A Second Perspective on the Spaying and Neutering Question

08/11/16 • -1 min

My dog Chocolate Chip is currently in heat. Go ahead, gasp in horror! I’m used to it, because I take quite a bit criticism for this. There are a lot of people out there who say that you absolutely must have your dogs spayed or neutered, and the earlier the better. Before we dive further into this topic, I’d like to offer a quick disclaimer. I don’t want to definitely come out and label either side of this issue right or wrong. I’m not an expert on dog hormones or surgery. What I do want to do is offer a different perspective for you to think about. Often, many veterinarians tell owners what to do without looking at all the information available. A few studies have come out in recent years which show that neutering and spaying early isn’t actually a good thing. It can allegedly lead to higher rates of cancer, behavioral issues, and other problems. On the surface this seems sensible, and once you dig into the idea a little further it starts to make more and more sense. Here’s why. When you spay a female dog, you remove her reproductive organs and a large chunk of her endocrine system along with them. Neutering a male dog produces similar results: removing the testicles and their hormones, you also take away many important growth hormones. Think about what might happen if you performed a hysterectomy on a five-year-old girl, or removed the testicles of an adolescent boy. These operations have been done for medical reasons, and they create hormonal imbalances and other health issues that often need to be corrected later. Plus there are many parts of the world where boys are sterilized at a young age, and they tend to develop many physical and mental health issues as a result.

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Swimming Through Stress: How Correction Changes Your Dog’s Perspective

Today I was down at my community lake, which brought to my mind the many times I’ve worked with dogs in the water. I have had lots of clients in the so-called “Sun Belt”—areas such as California, Texas, Arizona, Mexico, and even the south of Spain. Since most of these places are very hot, people who live there either have swimming pools or live on the beach. Naturally, they want their dog to enjoy swimming with them. Here’s the catch: many of these dogs are German Shepherds or Rottweilers or other protection breeds, dogs who aren't necessarily bred for swimming. In generally, these dogs don't naturally enjoy swimming. Nonetheless, their owners want to make sure that their dog can swim—to ensure their safety if they were to accidentally end up in the water—but to also to enjoy swimming. They just want to be able to take their dogs out to the beach or pool to have some fun. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that I can get almost any dog to enjoy swimming. Do they start out loving it? Absolutely not! Most of them start out wishing that they didn't need to go into the water. But every dog that I’ve trained to swim has ended up being not only a decent swimmer but an enthusiastic one as well.

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What Do I Do Now?: Asking The Right Questions

Albert Einstein said a lot of intelligent things, but one of his statements has always particularly stuck out to me. In fact, it’s one of my favorite quotes from anyone, and I think of it frequently in my dog training career. Here it is: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Now, I think a lot about how this idea can help my clients who are dealing with dog issues. My website gets a lot of traffic, and I get questions from people all over the world. I do my best to answer those questions when I can, but I just get too many to answer every single one of them. There are some questions, however, that I routinely ignore: the ones that don’t even come close to following Einstein’s formula. Now, I’m certainly not saying that you have to be as smart as Einstein in order to ask a question! But I frequently get questions like: “My dog has aggression problems—what do I do?” or “My dog pees in the house—what do I do?” It’s clear that the people asking these kinds of questions have devoted no thought process to it. If they had, then they wouldn’t be asking the question that way in the first place.