Very bad news . . .

Apologies for the delay but it’s very difficult to bring yourself to announce really bad news and we’ve certainly had a big shock with Jill’s litter of puppies.

Jill’s a wonderful character, she’s playful and fun loving. One of her tricks involves chasing her stainless steel water bowl around her pen (or preferably the yard). She doesn’t just chase it along the floor, it goes up, and even along, the wall. She’s become so skilled that it’s very entertaining to watch her.

Unfortunately, Jill will still play with the bowl when she has puppies, so we invested in a bowl with turned down edges that, presumably are intended to prevent dogs upsetting them.

This was no challenge for Jill, she very quickly learned how to get the bowl moving along the floor and then flick it into the air with her nose.

I decided to modify the bowl by bending the bottom edges inwards to form a sort of retaining lip, and then I filled the underneath cavity with concrete. The result was an extremely heavy water bowl which offered virtually no grip for a dog to pick it up.

Success . . . (or so I thought).

Sadly (and incredibly) Jill somehow learned to pick up the heavy concrete-filled bowl and to our horror, she must have carried it into the bedding area and dropped it on her litter of eight tiny puppies. All but two were killed.