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.

Dumb People vs Dumb Animals

I know I've missed the last couple weeks.  I'd like to say it's because I've been too busy, but to be honest I just haven't felt up for writing anything that I don't absolutely need to write.  However, I did a bit of philosophizing in the second-best place for doing so - the bathtub; the first is the toilet - and was thinking about the label 'stupid'.  Specifically, what does it mean in a human context, and does that differ from animal contexts?

I decided that it does, because of what society does for stupid people that it does not do for stupid animals.  Stupid people have the run of the place.  If, or rather when, they screw up, they have their social network, their union, their lawyer, and their government to back them out of it.  They can keep on being stupid.  Stupid people tend to underestimate risks, and they also tend to underestimate their personal impact on their social and physical environments.  A stupid person will do stupid things to make your life difficult that would, in a fairer world, mean at least the end of their viability in the community, if not the end of their life, but instead they get bailed out and may even get monetary compensation depending on the consequences of their own idiocy.

Stupid animals, on the other hand, are harder to nail down, but we can perhaps say there are two sorts: there are the kinds who underestimate risks, and those who overestimate them.  We all know animals who are afraid of anything strange, whether it be a guest in your house or a new piece of furniture.  We know dogs that bark at everything, and cats who are terrified of random inanimate objects.  Not too many animals go the other route; although we of course have sexually liberal critters, for the most part, animals who underestimate risks tend to die.  They certainly do in the wild, and given that the same social safety nets that work for humans do not work for the furrier of us, they often end up at least in a more difficult situation than they were before in domesticity.  Therefore, most stupid animals that we come into contact with are the skittish ones: the ones who overestimate risks, in contrast to their human counterparts.

Can we make a comparison, then?  Of course: someone who overestimates risks is much more reserved, and while they may be a detriment to their own lives, they are not, by definition, affecting the lives of others very much, as for them it's all about avoiding doing.  One who underestimates is the opposite: he will continue to do stupid things, as opposed to not do smart things, and these actions, in comparison to nonaction, are more potentially detrimental to the individuals and world around them.

A lot of armchair philosophers say that we should be more like our pets.  The realist in us says that we might not, since our pets might be kind of dumb, but if you're going to be an idiot, it's still probably best to at least be an idiotic nonhuman.  I would let a stupid animal near a person just about any day, but I would never allow a stupid person near my animals.

Just a little stupid brainstorming.  Hopefully I can be more regular with posting in the future, but if you're smart, you'll go by my track record and not my word.  Until next weekend - maybe!

The Zoo Community

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Cats & Dogs

One suggestion I got recently was to talk about the differences between cats and dogs as far as how they interact with each other, and how we as the humans in their lives interact with them.  Now, I think this individual wanted more me to discuss why cats rule and dogs drool, but I am going to take a different approach and examine the different ways in which each species is intelligent, and what those forms of intelligence mean to us.

I’ll start with dogs, then, because dogs are the species that we are most familiar with.  We, as humanity, have been befriending, working with, and selectively breeding dogs (from the grey wolf) for potentially as long as 30,000 years.  They are the first animal we domesticated, and the closest from day one.  Many scientists believe that humans actually nursed wolf cubs in the early years of domestication (from Grandin, T. 2005. Animals In Translation, an excellent book regarding comparative psychology and sociology).  It’s really little wonder, then, that today we feel much more at home with dog emotions, whether they have become more like us or we have become more like them.

The first and most obvious similarity is that we are both highly social animals, and rely very heavily on each other and social hierarchies.  Contrary to popular belief, dogs do not view their owners as “the alpha” – the pack mentality was bred out of them long ago, and we can see this today in the looseness and disorganization of feral dogs descended from domestic breeds.  They do, however, tend to put a great deal of stock in our happiness as individuals that they cherish, and retain a great deal of the social intelligence of their lupine ancestors.

Some of this intelligence is in their willingness to display how they are feeling in terms that we understand.  Dogs use facial expression well, including using their eyes.  Perhaps ironically, though, while they have little qualms about being embarrassed or making mistakes that impact them personally, they are more likely to inhibit themselves if they feel it necessary for the happiness or agreement of their enigmatic human companions.  I want to write a significantly creepier article on this later, but for now, this means simply that we as human beings must not fall into the hole created by the dog’s usual openness, and learn to read the more subdued cues they give, especially when they are uncomfortable.

I want to talk about cats more, because cats are far more mysterious – and they seem to like it this way, so I apologize to any cats whose veils I am preparing now to lift.  This desire to not show certain aspects of themselves, particularly anything that may make them appear weak, is pervasive across all breeds and species.  Perhaps the most famous and distressful example of this is that cats will seek complete solitude when they are dying.  Many cat owners, even those who have not lost a pet, are aware of this solace-seeking behaviour when kitty is ill; she will hide beneath or behind a piece of furniture and not come out for anything, even if she has had no prior experience with the veterinarian.  The etiology of this behaviour is pure instinct: a cat that is ill does not want to bare herself in the open as an easy target, and it is instinctive behaviour like this that often separates them from dogs.

Cats have been domesticated for a long time, but not nearly as long as dogs – only at most 9,500 years ago.  More importantly, we have never become partnered with cats – apart from, on occasion, using them as hunting partners, and even in combat, we have mostly just kept them around the grain bins and barns to keep away rodents.  We give them a place to stay and a nice source of bait for their food, and they keep that bait from being eaten by their food.  Only relatively recently, mostly since the late Bronze Age according to region, have we done much for keeping them as vanity pets and companions.  It’s therefore little wonder that they have much more for instinct, and we understand them far less than we do dogs.

However, one can learn cat.  While cats are still so well tied to their feral nature that they can even be expected to survive in the wild if abandoned, they do have some surprising social skills.  Although they are not nearly as tightly-knit as wolf packs, cats do form small social groups that are mainly for collective hunting and protection of queens and kittens.  Cats also have a huge range of communicative abilities, but there are two difficulties that we have in interpreting them.  Firstly, their base level is the way that dogs are when they are concerned with your reaction.  They keep their emotions tight to the belt in order to not appear weak, until they are needed.  In short, they are the opposite of dogs in their expressiveness.  Secondly, their ways of expressing themselves are much more foreign to humans: rather than using the direction of their gaze or ecstatic activity that are very easy for us to interpret, they use their ears, whiskers, tails, eyelids, and very minute tactile methods of communication that we simply are not very well-acquainted with.  Someday, perhaps, I will talk about these as well in more detail, but the simple fact is that unlike both dogs and humans, they put a great deal more stock in hearing, smell, and tactile information (ie whiskers) than they do sight, which leads to differing forms of communication.

Due to both the historical nature of our relationship, then, and our varying methods of communication that neither side has a great deal of ease in understanding, we tend to assume that cats are less amiable or even less intelligent than are dogs, which is not true and is merely a gross oversimplification of the differences in their respective psychologies.  The last number of posts I have made, I have left the reader with an overarching message to chew on until next week, and I believe this is a fine time for that: each animal genus and even species has its own idiosyncrasies, intelligences, and methods of communication, and all are deserving of respect and striving towards understanding, even (especially) if we need to leave behind our human mindset.