Did you know today is a holiday? That’s right, it’s Spay Day!
The whole month of February has been designated as Spay and Neuter Awareness month.
Spay or neuter surgery is essential, life-saving care for dogs and cats. Definitely worth celebrating!
What is spay/neuter?
Here’s a brief rundown for those who may be unaware what spay/neuter surgery is, and the distinction between the two:
Spay operations are performed on female dogs and cats. Spay surgery typically involves removing her ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uterus. This makes it so that she cannot reproduce, will not have a monthly heat cycle, and also reduces breeding-related behaviors.
Neuter operations are performed on male dogs and cats. The testes are surgically removed, making it so that he cannot reproduce.
Why does Spay/Neuter matter to the individual animal?
Spay/neuter is essential, life-saving work.
The decision to spay or neuter a cat or dog not only protects the individual’s health, but also protects entire future generations of dogs and cats from suffering.
Neutering male dogs and cats reduces aggression, helps limit the desire to roam (and possibly get injured), and also reduces the risk of spraying and marking behaviors. The risk of testicular cancer is eliminated, and other organ-specific disease risks are reduced.
Spaying female dogs and cats eliminates the heat cycle. Spaying reduces or eliminates the risk of mammary gland tumors and uterine/ovarian cancer.
Spay and neuter surgery greatly benefits the individual animal. But beyond that, spay/neuter saves entire future generations of dogs and cats from suffering!
How Spay/Neuter saves entire future generations from suffering:
On any given day, over 600 million stray animals roam the streets without access to food, water, shelter, or a loving home.
Dogs and cats can reproduce extremely quickly. Cats can have multiple litters every year, with an average of 4-6 kittens per litter. Female dogs over the age of 6 months can give birth to a litter of 4 to 12 pups. The largest ever-recorded litter of dogs had 24 puppies.
It’s easy to see how the situation has gotten far out of control. And we don’t have enough homes for all of these strays.
Being exposed to the elements often leads to fatal situations for stray dogs and cats.
Being hit by cars is one of the most common ways that cats die.
Stray dogs and cats suffer from treatable diseases because they have no access to veterinary care.
Horrifyingly, hundreds of thousands of dogs and cats are killed in U.S. shelters every year. Many of these animals are perfectly healthy and adoptable.
And in many countries around the world, strays are put to death in brutally inhumane ways.
In many countries, there are few to no laws protecting strays from disturbing abuse.
Stray dogs and cats may be shot, poisoned, hanged … or even fed food laced with broken glass, leading them to bleed out internally.
In Bahrain, an incredibly oil-rich country in the Middle East, activists have documented brutal incidents of inhumane killings of stray dogs. Read more and sign our petition here:
How Spay/Neuter protects humans from suffering:
Unfortunately, the main cause of rabies in humans is bites from dogs.
Because of the dog overpopulation crisis, there are hundreds of millions of stray dogs roaming the streets on any given day worldwide. The large number of stray dogs causes a large number of people to be bitten and infected with rabies each year.
Rabies is a frightening, painful disease that kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Once a person begins to show symptoms from rabies, the disease is 100% fatal.
Dogs can be vaccinated against the rabies virus, but this is only a temporary solution. The most efficient way to limit the number of rabies cases is to reduce the number of dogs born in the first place!
Spay/Neuter Needs a Revamp!
Adopting dogs and cats from shelters instead of buying from breeders is essential, as it helps to place animals in homes instead of bringing more animals into this world that we do not have homes for.
But the most effective way to limit overpopulation is to limit the number of animals being born in the first place!
You may be familiar with TNR: trap, neuter, release. This has become a common practice in the U.S. and across the globe. TNR involves trapping stray dogs or cats, bringing them to the veterinarian to undergo spay/neuter surgery, and then releasing them to the place they were captured from.
TNR is essential, and we greatly appreciate everyone involved with helping animals in this way. But it could definitely use an upgrade! TNR takes a lot of time, effort, and money, and it requires the surgical skills of a veterinarian. In many cases, not enough veterinarians are available to assist with stray animal populations. Also, spay/neuter surgery is considered “major surgery,” and complications, while rare, can happen.
Spay Neuter … with a cookie?
While many “birth control” formulas already exist, none of them do exactly what we need them to do: produce lifetime infertility in a single, edible formula.
600 Million Dogs is developing the world’s first-ever One-Dose Spay and Neuter Cookie.
Our nonprofit science-centered mission is to significantly reduce animal suffering on a global scale by developing a safe, edible, one-dose, permanent-lasting birth control Cookie for stray dogs and cats!
Check out what's happening at https://www.600milliondogs.org/currentstudies
Please, will you join us in revolutionizing Spay and Neuter … without surgery?
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