Happy news for Vali the Police Dog
Here at VSA we are lucky enough to work with some incredible animal services throughout New Zealand, including Auckland Zoo and the NZ Police Dog Section. The hard-working police dogs and their handlers are well known to our team and so we were incredibly proud to be able to help out police dog Vali with her second pregnancy.
Vali is a 3-year-old German Shepherd who works for the Auckland Police Dog Unit. She came in to see our Mount Albert team at the end of September for a pregnancy ultrasound to check for a positive pregnancy. On this visit, Dr Mike Coleman confirmed multiple viable gestational sacs, but we were unable to say how many there were.
It’s tricky to do this when there are multiple sacs at the best of times, let alone when you are doing an ultrasound on a very active police dog. Vali is a very strong dog, as all police dogs are and so getting her to stay still while we tried to count the number of pups was a challenging task. Vali is a dog who knows her own mind and that meant that while on this visit we were able to confirm a pregnancy, we had to defer counting how many puppies there might be to another visit.
Vali’s pregnancy continued incredibly well, and we had a second visit from her at the end of October. On this visit we took some x-rays and were able to confirm 7 puppies. You can see then numbered on the x-ray below.
Shortly after this second visit, Vali took a trip down to the Dog Training Centre birthing unit and she started whelping almost immediately. By the end of the weekend of 29/30th October she had delivered 7 healthy puppies, 4 girls and 3 boys.
Vali is an amazing mum. She is calm and maternal, using all her police dog training to keep her puppies in check. Female police dogs are made of tougher stuff than the males – well you would need to be to rear 7 new police dogs, wouldn’t you ?!
Vali’s pups are growing up fast and they are just over 7 weeks old now. Aren’t they adorable?
Meet Auckland’s newest Dog Squad!
