A musher asked us a simple question about one of his bitches:
"On the feeding sheet the ration is going down. But is the pregnancy taken into account?"
It wasn't. And the awkward part isn't the omission — it's the direction it leaned.
What was happening, and why it was the wrong way round
The suggested ration starts from the dog's weight and its work: what it has absorbed over the last seven days, what the plan asks of it over the next seven. The more it pulls, the more it eats. That is correct — for a dog that pulls.
A pregnant bitch pulls nothing. Her load falls to zero, the app concludes "rest", and rest is the lowest step on the table. So the sheet showed a number — a clean, precise number, with no warning attached — and that number went down at exactly the moment her needs go up.
Through the last third of pregnancy, and then through lactation, a bitch needs considerably more than maintenance. She was being given the smallest ration in the kennel.
A blank would have been awkward. A wrong number, shown with the same confidence as every other, is a different thing entirely: nothing invited you to correct it.
What the app does now
On the feeding sheet and on the bitch's own page, two things change.
Her state is named. Where the Activity column said "Rest", it now says "Pregnant" or "Nursing". These are two different situations, and they are never conflated.
The ration is no longer calculated. In place of the number: "Pregnant — set the ration by hand". On her page, a sentence explains why — the calculation would start from work done, which is zero, and suggest less than maintenance.
On the printed sheet you pin up in the food store, the state appears under her name, so whoever does the morning round sees immediately who they are looking at.
What does not change for you
If you had already set the ration by hand, it stays exactly where you put it. Grams entered, calorie target entered: your figure is served, and her state is shown beside it. We do not overwrite a musher's decision.
The rest of the kennel is unchanged, to the gram. The food-store totals count her separately, among the "dogs with no computable ration", exactly as they already do for a dog with no food set.
What this does not do — and it isn't "not yet"
The app suggests no number of grams at all for a pregnant or nursing bitch. That is a choice, not an unfinished job.
Working out that ration needs veterinary reference points: how much the requirement rises per week of pregnancy, what a litter of two costs against a litter of nine, how the need falls away at weaning. Those figures exist in the literature, but we do not put grams in a bowl on the strength of a quick read. Until a vet has validated them, the app would rather say nothing than be wrong twice in the same file.
Nor does it stop you doing anything. You remain free to feed what you judge right, as always: the app flags, it does not decide.
On the phone you get the state but not the sentence. The mobile page shows "Pregnant" and removes the figure, exactly as the web does; the full explanation will follow with the next update to the app's wording.
The decision taken against the obvious
The obvious move would have been to apply a multiplier: × 1.5 late in pregnancy, × 3 during lactation, job done in an evening.
We didn't, for a reason that fits in one sentence: that is precisely the kind of plausible, unmeasured coefficient that produced the original defect. A number invented with confidence reads exactly like a number that was verified. It would have taken months and a litter to discover it was too low — or too high.
An empty box makes you open your notebook and call your vet. A wrong number does not.