Progesterone Testing. Waste of money or Essential Tool ??

Waste of money if you can have the bitch board with dog or vice versa. 

Cost wise cheaper to travel to stud than do the tests where on average your likely to need at least three.

Also don't like putting my bitches through unnecessary unpleasant blood draws. 

Prefer to have reproduction as natural as possible.  Preserves natural breeding ability/behaviour.

Personally I think with stud fees being the price of a puppy, expecting the stud owner to actually have the bitch to stay is reasonable trouble, after all they are getting a lot more than the price of a weeks boarding if successful.

Essential for use with frozen AI of course.

Agree absolutely Barbara.

Essential for me regardless of travel distances and have tested to travel under an hour to over three days across Europe.
When travelling one end of country to other testing is cheaper than hotels for anything up to a week or repeated long journies
Prefer bitches visiting my male to be tested as many bring bitches far too early and I don't board bitches. Testing is simple and removes so many variables, less stress all round IMHO

Hi
we had our bitch progesterone tested got the fone call to take bitch on these dates, had her scanned and nothing , this is the second tine i've done this some years ago on another bitch and again then nothing , so i won't use progesterone again,

>got the fone call to take bitch on these dates,

but was this a guesstimate of how the season would progress or had you got a result saying she had actually ovulated???

Example you test and the levels show approaching ovulation.  the average bitches levels double each day so a guess can be made where she might be x days ahead, but and it's a big but, unless you have a reading that shows she has ovulated, then she may not ovulate at all, she may stick at the pre ovulation state for up to a week, and your timing will be out.

The safest approach is to keep testing every other day until you get a reading that shows ovulation has occurred.

Your timing can be right, but for some reason hormone levels are n5to maintained/increased to maintain pregnancy, or the bitch resorbs the pups for some other reason.

We know bitches can absorb puppies up to 6 weeks.

Hi
thanks for reply. Good news Yesterday we took our bitch for scan and there's approx 3 puppies, now we've got to wait as last time she went 40 days miscarriage, fingers crossed