Myla makes history giving birth to record number of pups!

Myla, a three-year-old Cane Corso, an Italian mastiff breed, may have broken the Irish record for the highest number of puppies in one litter, giving birth to 17.

That's according to her owner, John Kerrwick from Rochfortbridge, who is looking forward to a busy few weeks ahead.

"Myla is cleaning and feeding them, but with that number of pups, we'll have to be on hand with bottle feeds too because it is a lot of puppies for her to manage," John tells the Westmeath Examiner.

"I think it's the highest number for a litter of pups in Ireland. I think the record for the Cane Corso is 19, and that happened in the UK, but the usual number in a litter is between six and eight pups. And that's what we were originally told she was going to have.

John says that sadly five of the pups did not survive from birth - however, mother and the 12 surviving pups are doing very well.

"It started on Wednesday morning last week, she had her first pup at 9.30, followed by the second at 10.30, which passed away. The third came 11.30 and then the fourth at 1.30.

"She was still very big and we waited from half one until five o'clock, but there was nothing happening, so we rang the vet and she said to bring her in.

"The next we heard was at 8am the following morning when the vet rang us to tell us that she had good news and some bad news. The good news was that she had 13 more pups, but some were stillborn. So she had 17 in total but only 12 survived - four girls and eight boys."

The proud dad, Gino, is a one and a half-year-old Cane Corso and also owned by John.

"The grey ones are like Daddy, they call that colour 'blue', and the rest are like the mum. This was her first and last litter, this one was enough for her. If we had been told by the vet originally about how many she was actually expecting, we would have brought her in for a C-Section straight away, but unfortunately we didn't know.

"I've had dogs all my life so we're delighted to have them," said John.

You can follow Myla and the pups' story on Instagram @westmeathcanecorso.