to spay or not to spay?

Paradigm

BECKIN1507 wrote: »

I was going to start a thread about this but I'm still a little upset. A few days ago I watched my friends dog die of suspected pyometra, this is the reason dogs should be speyed! The dog was a 5 year old staffie, she had a bit of a heavier season than usual, was eating and drinking fine, showed no sign of illness. Her owner went out for a hour, came back the dog couldn't move, she ran to get me (she was heavily pregnant) I looked at her said she's in shock went to get my car by the time I got back she had died.
No not every dog will get pyometra but this is one of the reasons why your advised to spey, if they do get it, they haven't got a chance of living if the few signs are not picked up early enough.

No-one has said "don't spey" just to weigh up the pros & cons of when!

6 months is way too early, they're still puppies. Let them develop & mature.

Jojo_the_Tightfisted

What are the dangers of a dog getting pregnant on her first season? In other words, if one of the dogs that will inevitably be trying to get to her succeeds, how much (if any) additional risk is there in pregnancy to her and pups? Even assuming that a roughly equal sized dog gets to her and not something much bigger?

After all, with humans, we may be able to get pregnant at the age of 12, but it's a very high risk pregnancy as a result, due to not being fully grown.

BECKIN1507

kymrob wrote: »

thank you beckin1507 think we defo gonna get it done but the 6 months is still a concern. 5 years old is so young hope the owner is ok!

Totally agree about the 6months, a dog is still very much a baby, I'd wait until at least 1 with a small dog and 2 in a larger breed.

The owners and their 10 year son who was there at the time and saw it all, are completly devasated, she had her baby a day later so she now has something to take her mind off it a bit.

white_star

I'm currently waiting to have my girlie spayed. She's 18mths but I have only had her 3mths. Definately don't want to go through the nightmare of having another season with her, having to get up at the crack of dawn if I wanted to walk her on-lead around my local common, or face the consequences of dog owners screaming at me because they couldn't control their own male dogs running loose and fully loaded.

I'm lucky I have a great vets practice who couldn't be more helpful. However my problem is that I'm looking to have her laparoscopy spayed (keyhole spay).The amount of pain during the surgery is greatly reduced, they wake up from the anaesthesia quicker and more relaxed, the recovery/post-op period is much shorter, with a lot less pain after the surgery.The risk of infection after surgery is greatly reduced too as is the risk of the dog licking the wound, pulling stitches out, getting subsequently infected, etc…. The downside is there are not many vets that do this procedure yet, so I will probably have to travel and the cost of procedure is a lot more expensive.

Shepherd1

~Chameleon~ wrote: »

For those of you saying "don't spay" I see pyometra deaths far too frequently for it NOT to be a problem. Please think before you try to influence people when you have zero veterinary knowledge.

I don't believe anyone has said don't spay, people are giving their personal opinions and experiences.

And as far as your advice goes I suspect you have zero veterinary knowledge

lostinrates

I do not know about coat issues, (we have a breed that is meant to suffer coat change but it has never been our experience personally, though we have noticed issues with our breed as the get older and coat changes).

We have never had one neutered you g either....i am the dayghter of a dog breeder and so !!!!!es were shown and not neutered until it was decided whether they should have a litter or not.

However, out of all the girls we have had beitered NONE have had any of the risk factors, yet of those we have not had neutered we have had phantoms, pyo and frankly, just not neutering and all being healthy can be negative for the dog. E.g. Atm my dog dog is in season, which for us means i will not walk her in a public place (we have fields for her to run around) or let her into the sitting room for our normal evenings together. This change of routine is depressing for us both. She has very heavy seasns, and we have carpet (it will be changing in the future).

The other thing i would say is that unneutered risks of pyo have twice confused diagnosis of other situations, one of which turned out to be a horrific cancer. When she went in to be neutered for what our vet thought was pyo, she had cancer which had spread significantly (despite having been to the vet twice weekly in preceeding months for reams of tests).

Both our girls are going to be neutered this autumn/winter. I prefer it done in the cooler months of the year personally, and wi timing for them this will work out well. One is being done because she is six and its the latest i can realistically put her through a 'routine' operation (we only took responsibility for her two years ago, and conditions have not been right for us to do it before now, else i would have done wihout hesitation), and the other because we have decided not to breed from her and so time is right.

I look forward to not having to change our routines, to being able to walk whenever responsibly and to relaxing about charting dates of season and risk times six ish weeks after for pyo watch. i believe it makes them more relaxed and happy in the standard domestic setting.

In many environments imo it is not fair to our girls, or neighbours dogs, to keep entire girls ( or boys, but girls gor reason of scent) and to force them to live unnaturallly with natural urge to reproduce.

pinetree

Have been reading the for and against with interest, we always advised clients to wait for the first season then spay. Having seen older dogs having to have mammary tumours removed because of taking tabs to stop seasons etc and pyometra's where the whole womb is full of pus which if bursts will probably cause death im in favour of spaying. As for the incontinant debate this has been going on since the 80's and prob before that surely this has been researched by now.

Bromley86

Originally Posted by Shepherd1
And as far as your advice goes I suspect you have zero veterinary knowledge

Apparently you'd be wrong.

Certainly you are allowing your personal experience to colour your judgment in a manner that may be detrimental to the health of any future pets you own. If, broadly, 20% of all spayed b1tches go on to become incontinent, the fact that you've experienced it before in no way changes the likelihood of you experiencing it again if you get your 20m girl done.

[Actually it does, but that's because early spaying seems to lower the chance of incontinence to ~10%. Of course there are other health risks apparently associated with early spaying.]

Oh, and IANAVet.

thorsoak

Although it smacks of anthropomorthism, I would ask - would you advocate that a teenage girl has a hysterectomy?

A puppy of 6- 9 months is at the equivalent stage of maturity as an adolescent girl of 13-16.

My experience of keeping !!!!!es goes back 50 years - in that time, we've had 8 !!!!!es - 4 of whom have had 2 litters each, and speyed at 6 years old, 2 others, who never had puppies, speyed at 3 years 6 months (I had to look back through my records to check this out - thought that it was 4 and half years old). I now have 2 !!!!!es, one of whom (age 6) was speyed a year ago (she never had puppies - never came into season at the right time ) and the younger one (2 years old) we are awaiting her hipscoring - and depending upon that she might be speyed or she might have a litter. If her hip score is higher than we hope, then she will be speyed early because we also have a bright young stud dog (with good hip score) who would be too interested in her for her/our own good!!

I've been kept informed of most of the puppies that we've bred, and we've been lucky in that we've not had a case of pyometra in any of them - but pyo is terrible - it does hit so suddenly that I do agree that unless you are going to breed, then speying is the way forward - but please - not too early!

Edited to add : - for !!!es read "lady dogs" :roll-eyes: .....forgot that that particular word is a no-no here!

Shepherd1

Bromley86 wrote: »

Apparently you'd be wrong.

Certainly you are allowing your personal experience to colour your judgment in a manner that may be detrimental to the health of any future pets you own. If, broadly, 20% of all spayed b1tches go on to become incontinent, the fact that you've experienced it before in no way changes the likelihood of you experiencing it again if you get your 20m girl done.

[Actually it does, but that's because early spaying seems to lower the chance of incontinence to ~10%. Of course there are other health risks apparently associated with early spaying.]

Oh, and IANAVet.

I don't believe I am wrong, what vet advises to spay at 6 months old and says spaying before the first season is an old wives tale.

Would it be someone on the internet pretending to be vet?