her standing beside me, gently pressing her face against mine in what appeared to be a heartfelt argument for making more space.

I remained firm.

Mostly because there wasn’t actually any space to make.

Each time I pointed towards the nest, tapped the side and told her to go to bed.

Each time she climbed back into the nest and settled down again.

It is still not her preferred sleeping arrangement.

Given the choice, she would almost certainly choose the family sleeping pile every time.

But she is becoming increasingly willing to accept that the nest is where she sleeps now.

I am counting that as significant progress.

Bramble & I having a snuggle in the morning after not letting her in the bed all night

Unfortunately, there is still one ongoing complication.

Doughnut.

As anybody who has met Doughnut will know, any newly created pile of soft things is automatically assumed to have been constructed for his benefit.

Fresh blankets.

Folded duvets.

Cushions.

Mattresses.

If it looks comfortable, Doughnut will be on top of it within minutes.

The nest is therefore proving somewhat confusing for him.

He is not accustomed to Bramble being allowed somewhere that he is not.

On several occasions I have woken to discover that the dogs have quietly exchanged positions.

Doughnut has installed himself in the nest while Bramble has reclaimed the sleeping space beside me.

This is swiftly corrected.

Doughnut is asked to vacate the nest.

Bramble is directed back to her designated accommodation.

Everybody settles down again.

Most of the night Doughnut is sleeping quite happily beside me.

Nevertheless, he remains convinced that the large, carefully prepared pile of blankets has been created specifically for him.

From his perspective, this is an entirely reasonable assumption.

Unfortunately for him, the nest has been reserved for somebody else.

The Small-Litter Theory

One thing that continues to confuse me is Bramble’s appetite.

Everything I read suggested that heavily pregnant bitches sometimes struggle to fit large meals into the available space.

Meanwhile, Bramble remains enthusiastically committed to the proposition that all available food should belong to Bramble.

This has become the latest piece of evidence supporting my completely unscientific small-litter theory.

The theory did not begin with food.

It began several weeks ago when Bramble appeared noticeably less pregnant than other spaniels at a similar stage.

At first this contributed to my periodic worries that perhaps she was not pregnant at all.

The scan subsequently confirmed that there were definitely puppies in there.

We saw four.

That does not mean there are only four puppies.

It does, however, fit rather neatly with the existing theory.

Since then, several observations have found their way into the “possibly a small litter” column.

The fact that she still appears to have plenty of room.

The fact that she remains enthusiastically interested in large meals.

And the fact that she has shown absolutely no signs of deciding that food is suddenly optional.

I should stress that several of my previous theories have also sounded convincing right up until the point they turned out to be nonsense.

The evidence should therefore be treated with appropriate caution.

Even so, I have started splitting her meals into three smaller portions rather than two.

Not because she appears to need it yet.

More because, if I know Bramble, being uncomfortably full is unlikely to stop her eating.

And Bramble has always been remarkably good at pretending everything is fine when it isn’t.

I’ve also been advised that overfeeding slightly is preferable to underfeeding a pregnant bitch.

If there is a choice between a little too much nutrition and not quite enough nutrition for the puppies, I know which side I’d rather err on.

For now, she remains delighted by every meal placed in front of her.

Whether this means four puppies, six puppies or simply a particularly food-motivated spaniel remains to be seen.

The Doughnut Dynasty

Another sign that this is all becoming alarmingly real is that I have started assigning puppy designations.

Traditionally breeders use colour collars and labels such as Mr Blue, Miss Yellow and Miss Pink.

Bramble herself began life as Miss Yellow.

Doughnut was Mr Blue.

At the moment I appear to be doing the same thing, only in a way that is considerably less practical and considerably more entertaining.

The puppies are currently being designated after their father.

Or, more specifically, after the many different ways humanity has independently reinvented The Doughnut.

It turns out that almost every culture on Earth appears to have looked at flour, fat and sugar and reached broadly the same conclusion.

Bombolone in Italy.

Malasada in Portugal and Hawaii.

Churro in Spain.

Pączki in Poland.

Beignet in France.

Sufganiyah in Israel.

Zeppole in southern Italy.

Andagi in Okinawa.

Buñuelo across much of the Spanish-speaking world.

And no doubt many more I have yet to discover.

These are not necessarily permanent names.

They are placeholders.

Working titles.

The sort of labels one uses while waiting to discover who everybody actually is.

If a particularly large puppy emerges, there is a strong chance it will become Bomba, short for Bombolone. ( A Doughnut filled with decadent amounts of sweet filling)

A particularly cute little girl may become Malasada. It just feels cute & feminine.

If one of them turns out to be gloriously unusual-looking, it may become Muffin, which admittedly breaks the theme entirely, but that is the point & every system needs an emergency exception.

At this point I have enough names for considerably more puppies than I am hoping Bramble is carrying.

Given that I still don’t know exactly how many puppies there are, this may prove either sensible preparation or evidence that I have finally lost my mind.

Time will tell.

Still, there is something rather fitting about it.

Everybody loves puppies.

And almost every culture on Earth appears to have independently invented some version of sweetened fried dough happiness.

The puppies are therefore being designated after their father and one of humanity’s most universally successful ideas at the same time.

Pre prepped puppy collars with the top 7 doughnuts & Muffin on.

Some Constants Can Be Relied Upon

While most aspects of the household are currently adapting to the impending arrival of puppies, there are some constants in life.

My mother is one of them.

Upon learning that Bramble was pregnant, she informed me:

“The problems arising are all yours. You have gone against my wishes and I am too old to deal with dog shit and complaints.”

This is, in fairness, entirely consistent with precedent.

When I was forty years old, living hundreds of miles away, I was also strictly forbidden from getting Doughnut.

At the time I considered this advice carefully.

Then I remembered that my expertise pertains to dogs and their care, whereas Mum’s expertise mostly pertains to turning animals into sausages, roast dinners and Christmas lunch.

I therefore reached a different conclusion.

It has since turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.

Two years later, at the age of forty-two, I am now apparently once again going against my mother’s wishes.

There is something wonderfully absurd about being a fully independent adult and still receiving parental declarations about what is and is not permitted.

Particularly when any consequences, should everything go spectacularly wrong, will still be entirely my problem rather than hers.

And yet there is also something oddly comforting about it.

The nursery may have appeared.

The puppies may be imminent.

My life may currently revolve around thermometers, nesting materials and increasingly complicated sleeping arrangements.

But through all of that change, Mum remains Mum.

Some constants can be relied upon.

The Great Anal Probe Negotiation

The vet has informed me that one of the more useful indicators that labour is approaching is a drop in body temperature.

This is excellent information.

Unfortunately, obtaining that temperature requires a thermometer.

A very specific thermometer.

And a very specific destination.

In this household it rapidly became known as the anal probe. Dun Dun Duhhhhh!!!

Breeder Brain immediately ordered the anal probe.

Mum Brain thought this was a ridiculous waste of money.

Getting an anal probe anywhere near Bramble’s backside was going to be difficult enough.

Keeping it there long enough to obtain an actual reading seemed completely impossible if not suicidal.

Behaviourist Brain then chimed in to disagree whole heartedly.

Behaviourist Brain pointed out that this was merely another training problem and Bramble is very food motivated.

And so the negotiations began.

The negotiations did not begin with the anal probing itself.

That would have been optimistic.

The first few sessions consisted entirely of introducing the concept.

The anal probe appeared.

Kibble appeared.

The anal probe disappeared.

More kibble appeared.

At this stage there was no growling at all.

The anal probe had not yet acquired any unpleasant associations.

It was simply a strange object that mysteriously caused food to rain from the sky.

The next stage involved touching her tail.

More kibble.

Touching the area beneath her tail.

More kibble.

Touching suspiciously close to her bum.

Even more kibble.

At this point Bramble began expressing concerns.

The growling started long before the anal probe was actually used.

Apparently she had already formed some opinions about where this process might be heading.

By the time we attempted the first actual reading, the negotiations were well underway.

The conversation appeared to go something like this:

“I distrust the anal probe.”

“That’s fair. Have some kibble.”

“I would like it formally recorded that I remain opposed to the anal probe.”

“Excellent. Have some more kibble.”

“I am accepting payment but wish to make it clear that this should not be interpreted as approval.”

“Completely understood.”

“The anal probe remains unacceptable.”

“More kibble?”

“How much more kibble?”

And so the negotiations continued.

The remarkable part was that Bramble never attempted to leave.

She never snapped.

Never spun around.

Never tried to escape.

She simply stood there grumbling while methodically stuffing her face with what eventually amounted to roughly half an old bigger meal’s worth of kibble…. twice a day on top of her new smaller 3 meals a day.

The procedure continued.

The food continued.

The complaints gradually diminished.

A few days later the growling disappeared almost entirely.

The anal probe remained.

The food remained.

The objections did not.

These days the occasional token grumble still appears from time to time, presumably for contractual reasons, but Bramble now presents herself for the procedure with considerably less debate than she did initially.

As it turns out, she was perfectly capable of tolerating the anal probe.

She simply felt strongly that she should be compensated for it.

This is a position I can respect.

In fact, I am beginning to suspect that Bramble has successfully negotiated herself an entire extra large meal every day in exchange for tolerating the anal probe.

Looking back on recent events, she may well be the cleverest participant in this entire operation.

Technically, I believe it was sold as a baby gate, but given that there were no babies in the household and one tiny black spaniel was already attempting to commit crimes at ankle height, its intended purpose became fairly obvious.

The idea was simple enough.

The gate would create boundaries.

The dogs would remain on one side of those boundaries.

Human civilisation would continue uninterrupted.

This was, in hindsight, an extraordinarily optimistic plan given that Puppy Bramble rapidly revealed herself to be some sort of tiny black parkour cryptid.

No furniture was safe.

No surface remained unconquered.

The house itself seemed to become, in Bramble’s mind, less a home and more an interactive climbing frame designed specifically for her entertainment.

Sofas were launched from.

Tables were traversed at alarming speed.

Bookshelves were viewed merely as ladders with literary decorations attached.

Chairs became stepping stones in elaborate aerial manoeuvres.

The gate itself simply became another obstacle to creatively disrespect.

At first, Puppy Bramble did not so much respect the gate as conduct a series of engineering assessments on it.

She approached it thoughtfully.

Examined the lower gap.

Then simply flattened herself like a furry liquid and slid underneath it.

Not squeezed.

Not scrambled.

Slid.

Like a small black otter made entirely of determination and poor intentions.

So naturally we blocked the gap underneath.

For perhaps three entire minutes, we believed we had solved the problem.

Puppy Bramble examined the new arrangement with great interest, then immediately used the blockage as a climbing aid to help herself get over the top instead.

This became a recurring theme of early puppyhood.

Every solution we invented simply became part of the next escape attempt.

As Bramble got older, she eventually became too large to fit underneath the gate at all.

At this point, the humans of the household became briefly smug.

Again.

Surely now, at last, the gate had finally become effective.

Then Bramble promptly jumped straight over the top of it.

Easy peasy.

Not dramatically.

Not with effort.

Just a casual little vault as though the gate existed merely as a decorative suggestion.

To be fair to the humans, however, we did eventually teach her that bookshelves were not, in fact, acceptable climbing apparatus.

We begrudgingly permit considerable amounts of indoor parkour involving chairs, sofas, sofa backs, beanbags, and various other pieces of furniture that have long since surrendered any claim to dignity.

But bookshelves are forbidden.

And so is jumping the gate.

Now, realistically, I strongly suspect that if I placed a large quantity of cheese on top of the bookshelves and then left the room unattended, the cheese would not remain there for long.

But despite this, I have not actually witnessed Bramble attempt to climb a bookshelf since she was a very young puppy.

Likewise, when she was around six months old she would happily launch herself over the gate whenever she felt like it.

But we taught her not to.

And these days she generally respects that boundary.

Which is an important distinction.

The gate itself does not physically prevent the dogs from getting through.

The dogs have simply learned that I would prefer them not to.

Physically speaking, both dogs remain perfectly capable of bypassing it whenever they truly wish to.

Which creates a slightly awkward dynamic whenever builders, plumbers, delivery drivers, or nervous workmen visit the house.

I politely place the dogs behind the gate.

The visitors visibly relax.

“Oh good,” they say. “They won’t be able to get through there, will they?”

Now.

I would never lie.

So I simply say:

“They won’t.”

Which is completely true.

Provided:

• I remain visible,

• nobody opens cheese,

• nobody falls downstairs,

• nobody abandons Doughnut emotionally,

• and no unattended roast chicken happens to roll through the hallway.

Under those circumstances, the gate functions perfectly.

The plumbers continue their work reassured by the presence of approximately three feet of modified baby gate while two intensely observant dogs watch them from the other side with enormous interest.

Not predatory interest.

Just curiosity.

Bramble tends to stare at workmen as though carefully supervising extremely disappointing apprentices.

Doughnut mostly looks hopeful that somebody may accidentally drop food.

Neither dog has any desire whatsoever to attack a plumber.

In fact, Bramble is so conflict-averse with humans that even when being fussed by people she actively dislikes, she simply puts her tail between her legs and endures the interaction sadly rather than growling or snapping.

The gate is not there because the dogs are dangerous.

It is there because humans sometimes feel safer when there is a visible line between themselves and unfamiliar animals.

And honestly, that confidence matters.

The delivery drivers are perhaps my favourite example of this.

Some are perfectly happy to say hello to the dogs directly.

Others become noticeably more comfortable only once the gate is closed between them and the living room.

Only then do they approach the front door carrying takeaway bags they firmly believe they are protected from by approximately three feet of modified baby gate.

Meanwhile the dogs themselves are mostly just thinking:

“The chicken man has arrived.”

There is no malice in this.

If anything, Doughnut appears deeply emotionally invested in the safe and successful completion of the food transfer operation.

Because the truth is that the gate does not work because it physically stops the dogs.

It works because the dogs understand context.

Most of the time, they understand that I am asking them to stay there for a reason.

And most of the time, they agree this is reasonable.

But occasionally circumstances arise in which the social contract collapses.

One such event occurred when I slipped halfway up the stairs after treading on my own skirt and came crashing down painfully onto my hip.

The sound this produced alarmed Bramble greatly.

Now, according to the established gate agreement, the correct response should technically have been:
“Remain calmly in the living room.”

Instead Bramble reacted as though the laws of physics had ceased to apply.

She launched herself over the gate immediately to come and investigate the crisis.

Not because the gate failed.

Because, in her mind, an injured Mum outranked household rules.

Unfortunately this then created a secondary emergency.

Doughnut was suddenly alone downstairs.

For Bramble, the situation had become:
“Mum may be injured.”

For Doughnut, the situation had become:
“Everybody has abandoned me and I was not consulted.”

Which, emotionally speaking, may actually have been worse.

So naturally Doughnut also launched the gate in order to join the ongoing incident.

Neither dog could help me up.

Neither dog possessed medical qualifications.

But both arrived at high speed to provide emotional support and considerable quantities of concerned licking.

And honestly, that is the thing about the gate.

People assume it represents control.

That it is proof the dogs are contained.

Restricted.

Prevented.

But really, our household runs mostly on communication, trust, routine, and two dogs who generally choose to cooperate with my requests because our relationship matters to them.

The gate itself is almost symbolic.

A polite visual marker meaning:

“Mum would like us to stay here for now.”

And most of the time, they are kind enough to pretend it is a real barrier at all.

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Either Bramble was pregnant or she wasn’t.

The answer would arrive eventually.

Then we reached the four-week mark and apparently decided to compress an entire soap opera into the following fortnight.

There was the pregnancy test.

There was the increasingly desperate quest to obtain a suitable urine sample.

There was the custom-built milk-carton collection device.

There was strategic hydration.

There was the negative result.

There was the growing suspicion that I was either completely correct or completely losing my mind.

Then there was the ultrasound.

Then there were the puppies.

And now, suddenly, this is real.

The uncertainty is gone.

The planning has begun.

Two weeks ago I was attempting to collect a urine sample from a spaniel who appeared to have permanently retired from urination.

This week I am converting an entire room into a nursery.

The first problem was that I did not actually possess a nursery.

What I possessed was approximately forty years’ worth of creative obsessions occupying the same geographical location as a room.

For most people, a craft room is a place where crafting happens.

Mine is more like a warehouse.

It contains the tools, equipment and materials for everything from spinning, weaving and felting to carving, leatherwork, sewing, embroidery, jewellery making and a dozen other skills accumulated over a lifetime.

There are spinning wheels.

There are sewing machines.

There are weaving looms.

There are carving tools.

There are leatherworking tools.

There are beads.

There is fabric.

There is wool.

There is felt.

Some people collect ornaments.

Apparently I collect crafts.

The actual crafting then takes place elsewhere.

Usually the living room.

Usually all of the living room.

A surprisingly small armful of supplies can somehow expand to occupy an entire floor of the house.

I do not fully understand the mechanism.

I only know that it happens.

The room had also become the temporary resting place for various pieces of furniture, storage, and miscellaneous household objects that had been shoved in there because there wasn’t a more sensible place for them to live.

At some point in the distant past, it may also have contained floor.

Evidence for this remained inconclusive.

It was a shameful state so much so that large amounts of detritus were literally spilling out of the door into the hallway.

Several days later, against all expectations, a room has emerged.

Not a perfect room.

Not even a particularly tidy room.

But a room.

There is floor.

There is space for a whelping pen.

There is a chair.

There is a mattress.

There is even enough empty space for me to walk from one end to the other without specialist climbing equipment.

The mattress has created an additional problem.

Doughnut has carefully inspected the preparations and concluded that the chair is for Mum, the future whelping area is for Bramble, and the mattress is for him.

This assessment appears to be based entirely on the fact that it is a mattress.

Doughnut considers mattresses to be one of humanity’s finest achievements.

While all of this has been happening, Bramble has started her new puppy food.

I found a food I liked.

The pet shop had one puppy version.

I bought all of it.

This sounds more dramatic than it is. There were only thirty-six cartons, which sounds like an absurd quantity until you realise Bramble currently gets through two cartons a day.

Years of managing unreliable energy levels have taught me that when I find something I need, I buy enough of it to avoid needing another trip next week.

Unfortunately, Bramble currently has similar feelings about puppy food.

I shall almost certainly be returning to buy them out again.

The food itself is basically glorious chicken, rice, carrots and seaweed.

Bramble absolutely loves it.

Every morning, Doughnut sits waiting for his opportunity to lick out the empty cartons with the sort of trembling anticipation normally associated with sighting a cat.

Apparently the finest culinary experience available to him is whatever microscopic residue remains stuck to the packaging.

There have, however, been consequences.

Bramble has always been a drive-by farter.

She has been known to wander over, deposit a fart in somebody’s immediate vicinity, and then leave to provide affection elsewhere.

It is a remarkably efficient system.

The new puppy food appears to have elevated matters considerably.

The farts are louder.

The farts are longer.

The farts are more frequent.

The farts are more ambitious.

In short, the nutritional requirements have increased and so has the blast radius.

Bramble herself is also beginning to look pregnant.

Not obviously pregnant.

If you didn’t know her, you probably wouldn’t notice.

People have spent most of her life mistaking her for a small black Labrador anyway.

Personally, I think the spaniel is obvious, but experience suggests I may be in the minority on that point.

At the moment she is looking slightly broader through the ribs, slightly lower through the belly, and, rather annoyingly, more like the Labrador everyone has always assumed she was.

If you know her well, though, she is definitely changing shape.

Beyond that, life has become an endless stream of deliveries, planning, measuring, reading and learning.

The puppy collars have arrived.

The feeding equipment has arrived.

The aspirator has arrived.

The worming medication has arrived.

The whelping pen is on its way.

Every day seems to introduce another thing I didn’t know I needed to know.

At some point I will also need to accept that my normal writing schedule is likely to suffer.

The serious canine essays are not disappearing.

The Fur Family Adventures are not disappearing.

But there may be a period over the next couple of months where they are forced to compete for space with an unreasonable number of pupdates.

I trust readers will endure this hardship bravely.

For now, Bramble is happy.

Doughnut is delighted.

The nursery is slowly emerging from beneath four decades of accumulated creativity.

And somewhere inside Bramble are an unknown number of puppies quietly continuing their work.

We still don’t know how many there are.

But they have already taken over the house.