BEAGLES ARE REALLY ‘LABS’

Meet world’s first test-tube pups

LOS ANGELES — A team of veterinarians, scientists and lab workers gathered around a surrogate hound and watched her give birth to seven halfpound puppies — the first dogs ever conceived in a test tube.

“We each took a puppy and rubbed it with a little towel and when it started to squiggle and cry, we knew we had success,” said Dr. Alexander Travis, who runs the lab at the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca.

“Their eyes were closed. They were just adorable, cute, with smooshedin faces. We checked them to make sure they looked normal and were all breathing,” he said.

The puppies (pictured), born on July 10, are a mix of beagle, Labrador and cocker spaniel and are now healthy 5montholds, Travis said. All but one female were adopted. She’s being kept by the lab to have her own litter.

The lab kept track of the puppies by painting their nails with different color polish. Travis adopted two, still known by their nailpolish names, Red and Green.

In vitro fertilization, the process of fertilizing an egg with sperm outside the body, is widely used to assist human reproduction these days. The first human birth from IVF was in 1978.

But IVF efforts with dogs have repeatedly failed until now, according to Dr. Pierre Comizzoli, a reproductive physiologist for the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va., which works with Cornell.

“The biology of the dog is really, really different than humans,” Comizzoli said.

Dog pregnancies last only two months and females go into heat just once or twice a year, releasing immature eggs instead of mature eggs needed for IVF.