17th June 2026
Through our Brood Dog Volunteer programme, dedicated volunteers welcome a pregnant mum into their home, caring for her throughout her pregnancy and raising her puppies until they are ten weeks old. It’s a vital part of our breeding programme, which is built around the absolute highest standards of care. Every mum is fully minded, loved, and monitored through every single stage. But sometimes, nature just does its own thing in the nest, and what happened to one of our newest arrivals was simply one of those things that couldn’t have been avoided or predicted by anyone.
On the 16th April, mum Savana delivered her five pups, and as usual the first few days, the usual routine of weighing brought back a familiar, quiet anxiety.
Lynn Christianson, who has fostered more than 200 pups so far for AADI, knows that feeling all too well.
“I usually have small panic attacks during the first couple of days when one or the other of them decide they are not going to put on weight on a particular day,” Lynn admits. “You would think in all the years we have been doing this that I would have a bit of cop on by now, but no, I still manage to convince myself there is something wrong if they are not piling on the weight.”
By day three, something felt a bit off with Miss Orange, who up until then had been nicknamed Saucy Sally because she was always giving out.
“I pick her up and think, something here feels a bit off, she doesn’t feel the same in the front as I think she should,” Lynn says. “To me it felt like her ribs didn’t come round to the front of her, they sort of stopped at the sides. To add to my confusion, everything else about her was perfectly normal. She was putting on weight, she was wriggling over to Savana for a feed the same as the rest of them.”
By day ten, she didn’t just feel flat, she looked so flat when lying down that Lynn changed her nickname permanently to Pancake.
A trip to the orthopaedic vet in Cork confirmed that Pancake had flat chest, highly likely because one of her larger siblings had been pushing against her in utero. “I have my suspicions,” Lynn laughs, “but no body shaming in this house.”
A few hours later, the drive home involved Pancake, her teddy, and a massive brace. It wasn’t high fashion, and she made it very clear she didn’t like it, but she showed her spirit and never stopped trying to get her legs under her. After consulting the vet again, Lynn and her husband decided to downsize the brace to help her move. The modification process required a real kitchen-table effort involving hacksaws, steak knives, and Stanley knives.
“In the end we got there and in the end so did she,” Lynn says. “Bit by bit she started to walk around in it. That is her hanging over the board from the pen, like Mrs. Brown hanging over the garden fence.”
And these days, Pancake doesn’t really resemble her name anymore. She’s filled out beautifully and is now just as round and sturdy as the rest of the litter.
