I spent this past New Year’s Eve walking through our nursery clutching close to my chest the most beautiful little Rouweiler puppy we’ve ever produced, looking up into the bright, star-filled night, almost as if to search the heavens for some reasoning behind this nightmare that had been our constant companion for the past eight days. A short, heavy sigh quickly brought me back to reality, as this tiny, now disease-ravaged puppy’s body went limp, her eyes glazed over and the fight ended...

My eyes filled with tears. My heart sank even lower than it had over these past eight days. I knew the inevitable but I hated to let death beat us. We had been fighting so valiantly, our little team, Eve, myself, and this beautiful litter of eleven puppies that God had given us four weeks earlier, but we never had a chance. My hand ran over the now motionless body of the little girl we had nicknamed "Angel," because she had been the one to hang onto life the longest. She had been our inspiration, our raison d’etre, our reason for being, that kept us in the fight for the twenty hour days we had been currently experiencing. In fact, for the past four and one-half hours I had been walking - more like wandering - through our nursery begging God to let this one live. And, each time I put her down in the pen she stopped breathing, then I’d quickly pick her up, she’d pull her body close to mine and short, shallow breaths would begin. Somehow, some way, I kept praying that she would find the way back to life. I laid our little angel down and tucked her in with a little blanket. The fight was over. I knew the inevitable. I had watched it for these past eight days, as one puppy after another died before our eyes as we stood helpess. What had happened? What mistakes had we done to cause this nightmare? How can I stop it from happening? Those were the questions that had racked my brain for the past eight days.

December 23, 1989, was the first day in this nightmare, many factors come to mind that could have contributed to this outbreak of disease. For one thing it was brutally cold. In fact, it was the coldest day in recorded history with temperatures dipping all the way down to ten degrees here in Tampa. With the wind chill it was said to be minus nineteen degrees. We brought all our dogs inside our house. The puppies were put in an especially warm area. We had heating pads, heat lamps, and central heating in the house to combat this severe weather. Everything seemed fine. Then, around three o’clock in the morning the electricity went oft. Five hours later it was still off and now it was thirty-eight degrees in our house. The high that day was twenty-nine degrees.

Still, no signs of any problems. The weather and lack of electricity repeated this same scenario a second night. We awoke this morning to find two listless puppies in our litter of eleven. They seemed in shock. We immediately began emergency measures -IV fluids, warm compresses and an assortment of medications, to fight the extreme diarrhea and vomiting we were now witnessing. In less than five minutes they were dead. What the hell was going on? Of course the scourge of all kennel owners - parvo - came to mind first. No way - I immediately dismissed this option. Our kennels are always spotless, our dogs are all up-to-date with their vaccinations, and our puppies are isolated from other dogs and people. But what was happening here?

Right before our eyes we watched two of the other puppies begin to retch a little, as if they were trying to vomit, but nothing came up. We isolated those two. We did blood work, fecal flotation and examination, urine work, and found nothing unusual. In a matter of hours, even with IV fluids and an assortment of medications, these two puppies had lost over twenty percent of their body weight. That same night they both died. The team of veterinarians that we put to task over the following eight days were as dumbfounded as we were. We did every test possible and each test pointed to some sort of bacterial disease. Viral diseases were out - or were they?

We have over three thousand dollars worth of veterinary books in our library and I promise you that I read each and every one of those books looking for answers to our dilemna. You turn to the chapters on Parvo and you find a whole series of inconclusive statements. For example, the temperature of the puppy may or may not go up, the White Blood Cell count may or may not go up, vomiting may or may not occur, diarrhea will definitely occur - but damn it, diarrhea occurs in all gastrointestinal diseases. I read chapters on distemper, Herpes, Coronavirus, on and on, and each time you are hit with a list of inconsistent diagnostic tools - the disease may or may not produce certain symptoms. I called my friends at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine and once again I was left with a bunch of inconsistencies and maybes.

We turned our attention to parasites such as coccidia. Certain signs were there but no way could this be the single cause of our problems. Bacterial diseases became our only real possibility, but what bacterial disease could spread so fast and cause death so fast? So far ever puppy that had showed symptoms of the disease had died - and within forty-eight hours. Try and imagine our dilemna. We have just gone through our busiest season for our nursery business. We are utterly exhausted from the eighteen-hour days we have spent over the past month in this endeavor. And now we are watching what had been only two days earlier the pride of our breeding program, perfectly healthy, lively puppies, now die one after the other despite the hundreds of dollars of IV equipment, antibiotics, and laboratory work we have put into this fight. Every four hours we had to give IV’s and other medications to the now seven puppies that were living. The leading cause became Salmonella poisoning from some sort of bad food. The culture from the autopsy of the first puppy to die came back positive for a pathogenic E. co/i. The antibiotic sensitivity scan lead us to us Amikacin, at $280.00 a bottle. We continued our IV therapy and now added the Amikacin and in three days all the puppies stabilized - not fully recovered, just stabilized; in the following four days they were back on normal food and fluids.

Meanwhile, just as we thought everything was going to be back to normal, our worst nightmare once again began to unfold. It was the Friday before New Year’s Eve. I got up early that morning after a good night’s sleep - the first in nearly a month - and took some of the dogs tracking. It was a beautiful morning and a beautiful tracking session. Life was back to normal. The new year would start off right. I came home, put the dogs up and went to look at the puppies. Everything seemed fine. I went to check on a second litter of puppies that were now four weeks old. I watched in horror as each of the six puppies, one after another, began vomiting and gagging, almost like they were in unison. What the hell?, I thought to myself. I ran to get Eve. Her heart sank as she witnessed what we knew was happening. She began to cry. I held her, but it was little comfort. How had this happened? How had it spread? What had we done wrong? These were the questions that we kept asking ourselves and the team of researchers and veterinarians with whom we were in constant contact.

The first feeling one gets is of being unclean, but no way. Our kennels are spotless. We use ten percent bleach everyday and a pressure washer every day to clean after every dog and litter. Overcrowding is not a problem either as we have five acres just for the dogs. So where the hell did it come from? I would not sleep until I found out. And, how was it spread to the second litter? We employ aseptic technique with all our puppies. The two litters never came in contact with each other. Not only are they isolated, but we wear gloves and change clothes before we touch the puppies. A bleach foot bath is used for the shoes. So how could the second litter have gotten the disease? No one could answer our questions. Within four days four of the six puppies from the second litter died. I swore it was a viral disease simply because of the rapid manner of spread and the tremendous lethality it produced, but not one symptom would support this conclusion.

When the test results came back a week later it was again confirmed that a pathogenic E. coli was the killer. And even though we had put the puppies on the Amikacin immediately following our initial discovery of their symptoms, the strain was so destructive that death to the puppies occurred before the antibiotic could take effect. In the normal situation in the digestive tract of animals, including man, E. coli is what is termed a symbiotic bacteria - a biological condition in which both the bacteria and its host benefit from the relationship. In the case of E. coli it is a situation whereby its host cannot digest certain plant substances so E. coli lives in the gut, digests these plant substances and excretes by-products that the host then is able to digest. So both the host and E. coli benefit and neither is harmed. But, on the other hand, a pathogenic E. coli is one that has mutated to a harmful form and actually, as the name implies, becomes pathogenic - produces disease.

These pathogenic E. coli begin reproducing at a rapid rate and instead of producing a substance that the host organism can digest, they produce what is called an endotoxin - simply put, a poison. This poison, especially in a young puppy is highly toxic and causes the puppy to go into shock which ultimately leads to death. In our case we had the correct antibiotic, Amikacin, but its action was not as fast as the toxicity of the poison produced by the pathogenic E. coli.

The question remained - where did it come from? Normally, a pathogenic E. coli comes from poor sanitation or bad meat. In the first case, as I said earlier, in our kennels sanitation is of primary importance so no way could this be the cause. Bad meat became the only possibility. But how? We do feed a mixture of meats with our normal dog food to the adults, but none of the adults had been sick.

Or had they? Remember, I told you about the severely cold weather and how our electricity had gone off for five hours for two straight days. Well, two nights ago Eve and I were watching television and heard on the news that a slaughterhouse in Tampa had been found to be the source of some food poisoning outbreaks over the Christmas season. We get our meat from a butcher that gets his meat from this same slaughterhouse. We had fed some of the meat to some of our dogs prior to the freezing weather, but with the freezing weather we were not able to thaw the meat out to feed it anymore so only a little amount was used. The meat mixture was given to the mothers who came down with only mild signs of diarrhea which we attributed to the change in weather. They passed it on to the puppies in their milk. We stopped using all meat products when we first saw signs of the disease simply as a precautionary measure and as a result of this terrible ordeal we will never use it again.

I guess the one lesson to be learned from all this is do not feed your dogs raw meat no matter how fresh it is or how good a butcher shop it comes from. The reason we used raw meat was because it is a natural food for carnivores and dogs are carnivores, and nearly everyone in Germany that I know feeds raw meat to their dogs.

Last night Eve and I were sitting in our living room, nestled up next to the fireplace, watching one of our girls, Britta, feeding her litter of newborn puppies, seven healthy puppies, all fighting for a nipple, some pulling rhythmically back and forth for sustenance, others asleep with the nipple still in their tiny mouths. Britta was laying in the whelping box looking over at us with a big smile on her face. She was in heaven with her little family. Eve and I looked at each other, tears filled our eyes, we knew what each other thought. "This is why we do it," I said aloud in a choked voice. The sight of our little girl Britta proudly feeding her little family is what make the trials and tribulations of breeding dogs all worthwhile.