Ferdinand is a six year old tricolor Smooth Collie. His sire and his dam are both former Top 10 Smooth Collie show dogs. TC (Ch. Row-Bar’s Sum Of All Fears HT) and Ursula (Ch. Row-Bar’s Southern Dream) have between them won Herding Group, Best in Specialty Show, a Collie Club of America Award of Merit and three top 10 rankings end of the year. The night she gave birth to the litter (litres always arrive at night), Úrsula gave birth to eight healthy puppies and then went into uterine inertia. The contractions stopped, though he was sure there was another pup there. He gave her an injection of oxytocin to try to stimulate more contractions to no avail. The first eight pups were nursing and looking good.
First thing in the morning I took Úrsula to the vet. She confirmed that there was one more pup there, and after another failed injection of oxytocin, Ursula was prepped for a C-section. In a last ditch effort, the vet was able to get the last pup out without surgery. He was a tri smooth male. He didn’t look quite right, but I took him home and tried to get him to nurse with the other pups. He was too weak to nurse. I fed him by tube and took him to the vet. She diagnosed a systemic infection and gave him an antibiotic injection and sent me home with enough antibiotic for one injection every 12 hours for a week. He was never strong enough to nurse, so I tube fed him (tube feeding involves sticking a tube down the puppy’s throat and filling his stomach with milk replacer) every 4 hours until he was strong enough to lay. standing and eating from a puppy feeder, about three weeks.
Every weekend my wife would come home (she lives and works 90 miles away during the week) and ask “did the pup die yet?” He survived and grew, but he was smaller than the other eight. At 6 weeks old, I moved the entire litter into the kennel building in a double size “puppy” run. The little tri was so small that he could climb under the edge of the run into the interior of the kennel and would go visit the other dogs. At the time, he had an adult male collie who was so dog-aggressive that he couldn’t let him run with the other males and he also had a curmudgeonly older male corgi. He would find the wandering cub on any of his runs: visiting. It was at that time that I named it Fernando after Ferdinand Magellan, the world explorer. I registered it as a Row-Bar World Traveler.
During the first three weeks of its life, the tip of its tail withered and fell off and it gradually developed a clubfoot at the end of its left foreleg. It wasn’t until he was almost nine months old that I noticed that his right shoulder was malformed. He walks with a limp and can’t jog normally, but he jumps and shows no signs of pain. He loves everyone and is the first dog in the house to approach visitors. His will to live in the first weeks of his life was amazing. My wife called him the “dog he was never meant to be” but she put up with it. He is lying at my feet as I write this. Ferdinand the Survivor.
