02/12/2026
Good commentary from Deb. Consider following her.
I was taught a lot of things in vet school that after I got out and started practicing I realized were not truth but more suggestive. There is still so much information coming out that is put out as truth and yet after three decades of actually being a vet and the past decade of having 100+ animals a work day go through my clinic, and having been open for almost twenty years and seeing many patients for their entire life, I think science should not be put out as truth but as observation.
Let’s talk about spaying and neutering age. It is increasingly suggested that we wait longer and longer to spay or neuter dogs. This “research” is more of a selection of dogs at universities or specialty centers because they tend to have easier to access records. How many of the general public take their dogs to the Universities or specialty practices? In my population of patients I would say it is less than 1%. That is not to say that in large cities there might not be a higher percentage because of proximity but I would think it would not be substantially higher because average Joe American can’t afford that kind of care.
The “research” they are using, while they tell you it is representative, I would disagree. You go to a teaching hospital where only a small percentage of average pet owners can afford to take their dogs and you pull all their records and look at them and decide that spayed or neutered dogs have a higher risk then those that are not doesn’t really mean what they are telling it means. If you compare the number of dogs seen at universities or large specialty clinics to the number seen at normal clinics, there is a huge difference. Dogs going to specialty clinics or universities have lots of issues or they wouldn’t be going there so of course it is going to seem like the numbers are shocking but what if you took all the dogs seen by all the clinics in the state or in the nation and took your numbers from there? What if instead of cherry picking dogs that have problems you consider all the dogs that don’t have issues that send them to a university?
I can already hear people screaming about how impossible that would be and it would be difficult for sure but I can tell you that in my clinic, I just do not see the issues at the rate that they claim. Are spayed and neutered dogs more likely to tear their cruciates? Of course they are because there are more spayed and neutered dogs and the ones tearing cruciate are generally fat out of shape couch potatoes. The non spayed ones are kept in smaller areas with less play time and such because they do not want them to be out there getting knocked up by Joe blow stray. So are the cruciate tears really caused by lack of hormones or lack of exercise and an imbalance between the quads and hamstrings because they don’t do anything, just like in us people?
If I actually saw in my practice what they claim to be “true” I would absolutely change my thoughts on when and how but I just don’t see those things. I see fat out of shape dogs tearing their cruciate because people get dogs for their pleasure and they let them lay around and live lazy lives and get fat and out of shape just like us people. Well of course they are going to tear their cruciate. I get them in all the time! What I do not get in are the spayed and neutered fit dogs that are always out chasing cows or being properly exercised and running and well developed muscularly even when they have been spayed or neutered at 6 months. It is not the age of spaying or neutering that lends to cruciate tears, it is the out of shape not enough exercise and too much food that lends to cruciate tears.
I see high cancer rates in all dogs these days. We just had a 9 year old intact dog with metastatic spread everywhere in its body. Do I see more spayed and neutered dogs with cancer, sure I do because there are more spayed and neutered dogs! It is not the hormones, it is the overly processed food and the environmental toxins and the high sugar diets and probably moldy houses and all the same things that are causing increased cancer rates in humans and most of all still have our uteruses and balls and we have all the issue and no one is blaming it on not having our parts.
Years ago I had a distribution rep come and talk to me when I was starting my mobile practice. He had come from the human side as a drug rep. We met at Kentucky Fried Chicken, do not ask me why, and I place me order and had asked him why he was a rep for this company. He told me that he had lived in Washington and was a rep for a pharmaceutical company that had a new blood pressure medication. It was his job to go to the doctors offices and try to get them to switch to using this drug.
A huge part of his area was Asian and the company knew that their drug had very limited effects in people of Asian decent and yet he was told that in order to keep his job he had to get X number of doctors to start prescribing their drug even though they knew it was not going to help the population of people those doctors saw. The company had all kinds of incentive programs from cheap things to expensive trips based on how many prescriptions the doctors wrote. He went into these doctor’s offices and essentially got them to prescribe a drug that did not work in their population of people by offering them goods and trips. It is not about the science, it is all about the money that is made.
If your dog keeps its uterus or ovaries because they told you that by taking them it would cause musculoskeletal problems that wouldn’t happen if you actually exercised your dog and fed it real food but your dog gets a pyometra, corporate America is making a lot of money off of you with its life saving spay. If your dog gets mammary cancer, money from radical mass removal. Your male dog gets out of your yard because it still has it huevos, lots of money to be made off of fixing its leg or sewing it up or repairing its fractured pelvis.
Science is not necessarily truth, science can be whatever one wants it to be based on how much money can be made from the results. The more money can be made, the more the science will prove the way to get that money. Maybe it isn’t the timing of the spaying and neutering as much as it is all the drugs and chemicals and food additives and lack of exercise. Maybe it is time for us to stop blindly following science and start asking who is actually benefiting from the science.
