Canine Pet Care
Spaying/Neutering Your Dog
If your pet is not going to be a breeding animal, we recommend spaying your female or neutering your male dog at 6 months of age. We usually try to remind you of this as you are coming in for your puppy vaccinations and we will even send you a reminder letter to spay/neuter your pet when they are approaching 6 months of age. Following is a list of the many benefits to early spaying or neutering of your pet:
- It eliminates annoying sexual behavior such as mounting legs and furniture and helps keep males from "marking" or hiking their leg to urinate and eliminates females unwanted heat cycles which can be messy.
- It eliminates males from roaming in search of females in heat thereby minimizing their risk of fighting with other male dogs or getting hit by a car while running loose.
- Spaying prior to a first heat cycle greatly reduces the risk of mammary cancer in the future and avoids ovarian and uterine cancer and infections (pyometra) and neutering helps prevent prostate cancer and infections and avoids testicular cancer as well.
- It diminishes aggressive behavior and helps to control the pet population crisis.
We recommend a pre-anesthetic bloodwork panel prior to your pet’s surgical procedure to help evaluate their safety during surgery. This panel will check the function of their kidneys and liver, and also make sure they do not have anemia, an infection, or low platelets prior to surgery. Spays and neuters as well as all of our major surgeries are performed under completely sterile conditions which requires that we use sterile surgical instruments and wear a sterile surgical gown, gloves, cap, and mask. This adds to the cost involved in performing these procedures, but we feel the safety it provides for your pet is worth the cost and extra effort. Please call us today for an estimate or to schedule your pet's spay or neuter.
