Dog Breeding: Choosing a Stud Dog and Managing a Stud Dog By Marty Greer, DVM | July 5, 2023
is to decide if we will keep him.
Once he passes his veterinary exam, he needs a Brucellosis test to prove he is negative for this disease. Repeat the Brucellosis test in 60 days to prove he stayed negative and was not incubating the disease at purchase. We don’t want to introduce a disease we don’t have! Screening for Brucellosis must be run at a lab on serum (blood). There is no longer an FDA approved Brucella test kit available for home use or use at the veterinary clinic.
Raising a Stud Dog We recommend giving Doc Roy’s® Daily Care vitamins to replacements we are growing for breeding, male or female dogs. Daily Care helps support optimum growth. The goal is to raise replacements that mature physically by one and one half years of age. Their diet should be the one you raise your puppies on as you are feeding the best food you can get. Can Breeding Dogs Live Together Once home, isolate for four weeks, treat for internal and external parasites, give a booster vaccination, and make sure he is staying healthy. After the four week isolation, we can raise with appropriate sized and temperament puppies. Do not select a roommate that is dominant as we want this guy to be dominant and an aggressive breeder. Never grow a stud dog prospect with a retired female. Grandma will box his ears every time he acts like a teenage boy and suppress breeding behavior. Breeding is a learned trait, and we want to set this guy up for success.
A male breeding dog is called a stud dog. There are multiple factors that go into stud dog selection—selecting for fertility, ease of breeding, litter size and the ability to correct a weakness we see in our female dogs. We select new genetics because of conformation, size, and the ability to reproduce the traits in offspring. Much time goes into looking at parents and siblings as stud dogs are selected and purchased as puppies. We keep our own female dogs as we can raise better females with known maternal traits for whelping, litter size, and ease of handling than we can buy. Replacement females will be selected out of these stud dogs, so select well. Remember, management should not stop after the purchase. Stud Dog Health Tests Once selected, take your stud dog prospect to a veterinarian for a health exam. Your veterinarian should make sure he has both testicles in the scrotum, and that the prepuce and penis are normal. The veterinarian should also assess the knees, hips, heart, bite, hernias (umbilical and/or inguinal) and general health. There is rarely a perfect puppy, and we need to know where the weakness
By five months of age, it is good to house a stud dog by
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