De-Sexing for Dogs & Cats
A large part of our routine procedures is keyhole surgery for puppies and kittens for de-sexing. This helps to reduce wound breakdown potential and post-surgical pain, with internal skin sutures for dogs reducing skin closure failure from over-grooming and removing the need to return for suture removal.
Click here for surgical images of during and after the procedure.
Veterinary Reasons for De-sexing
De-sexing in dogs and cats is about a lot more than controlling unwanted reproduction. In females the risks relate to mammary cancer and a potentially fatal infection of a misbehaving uterus called a pyometron. In dogs that are de-sexed before their first heat, their mammary cancer risk is about 0.05%. After the first heat it can jump to 8% risk and 26% after the second heat. There is no benefit in mammary cancer reduction after the third heat. Early age tumours are more likely to be benign, more than 10 years old and they will be almost invariably nasty.
In the cat intact females are 7 times more likely to get mammary tumours, and feline mammary tumours are nearly always malignant. The incidence in cats is much lower than dogs, but they are nearly always multiple by the time of detection and radical surgery is required but often fails.
In males hormones are less involved in cancers. An undesexed male dog can get a benign prostate enlargement. When blokes get prostate problems, peeing is a challenge. When dogs get prostate problems, pooing is a challenge, as their prostate gets much larger than ours when benign and has less impact on the bladder neck than it does on the colon. If the enlarged prostate gets infected it can be an awful experience and can be hard to resolve, as antibiotics don't penetrate prostatic tissue very well. It requires surgical drainage, or ultrasound guided multiple needle drainages. Do him a favour, and arrange for him to lose the googlies.
Now, for your male pussy cat friends, keeping your testicles is like an invitation card from the Grim Reaper. They can get tumours of the prostate, though it is very rare, and of another form of penile plumbing called a bulbourethral gland, but what they mostly die of is misadventure. When I walk along Wyong Rd and see dead cats lying in the gutter, almost every single one still has his gonads.
They will try and rule a territory requiring several kilometres journey each night, and if Toyota doesn't kill them, or a couple of Staffies, then they are at very high risk if FIV acquisition and spread. If you haven't heard of FIV, substitute H for F and think of the human context.
Retroviruses were well documented in animals a long time before we realised we had copped them. Cats don't get FIV because of needle sharing or not using a condom. It is spread by fighting, and that is a tomcat's second biggest interest.
De-sexing is a big avoidable disease issue and more than just getting discounts on pet registration. Remember also the effects of testosterone on aggression and wandering in dogs, and associated trauma.