Fixing Your Pets

This is a sticky topic with me, and one I have had to deal with recently, so I’m going to rant on it.  First of all, I do not believe in neutering your male or your female cats and dogs.  To a lot of people (see: just about everyone), this is a ludicrous thing to believe, partially because, like so many things, everyone does it, so it must be right.  However, there are arguments out there for neutering your animals.  In this article, I plan on addressing them, debunking them, and raising my own against them.

“It’s cruel to let your pet go through sex cycles.”

I find this patently silly simply because letting a universal and natural thing occur cannot by definition be cruel.  Even things that are, unlike sexual arousal, most certainly unpleasant, such as sadness, should be a part of an animal’s life.  At face value, we might say life would be better without sadness, but sadness fills a very important role in our lives as do all emotions – in this case, encouraging the strengthening of social relationships.

Most people who give this argument are talking about female cats.  They hear them yowling and see them rolling around the floor whilst in heat and think the poor kitty is in some sort of pain.  This is not so; they are merely trying to attract attention in the most overt way they can.  I know it’s a logical fallacy, but in this case it does ring true that if it’s natural, it’s probably good for you.  We believe ‘natural’ to be good when it comes to multivitamins and hair products, and even our pet food; why do we believe that ‘natural’ is bad for our animal’s body?

“It’s annoying!”

Once again, typically talking about females in heat.  This argument truly is cruel, as it implies that we should gladly subject an animal to a life-altering surgery simply because we find them obnoxious as they are now.  We had the same mentality when we used to give difficult mental in-patients frontal lobotomies.  While neutering is not as extreme, it is stressful for the animal and does alter them significantly both physically and psychologically, and to me, “I hate how much noise she makes” is not a good enough excuse for that.

There are ways to relieve your female animal, and I don’t just mean icky bedroom-type stuff that people like me do.  There are tutorials out there for cleanly doing so and also to control without the use of surgery or medications the frequency of heats.  And for those of you who are looking to get on your grumpy queen’s good side, this sort of relief is for them a lot like your giving them food: it’s a very quick way to get them to like you even more than they already do – which dropping them off at the veterinarian certainly will not.

“They pee where they shouldn’t.”

This can be trained out of an animal with relative ease, and neutering does not guarantee that it will cease.  I know that both male cats I have had that were neutered still squirted everywhere whenever they got a whiff of a newcomer, until I scared the tar out of them while they were in the act enough times that they got the picture.  Animals aren’t stupid, and like us and our inwardly driven habits, they can change much of their behaviour through… well, I’m not sure if stomping and yelling can be called therapy, but something like that.

“Isn’t it healthier to neuter my pet?”

Not really.  There are certain advantages, the obvious one being that your pet will not get cancer of the gonads and need to have them… uh… removed.  They will also be less susceptible to some diseases, poisoning, and fights with other animals, because they will be less active and roam less – and people who neuter their pets also tend to have indoor animals; there has yet to be a study that I have read that does not account for this fact.  The obvious solution is to keep an eye on your pet, and keep them indoors or to a restricted area, which you should be doing anyway since this is the law in many areas.  There is a significantly lower chance for a spayed female to develop breast cancer, and even then only if she is spayed before her first heat, but that is the only health benefit directly related to neutering that I have read.

On the other hand, pets who are neutered are at greater risk for obesity, and all the associated complications, even if they are allowed outdoors, simply because of that lack of activity.  They are also prone to bone problems, because sex hormones (both testosterone and estrogen) are crucial to bone development and upkeep.  Neutered animals are more prone to urinary problems, and although generalizable statements are difficult to make, they will also be more susceptible to certain infections and diseases due to the effect sex hormones, particularly estrogen, have on the immune system.  Neutered animals of both sexes, particularly dogs, are also more susceptible to cardiac tumours, cognitive decline, and hair loss.  Spayed females are at greater risk for hypothyroidism.  Castrated males are at greater risk for prostate cancer.

This would also be a good time to talk about your animal’s personality.  They lose a lot of that idiomatic flair that made them special, and that lovable energy.  People often neuter their pets and, as the last vestiges of their natural hormonal balance fade off, erroneously think their pet is ‘growing out of it’.  The fact that everyone neuters their animals nowadays makes this a difficult assumption to overcome.  Cats can be kittens, and dogs can be puppies if you leave them to be who they naturally are.

“The cat/dog population is already out of control; I don’t want to accidentally increase it.”

This is probably the best argument for neutering your pet.  If this is your only, or at least your chief motive to neuter your pet, there is an alternative option, and that is tubal ligation for females, or a vasectomy for males.  This does not impact the benefits of sex hormones on the animal, but it does prevent them from contributing to the gene pool.  It is also less dangerous; although neutering is quite easy and is the one operation that all vets are damn good at because they do it so often, there is still risk of infection or complication, especially when it comes to spaying (females).  This procedure involves the complete removal of the entire reproductive system.  It is not a minor surgery.

These are the main arguments that I can recall that I have heard for neutering.  If you find any more (or have any more), please put them in the comments or else email me them, and I will attempt to address them.  Hopefully, though, I have gone at least some way in convincing you with this short article.

Ancient Lifestyles and Animals

Let's talk a little more about history: this time, the more ancient sort, before we had the concept that one could 'own' an animal any more than one 'owns' a child.

We'll start with what we can see with our eyes: in every corner of the world, one can easily find ancient graves in which there are animals buried with humans.  Often times, they were killed or sacrificed so that they could follow their masters into the afterlife.  Incidentally, this is also not uncommon with spouses, particularly wives, although suicide was more common here.  In Ancient Egypt, of course, we have millions of mummified cats, ibises, dogs, birds, and whatever else you might think of either given as a sacrifice to a relevant deity (because if your deity is represented by an animal, it logically follows that you should kill it) or, again, buried along with a human to accompany them in the next world.  Even in less structured regions, though, from Europe to the Americas to Japan, people are buried with their cats and their dogs.

Animals also crept frequently into the beliefs and the resulting art of these people: whether we're looking at tipi paintings in Montana or carvings on Norwegian jewelry, more often than not an animal will feature, frequently as the central aspect.  Old gods are often associated with animals: Horus and the falcon, Inari and foxes, Athena and her owl, Tezcatlipoca and his jaguar counterpart, Thor and his goats.  People became associated with animals, too: although when many of us, especially in the west, think of spirit animals, we think of Native American cultures, identical concepts existed all across the world essentially until the introduction of monotheism: the old Norse concept of fylgja mirrors precisely the idea of a spirit animal, which follows a person throughout their lives, representing them as part of their soul, and protecting them while they dream, and families in Japan are still sometimes represented by a zoomorphic deity.

Why was this?  What was so important about animals that has been lost today?  What has attracted us to animals so much?  First of all, from the earliest times, we have relied on them.  Today, when we say someone relies on animals, we think of beasts of burden, or food sources; however, until we started living close together in more urban settings, we instead lived closely with our animals.  Central heating didn't exist, so in colder climates people would sleep alongside their dogs to keep them warm.  Pesticides weren't exactly widespread, and since humans had not yet dethroned rodents as the number one carrier of human disease, cats were very often seen as protecting agents, hunting down those things that would not only deprive them of food but may well be the death of them through contagion.

Secondly, the divide between the human and non-human environments was not so distinct as it is today.  People both feared and respected the dwellers of the wild, and that often came to admiration, as we see so often in the association between deities and animals that had not at that time been domesticated.  Even as tarantulas bit us, snakes terrified us, wolves hunted us and foxes broke into the hen-house, and we were literally pitted against them, we recognized their power and wished for it ourselves, to be associated with these animals as our gods were.  This changed eventually as our prime nemeses in life came not from the climate and other species but from our fellow human beings.

The question we're left with is what precisely this means for us.  As noted in a previous post, it means that we're no longer as in-tune with our animal friends; that we have relegated them to a lower point than we once did and assumed them to be inferior to us, often to the point of having no consciousness of their own.  It also means, though, that we have lost touch with some of our own nature: many mental disorders, including schizophrenia and certain personality disorders, have roughly equivalent prevalence rates across the globe, mood disorders and anxiety disorders are most common in urban areas, where there is very little contact between species and very high contact within ours.  There is also a great deal of research on the negative correlation between depression rates and whether or not someone has a pet. (Hint: dogs are the best, but cats are great too, especially if you're female.) Animals have also proved very valuable in people with disorders like autism, (from Animals In Translation) and have other health benefits.

I already talked a fair bit about this before, so I won't yammer on, but it's something to think about: should we be looking backwards in time for our social and moral salvation?  In regaining a more mutual relationship with animals and animal nature, will we have a better sense not only of the world around us, but of who we are, and become more stable as individuals and a society?  In some ways, is the old better than the new?  I've obviously already made up my mind, but I invite the reader to do some research on his own, looking past the image of a boy and his puppy and thinking about what exactly the partnership depicted in that image means for each of its constituents.