09/03/2025
Rings C
FA Bl/T
Whelping Complications & Singleton Puppy Syndrome
We seldom post distressing cases because fortunately, they’re fewer and further apart than our happy endings but, given that the tragic outcome of this story was almost inevitable and the info behind it is both interesting and helpful, I decided to include this one. Fielding a call from an anxious owner whose pregnant bitch, Rings, looked as if she’d been on the verge of giving birth for over 24 hours, we wasted no time in getting there, after which Tawanda headed straight for the vet with her, arriving just as dusk was falling. The vets were busy, but when they saw her discharge and raging temperature, the urgency of the situation was obvious and she was immediately prepped for an emergency C Section. Poor girlie. Anaesthetized and finally out of pain, all the vet could do was remove the putrid body of a large single pup (which would have been a breach birth) clean her up and complete her hysterectomy, after which she remained in high care - only to succumb, a few days later, to the septicaemia they’d been trying so hard to get her through.
When Tawanda said the vet had told him it was a classic case of Singleton Puppy Syndrome, I did the usual and looked it up to try and make sense of it. As we all know, dogs usually give birth to multiple pups but occasionally, when only one develops, it’s called a Singleton, and the condition (referred to as Singleton Puppy Syndrome) not only presents extra challenges for the mother and pup, but can often be fatal to both. Altho more likely to be seen in toy breeds like Chihuahuas, it’s uncommon, has no single cause and can be the result of genes, hormones, age (very young or old mothers) infections or poor health and nutrition and, to make matters worse, it’s hardly surprising that it’s very often missed altogether.
Apparently, labour is initiated by the pups, only starting when they produce enough stress hormone to kick it into gear, but when there’s only one pup, with ample space and food, it doesn’t produce enough of this hormone to trigger it, which is a real problem because
the placenta's only viable for a certain amount of time, after which it will fail and if the pup isn't born, it will die in utero. When this happens, if the mother dog doesn’t deliver the dead pup, she’s in danger of becoming seriously ill and ending up with a ruptured uterus and, without an emergency caesarian to remove it, she will inevitably die too, which is what happened to Rings, despite all our best efforts.
Having said that, there’s a bizarre twist to this story because very occasionally, when a singleton pup dies, the mother’s immune system sees it as a foreign body and, in an attempt to shield the mother from infection, encases it in a calciferous substance that mummifies it – creating something called a lithopedion, or ‘stone baby’ – a name that comes from the Ancient Greek for ‘litho’, meaning stone, and ‘pedion’, baby. What’s more, apparently this rare phenomenon is not unique to dogs but can also occur in humans, with 300 known cases of lithopedion fetuses recorded in the history of medical literature, most of which went undetected for decades, only to be found when the women carrying them happened to be X-rayed for other conditions.
Poor Rings, I wish we’d been able to save her, but hopefully her story will make it easier for the rest of us to prevent this happening again on our watch.
RIP Rings ❤