As I was looking through some photos my daughter shared with me recently, I came across this photo of Bella and nine puppies. As you can see, Bella is a black and white border collie, and there is only one black and white puppy in this group. All the rest are reds, browns and merle.

Now it is not uncommon for border collies to have different colors in their litters, if it so happens that they carry those different color genes. Bella was a mother twice before and had litters of four the first time and two the second time, all of them being blacks, or blue merles. This time, lucky for her, she decided to give birth to only one girl, a beautiful black and white standard. The other eight puppies belong to Sadie.

Sadie is a red merle and mated with Kippa who is a red and white standard male, thus all of the red and brown puppies. Sadie is a smaller border collie and had a heavy load trying to take care of eight pups at once, especially since this was her first time to be a mama..

It just so happened that Bella gave birth to her one puppy, the day after Sadie gave birth to her eight. My daughter and granddaughter helped bottle feed some of Sadie’s pups in the beginning, trying to help her out, but we decided to introduce three of Sadie’s puppies to Bella for help in nursing them. We usually tried to keep the same three with Bella , and Sadie had to deal with only five.

Needless to say, sometimes the pups ended up changing nursing moms. So later on, Bella being the patient, and loving mama that she has always been, would get overrun with puppies any time that she tried to lay down to let the puppies nurse, all of them thinking that she was mama.

When providing a surrogate mother for nursing puppies, not only is important that the dam has recently given birth and is continuing to lactate, but they need to also be amicable, and willing to let them nurse. Fortunately, Bella was the perfect surrogate mother for these puppies. You can see in the photograph how much they loved her.

Funny thing, as they grew older, I am not sure if they knew who their real mama was.