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Thread: Spay

  1. #21
    House Broken happy_blackbird's Avatar
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    I'm going to throw my 2 cents into the ring (based purely on the anecdotal experience of our first girl). Stella had a pretty severely inverted vulva right from the get go, but neither we nor our rural vet knew of the benefits to allowing a female to go through a single heat cycle to naturally allow the bad architecture to resolve. We spayed her at 6 months and she had persistent issues with leaking urine and ureter inflammation her entire little life (though, amazingly, restraining her from the kind of sprinting involved with fetching the ball helped her incontinence immeasurably). Had I known then that there was a possibility that her vulva would have popped out like a turkey thermometer, I would have waited.

    Secondly, Stella was the only female in her litter to be spayed before her first heat cycle and she was the only pup in her little, so far, to die of cancer (mastocytoma). Again, that's a sample size of five, but along with the newly published literature out of Davis, that speaks volumes to me. Our current vet (with whom I do not always agree - enough with the oral pesticides already!) and my brother (also a vet), both recommend we give Ellie the chance to go through one heat cycle before spaying her to convey some hormonal protection to her system. Will it be a a pain in the ass to keep our house blood free and supervise her outings to keep her from getting knocked up? Yup. But it can't be much more difficult than this whole puppy thing to begin with!

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  3. #22
    Chief Pooper Scooper JenC's Avatar
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    I would wait until the dog is full grown before spaying. Grizz's sister Ellie had not gone into heat by 12 months and you could tell she was done growing, so I told her parents it was OK to spay her. Worked out OK.

 



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