Litters

A record that keeps siblings together.

A litter is not just a date on a puppy. It has its own details that belong to none of them — the mating date, the litter letter, counts of born, raised and stillborn animals, and notes on how it went. These are exactly what a studbook asks for.

You can create one at any time, even with a single field filled in. A litter is started at mating, when only one date is known, and completed after weaning. The database guards two things that are easy to mistype: a litter cannot be born before the mating, and there cannot be more raised than born.

A puppy is assigned to a litter in its own profile. On the kennel's public page the animals are then grouped by litter — even a litter of one gets its own heading, because that is an ordinary thing and hiding it among the others would say something else about it.

Only the letter and the date leave the kennel. Counts, the mating date and notes about complications are visible to nobody else — they are for the studbook and the breeder, not for a buyer.

Litters are part of the Breeder plan. Without it you cannot start one — and if you had it and stopped paying, your records stay: you can still see and correct them, you just cannot add another litter. Locking the data away would take the studbook paperwork with it, and that was never part of the deal.