MagiStream

So this has a bit of backstory.

My book club just read The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells, and during our discussion someone asked if what Moreau does to the animals would be ethical in today's society, if it were possible. Some people said yes, as the animals would be under sedation, and some said no, as it is a major change that the animal would need to get used to and would cause the animal pain, and "Would you do that to a human?"

So that got me thinking: Is spaying/neutering ethical?
We say it's "for the Greater Good." But is it really? I mean, we are surgically removing an unwilling animal's reproductive organs so that they will not have children. We say that it's so they won't be overpopulated, and we're preventing lots of animals from starving or being euthanized, or being run over, et cetera. But humans are already waaaaay more overpopulated than any animal on the planet! (Well, except maybe bugs. But that's another topic.) If we're going to be spaying/neutering anyone, shouldn't it be humans? Yes, some people do have themselves spayed/neutered voluntarily. But that's not the point. The point is, if you had a kid, would you have them spayed/neutered against their will?

Please post what you think on this.

In the face of some of the other things we do to animals - like breeding for detrimental features such as the abnormal sloping spine of the American Showline GSD - spay/neuter is not such a horrible thing.

The big problem I have with spay/neuter is that it's become a replacement for responsibility in some senses. Pet owners SHOULD be responsible enough not to get intact males and females unless they're preparing to breed or prepared to segregate males from females. Pet owners SHOULD be responsible enough to secure their animals within their property so no animals get out and none get in (especially intact females) so no one ends up with an unwanted litter.

For me...spay/neuter pros tend to outweigh the cons. Nothing we tried with our male cat was stopping the marking behaviour, and when we moved we would have had to have him neutered anyway, so we went ahead with it. It stopped the nuisance marking AND made him less aggressive. That said, I think that spay/neuter should only be done when the animal has reached full growth; I think it's healthier that way.

I would love to live in a world where we didn't have to worry about more pets than homes so that leaving animals intact wouldn't be a problem. This isn't the case, sadly, and ultimately I feel that there are issues of greater importance that we need to address first - such as changing show rules and regs to disallow the showing of animals with detrimental and unhealthy features like double merle or the aforementioned GSD (because these things have no pros).

I guess I don't really have a clear ethical or unethical answer.

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The point is, if you had a kid, would you have them spayed/neutered against their will?

No. Humans are usually able to consider this and decide for themselves.

Though, given the difficulty in many cases of even getting oneself voluntarily spayed, I doubt that anyone would be able to get a female human spayed against their will. u:

While pet owners should be responsible for many things, one cannot predict all outcomes. Especially with smarter breeds of dogs and some more cunning cats. Its an issue of would you rather spend your whole life constantly checking every last detail ensuring everything is properly secured and keeping your animals locked like a prisoner monitoring them as much as 24/7 possible, or would you have the security that should you slip up and your animal escapes or an animal does intrude, that you will not have an unwanted litter.

Even if people try to play the "Well just adopt them out" argument, it doesn't all work. Humans are disgustingly fickle creatures, and if suddenly that cute little puppy is too much work for them or they are simply too busy now to care for it, they would rather dump off the responsibility on to the streets or a shelter. Most shelters are kill shelters meaning that whatever animal lands there has a death clock. If it is not adopted out within x amount of time it gets euthanized. I doesn't matter if its cute, loving, happy, friendly, good with other pets or kids, if its not out of that shelter in a certain amount of time, its dead. These animals are burdens for most shelters. They use up resources, take up time, need attention, need interaction, and with little money truly going into any shelter, these animals are nothing more than money siphoning waste to them.

Most shelters don't even treat animals properly and neither do many pet owners. Most animals are abused, mistreated, not cared for properly, etc, and I mention this including shelters because I recently had a very nasty experience with a local shelter when one of my cats got out and was captured in a trap. Shelters will do what benefits them the most. What ever gets them the most money, even if that means blatantly lying to your face. Pet owners are no different. If a pet owner gets tired of a pet and abandons it, they will gladly lie to your face about how it "ran away" or how they "gave it to a friend" rather than admitting they dumped it on some road.

Spay/Neuter ensures that populations don't increase and create issue like mentioned above where animals don't end up in the streets getting hurt or run over, they don't end up in bad hands, abused and in pain, or in a shelter, being mistreated and later on killed. Spay/Neuter controls certain levels of aggressiveness in most animals, ensures animals do not go far distances in search of a mate potentially causing injuries or death to the animal, it curbs and even eliminates certain habits regarding territory marking, and it makes them easier to keep track of and maintain indoors since they will not be interested in seeking out a mate. It also helps secure that should you have that once in a blue moon slip up and your pet runs off, if another pet who is not spayed/neutered should interact with them, there will be no unwanted consequences.

Part of the responsibility as an owner is not just ensuring your pet is secure and safe, but ensuring that should worse come to worse, any unwanted outcome is prevented. Its unfair to expect owners to have full control and monitoring of their pet. Animals are unpredictable, and mistakes do happen as we are only human. In the long run it saves you time, trouble, money, and heartache to spay and neuter.

Let's use a dog as an example here.
Being responsible for a batch of puppies or kittens is a large responsibility for both the human and the dog. The dog cannot speak against our decisions that we make for it, but that does not make our decisions wrong. The dog will not take pride in the puppies as much as us humans do, and we are solely the responsible one for them. The dog would not honestly care if we spayed or neutered it. We do this to ensure happy behavior and it eliminates several health risk factors (testicular/ovarian cancer for example).
Not to mention the fact that the dog does not really know what happened to them or what is going on.

I think rayforbidden has said it - the dog doesn't know what is going on,and therefore doesn't care. I personally think it is far easier to live wiht an unneutered dog than with an unnuetuered cat (and I mean that term to include spaying). Dogs are (or should be) far more under human control than cats, and you make allowances. Unless there's behavioural or medical need I don't think it is as necessary to have a dog altered. Having said that I had a friend who had 3 afghans, all three suffered from phantom pregnancies after each season, which made them unhappy, cranky and actually dangerous to be around. Said friend was on benefits so didn't have money to spend, but the dogs were insured so she managed to get them spayed on the insurance as a medical necessity for them. They became much nicer dogs to be around.

Similarly I had friends who owned a hotel, they weren't animal people and didn't get the concept of neutering. A stray cat turned up outside, and stayed because food was available. She produced kittens. The kittens produced kittens, who produced kittens. After a very short time they were overrun by genuinely feral cats. The hotel was on quite a busy road and many of the cats got killed on it. Presumably quite a few got injured on it, but the owners wouldn't have bothered to get vet treatment for them, so they probably died too. They sold the hotel and the new owners had the cats 'removed'. Most if not all of them would have ended up dead. So, how much better would it have been if the original people had only spent that little bit of money and had the original cat spayed?

To widen the net a bit - what about horses, where the males are routinely gelded. If they weren't you'd have a whole lot of hard to manage stallions, and a lot of people, like me, who wouldn't be able to keep a horse because it would be impractical. Or you'd have everyone wanting mares (who can be difficult to deal with when they are hormonal) and the stallions would all be surplus to requirement... so what would happen to them? dog meat? send them all to a country where eating horse meat is acceptable? And what about (in the same vein) male cattle, sheep, chickens which, if not needed for breeding, are routinely castrated to make them more manageable until they are grown enough for slaughter. This practice has been around for over 6,500 years (Aristotle comment on it). At which point the ethic of neutering gets mixed up in the ethics of meat eating, and I'm really not going there.

If gelding horses hadn't in the past been deemed 'ethical' where would our cultures have been? Could we really have had them pulling carts, used as riding animals, fought wars using them, and all the other things...

Spaying and neutering has always seemed like a fact of life when it comes to me and my animals.

Unlike humans, animals don't have all these fancy ways of keeping themselves from getting pregnant. Certain precautions can be taken with humans, while animals succumb to their own biological whims without a second thought - and why shouldn't they? The only flipside to that coin would be the fact that these animals live among us, whether it be in or around our homes, and personally I don't want a bunch of adorable little puppies taking up space in my garage or under my porch.

So do I think spaying and neutering are morally acceptable, at least when it comes to domestic animals? Of course. Humans? Only of their own volition.

I'm not gonna type a long, drawn out philosophical answer to this.

I support neutering like a baby supports drinking milk.

Also, as someone trying to be voluntarily sterilized as a human--I have a metabolism issue that is genetic, and have no wish for a child to have it too--it's VERY hard to do even volunteer sterilization on humans. Most doctors refuse because "you'll change your mind and sue me". I have no intentions to ever change my mind, and plan on transitioning, which would render the surgery necessary at some point anyways....

For me, spaying and neutering your pets is a big thing. I personally think that everyone should get their pets spayed or neutered instead of having to pay your town to "license" your pet. (On a separate note, everyone should also have their pets micro-chipped, even if they are indoor cats). I work with an animal rescue group and currently have 4 half-feral kittens in my basement that my family has been working on socializing. There is a ban on feeding "wild animals" including feral colonies (because our town counsel is a bunch of morons. Couldn't even remember TNR. 3 letters...).

By spaying or neutering your pet, you can not only save 100s if not 1,000s of lives, but spaying or neutering your pet can reduce the risk of certain cancers. That and altering your pet puts a stop to many bad behaviors like spraying, and humping among other things, which many people surrender their pets for.


"Around 10 percent of animals entering shelters have been spayed or neutered, which is problematic considering in just six years, one un-spayed female dog and her offspring can create 67,000 dogs and one un-spayed female cat and her offspring can produce 420,000 kittens in seven years, reports Watatuga Humane Society."


Cats and dogs are a human problem. We domesticated them and made them into pets and then we dumped some back on the street and watched as populations exploded. It is our duty to fix this mess we created by getting our pets fixed so we don't contribute to the issue or by taking care of the feral cats and dogs (and I don't mean euthanizing them.). "There are about 70 million stray animals living in the U.S. That evens out to about five homeless animals for every homeless person in the U.S."


When looking at all these statistics and facts it would be almost unethical to not have your pet altered. And the good thing is, if you get them fixed before they hit full sexual maturity (which is somewhere between 4-6 months or as reccommended by your vet), they won't even "know" they're missing something.

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsan ... elessness/

The real question should be if declawing is ethical or not. (My family has recently transferred to the mindset of no, it is not.)

The amount of animals that get euthanized because they can't find home is insane. Overpopulation of cat is killing a lot of bird, and it's not healthy for a lot of animals to not get fixed. Human females get a period when they don't get pregnant, which is bad enough, for many female animals it can make them very, very sick. It's unethical not to fix your animal. I get that it's weird to do to them without permission, but they can't logically make the decision to stop breeding because of animal overpopulation, while humans can.

Ignoring the animal side of things, because as an ex-vet nurse I am hugely biased and extremely negative when it comes to my opinion on the average person's ability to genuinely manage an entire animal, the potential consequences (financially, emotionally, etc.) and truly understand the potential long-term issues which could hit their beloved pet in later life. I'm not big on getting every single animal neutered, but for the general population and given the difficulties in finding life long homes for the resulting offspring? Oh yes.

Humans: Humans, generally, have been blessed with the ability to produce and use contraception to significantly reduce the rate at which they reproduce. Some people do not use this. Some people do not have access to this. Also the difference between sterilising a human and sterilising a family pet is, well, a human can turn around and sue you for taking away their human rights, For taking away their choice.

I fully support voluntary sterilisation, but not enforced sterilisation. I think it should be made widely available, the information regarding it made freely available, and whilst I also think people should spend at least 12 months prior to the actual process educating themselves and making sure this is something they genuinely want, it should be available to them.

I'm just a big, big fan of letting people know that if they don't want to have children, that's okay. And if they want to take steps to permanently prevent children from occurring, then that's okay to. But if they want to take temporary steps to prevent themselves from having children, because they're not sure if they'll want children in the future, that's okay as well.

People have been sterilised against their will, some unknowingly, and when they've discovered this it has rarely gone well for those who performed the procedure or those who now know that not only will they never be able to have children but it's because someone else decided they shouldn't. Better to provide education and resources for humans to make their own decisions, than to take it away from them.