My girl was mated 6 weeks tomorrow 1st mating. She is huge and the scan thought a good litter. I am desperately trying not to overfeed her but she is permanantly hungry. To-night she has done something that she has not done since a puppy and destroyed an expensive pair of shoes of my OH. She is panting a lot but the house maybe too hot for her I don't know. Anyone experienced this. It would not be her first litter.

There has been several threads of bitches starting to pant and dig early but held out till due date or later.

She needs to be able to go somewhere cool/lie on cold floor, her meals smaller/more frequent puppy kibble so she doesn't feel bloated and breathless.

If she has a worm load activated by thr pregnancy hormones she will be bloated and needs to start Panacur 10% daily.

Hopefully she will soon settle

Thanks for that. She has settled a bit now as the heating has gone off on the timer. I did wonder whether she knew she had done something wrong although my OH was remarkably calm when he found her in the middle of chewing up the shoes his Mum had bought him for Christmas.
She is now due to start worming and I will have to start feeding her in bits and pieces during the day. I have some frozen fish defrosting. I am trying to go for high protein foods hoping that will be more filling for her rather than feeding her loads more bulk. Ordinarily she has a really good appetite anyway.

> did wonder whether she knew she had done something wrong

Rest assured that she didn't do it because it was wrong.  Relieving stress would be a good guess, but she will have no idea that it wasn't a scruffy pair of trainers (as opposed to a really expensive pair of shoes.) 

I don't restrict food during the latter end of pregnancy, giving as much as a bitch wants in the last 2 weeks.  But, yes, as you suggested, I make sure it is high protein.  :-)

Thanks for that input too. Ah I didn't think she knew the difference but obviously she would not normally chew up anything at all LOL
So she has about 3 weeks and looks quite heavy. Would you worry about that now. I was worrying that she would become so big that she would struggle to have the pups without difficulty?
She seems back to normal to-day and still wants to eat lots.

my girl had pups now but eat very well i was worried about pups being to big she is a toy breed her 1st litter she did fab and i let her eat alot for the last few weeks she was massive at the end :)x

Don't restrict her food or she will end up in poor condition as the pups will take what they want at her expense.

>So she has about 3 weeks and looks quite heavy. Would you worry about that now.

I no longer worry about it.  I bred from a smaller bitch than usual (after years of breeding for self whelpers), and she was enormous by 5 weeks.  I thought her belly would touch the ground!  I thought that if it was a big litter, then she was going to need plenty of stamina to rear them.  I fed her as much as she wanted (again high protein) and I have never seen such an easy whelping in all my years with dogs.  She went totally off kibble, so she was on wet food until pups were quite well grown.  As she was bound to have a sore mouth from all that cleaning she got plenty of poached fish, chicken and minced steak.  I was thrilled that she wasn't skin and bones, and she ate like a horse.