# How old shd my pup be for spaying?



## Neela (Mar 20, 2012)

Hi my girl is about 6 months & I'm wondering what age is safe spay? What is a parshel spay? Shd I wait for frist heat or not? So many ?'s


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## GSD Fan (Sep 20, 2010)

Shelters spay some at 6-8 weeks old, so it's probably safe. Have you asked your vet these questions?


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## LindaDwyer (Apr 9, 2012)

I don't spay until 18 months. There are to many negative side effects ti eary spay and neyterung


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## MaggieRoseLee (Aug 17, 2001)

More great info on 

http://www.germanshepherds.com/foru...hen-spay-neuter-6-months-18-months-never.html


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## LindaDwyer (Apr 9, 2012)

Canine Sports Productions: Early Spay-Neuter Considerations for the Canine Athlete

check this out before you spay or neuter to early


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## LindaDwyer (Apr 9, 2012)

still in testing phase but evidence shows a higher rate of bone cancer, especially in large breed dogs, if spayed or neutered before one year of age


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## GsdLoverr729 (Jun 20, 2010)

I was told 18 months to 24 months is the best time.


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## msvette2u (Mar 20, 2006)

Discuss if with your vet. It is fine to spay now. Any age is fine and if you do it now she won't develop breast cancer later on in life.

*Unless you have a fenced yard, and can supervise your dog every single outing, and not let her out without supervision?*

There's "optimal" and there's "safe". It is _safe_ to do now. Optimal "may" be later on, but if you can't guarantee she won't get pregnant in the meantime, do it now.


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## msvette2u (Mar 20, 2006)

LindaDwyer said:


> Canine Sports Productions: Early Spay-Neuter Considerations for the Canine Athlete
> 
> check this out before you spay or neuter to early


This is chalk full of inaccurate "statistics", btw. 

http://www.columbusdogconnection.com/Documents/PedRebuttal .pdf


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## Anitsisqua (Mar 25, 2012)

As demonstrated in this thread, there is no consensus, even among professionals. This is a decision you are going to have to discuss with your veterinarian and make for yourself.


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## Gretchen (Jan 20, 2011)

Our vet recommended age 6 months, as he said she will probably go into heat at 7 months. So we arranged surgery at 6 months - guess what, upon opening our dog up, she was in heat already. She showed not visible signs. So talk to your vet ASAP. While under anesthesia, our was able to check our dogs hips for structure defects. You can ask about that too.


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## Rachel1422 (Aug 30, 2011)

We are spaying our girl on Wednesday. She will be 9 months. This is the earliest the breeder asked that her pups be altered at.


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## llombardo (Dec 11, 2011)

Everyone of my dogs have been spayed at between 4-6 months..while statistics now show that later might be better for bones, earlier can still be better for cancer. I chose to try to limit the cancer end of it and in doing so I haven't had an issue with bone problems later on. Its all based on personal experience, but most vets will go with the younger age and they are the ones that knows what's best medically.


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## llombardo (Dec 11, 2011)

Rachel1422 said:


> We are spaying our girl on Wednesday. She will be 9 months. This is the earliest the breeder asked that her pups be altered at.



Out of curiosity, what would happen if you didn't listen to the breeder and did it earlier?


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## Rachel1422 (Aug 30, 2011)

llombardo said:


> Out of curiosity, what would happen if you didn't listen to the breeder and did it earlier?


That's a good question - I don't know...

We prefer not to go through a heat cycle and I have noticed our dogs are becoming quite rough in their play over the past two weeks. We will be glad to have the procedure done in 3 days! I have read a lot about waiting longer than 9 months and I am definitely an informed pet owner. I can only say that when you feel it's time, that's the right time


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## llombardo (Dec 11, 2011)

Rachel1422 said:


> That's a good question - I don't know...
> 
> We prefer not to go through a heat cycle and I have noticed our dogs are becoming quite rough in their play over the past two weeks. We will be glad to have the procedure done in 3 days! I have read a lot about waiting longer than 9 months and I am definitely an informed pet owner. I can only say that when you feel it's time, that's the right time


I only had one dog(it was my sisters originally) that was 2 when she got spayed and she had a rough time(lots of pain and longer healing). Every male dog in the neighborhood was at my house when she was in heat I will never go through another heat cycle again


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## chelle (Feb 1, 2009)

llombardo said:


> Everyone of my dogs have been spayed at between 4-6 months..while statistics now show that later might be better for bones, earlier can still be better for cancer. I chose to try to limit the cancer end of it and in doing so I haven't had an issue with bone problems later on. Its all based on personal experience, *but most vets will go with the younger age and they are the ones that knows what's best medically*.


I totally disagree. I've lost a lot of respect for vets in the past year or so. I don't say that lightly; I say that in a sad sort of way after what I've been thru with two of my dogs.

What I have personally found, and read about here and many other places, is the vast majority of vets recommend speutering as early as possible. It is just what they push. I had my two oldest dogs spayed early. My oldest was incontinent for her first year. I don't know that it was due to early spay or simply submissive peeing, but I do tend to believe the former. 

Someone do correct me if I'm mistaken, but my understanding is that the incidence of cancer is far, far less than the incidence of bone cancer occuring in early-speutered animals. 

I'm not trying to dissuade you from spaying your girl. At all. Just that you have to take everything in, and seriously, I would not lean completely on your vet, unless this is someone you truly trust. Even then, do your research and come to your own conclusion on what you think is best. Weight it all out. Can you properly contain the female? No, a female heat is not fun, but not the end of the world, either.


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## Draugr (Jul 8, 2011)

Vets have political issues they must address that will almost always come before the health of the individual animal.

It is sad it has to be that way but it is true. There are a lot of idiots out there who are either woefully negligent or are even deliberately breeding unhealthy very unstable dogs.

When you treating dogs as a population, sometimes you need to make decisions and policies that best benefit the population's health, not the individual's health. For a veterinarian and spaying/neutering, this is often how it is.

And in the end, although there may be more risks, they aren't doing anything that is truly life-threatening or risking anything egregious by spaying/neutering at a young age.

In the end though it is YOUR dog and YOUR decision to make. Do your research, and take your veterinarian's advice _in part_ with the rest, and realize that he/she will normally be voicing their opinion from a concern for all dogs, _not just yours_. At the time the topic usually comes up your veterinarian probably does not know you very well yet (if this is your first dog, or you've recently switched, etc, w/e).

They aren't trying to bully you around and they are certainly NOT being heartless, as far from that as you can get. Just realize that there is a very good reason why they must be more concerned about the population than your individual dog.

And of course, if you're one of the irresponsible owners that lets your dog roam at will, realize that you're the reason a veterinarian can't safely address each dog as an individual without knowing the owners very well.


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## llombardo (Dec 11, 2011)

chelle said:


> Someone do correct me if I'm mistaken, but my understanding is that the incidence of cancer is far, far less than the incidence of bone cancer occuring in early-speutered animals.


From what I'm reading its more common in big dogs, lots of Rotts for some reason. But I can say from experience that my mom's Rott was fixed at the age of 2 and she died at around the age of 12-13 from bone cancer. Of course this might be a fluke, but fixing her later did not help her Who knows, medically things change daily and when situations arise like this, its a 50/50 shot, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.


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## msvette2u (Mar 20, 2006)

> There are a lot of idiots out there who are either woefully negligent or are even deliberately breeding unhealthy very unstable dogs.


Even a good owner can have an "oops" as we've seen. By early s/n you are one less statistic. And as Draugr said, if it was so very unhealthy, vets simply would not do it.

Most our vets like to wait until 4-6mo. to s/n. We have one who will do puppies and the puppies don't even notice! They barely show signs anything happened at all. I wish they all would do the early s/n, it would make our lives as a rescue much simpler.


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## Draugr (Jul 8, 2011)

llombardo said:


> From what I'm reading its more common in big dogs, lots of Rotts for some reason. But I can say from experience that my mom's Rott was fixed at the age of 2 and she died at around the age of 12-13 from bone cancer. Of course this might be a fluke, but fixing her later did not help her Who knows, medically things change daily and when situations arise like this, its a 50/50 shot, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.


I think the Rottweiler study said that to reduce bone cancer chances, spay around age 4-6. So age 2 is still very young with regards to that.

But that's also a breed that is already VERY genetically predisposed to osteosarcoma. I very much doubt that it would necessarily translate over to any breed picked at random unless that breed already has a high genetic risk for bone cancer.

Here we go, found the link:

Rottweiler study links ovaries with exceptional longevity

Your mom's rottie still lived to an exceptional age if the average life expectancy is only 9.4 years of age.

~

I would also say that this study doesn't mean much without knowing the actual absolute percentage of female rottweilers that contract bone cancer, or the sample sizes used to obtain these numbers. If only half a percent of female rottweilers contract bone cancer (I'm sure it's higher than that given that this breed is known for this issue, but I'm just using this as an illustration as to why you should never take the results of a study at face value), then being 5 times more likely to contract bone cancer if you spay them before age six really is _not that big a deal_. Similarly if the statistic is 10%, and they're five times more likely...well, that seems pretty startling...

Unless the sample group was thirty dogs, or something. Or thirty dogs from the same lines. For instance, it's hard to find GSDs from certain lines without a specific sire in his/her history. So even if you got a few hundred dogs picked at random from different kennels, "popular sire" syndrome could come into play and alter your results. It doesn't make them necessarily untrue, but it's not telling the whole story, either. Did dogs X Y and Z without blood from sire A have this same effect?

It may mean something - but I'd want to see the original published study before taking *too* much stock in this. I do trust something that is published in an academic, peer-reviewed journal, to a certain extent, but I wouldn't make it out to be a massive playing factor in a huge decision, either.

Bone cancer is definitely something to consider - and one reason I'd would encourage _responsible_ owners to wait to speuter large or maybe even medium-sized breed dogs (if that's what they desire to do)...but if you're the kind of person who lets your dog roam around and get pregnant/impregnate willy-nilly, that's far more a risk to the dog's health than the risk of bone cancer being brought on by hormonal changes after a spay/neuter.


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## llombardo (Dec 11, 2011)

msvette2u said:


> Even a good owner can have an "oops" as we've seen. By early s/n you are one less statistic. And as Draugr said, if it was so very unhealthy, vets simply would not do it.
> 
> Most our vets like to wait until 4-6mo. to s/n. We have one who will do puppies and the puppies don't even notice! They barely show signs anything happened at all. I wish they all would do the early s/n, it would make our lives as a rescue much simpler.


I believe this too, my puppy was 4 months and she didn't even acknowledge the incision or the stitches and healed very quickly and nicely.


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## msvette2u (Mar 20, 2006)

> But that's also a breed that is already VERY genetically predisposed to osteosarcoma.


See, this is the problem with the "anti neuter/spay studies", unless the parents and grandparents were cleared for (for instance) hip dysplasia, if those studies say "Oh early s/n causes HD", how do you know the dog wouldn't have gotten it had it remained intact?

Another for instance - our pup who is around 12mos. now has some pretty horrible joints (one hip and one elbow). He's still intact, and at this rate I probably won't neuter him until we know for sure his prognosis is better than "enjoy him while you have him". So had we neutered him at 4-5mos., would you then say "Well he's got bad joints because you neutered him so early!"

Statistics can say anything people want them to, unfortunately, as the saying goes, there are lies, **** lies, and statistics!


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## Draugr (Jul 8, 2011)

msvette2u said:


> See, this is the problem with the "anti neuter/spay studies", unless the parents and grandparents were cleared for (for instance) hip dysplasia, if those studies say "Oh early s/n causes HD", how do you know the dog wouldn't have gotten it had it remained intact?


In a well-designed study, the idea is that when you have large enough sample sizes (hundreds or even thousands), small discrepancies such as this even out and don't become as meaningful given your criteria for selection.

And even then, a good study, in the closing section, will usually include something to the extent of "these are the factors that could have possibly influenced our results." There's a mathematical means of determining confidence in a given result, but it's been awhile since I took statistics. It's something I wish was a requirement; it's the one course I took that has proven consistently useful in my post-schooling life.

In an individual, if you're trying to determine what caused what, no, that's impossible and a fool's errand. For a specific dog, it's absolutely impossible to tell whether neutering him (or leaving him intact, for that matter), caused some specific disease/disorder.

But when you expand that and look across hundreds of dogs, patterns can emerge which give you more information.

That's one of many reasons why, as the saying goes, "anecdotal evidence is not evidence." There are too many chaotic factors coming into play with an individual for anything to make any reasonable determination. Um, let's see, how can I illustrate this...ah...

Oh! Okay. Say I know a dog that died of hemangiosarcoma, at age 5. He was neutered at 5 months. I also know that studies have shown an early neuter age predisposes male dogs to more than a two-fold higher risk (or thereabouts) of hemangiosarcoma of the heart (I also know that in both cases, those numbers are very small and nearly insignificant, but that's beside the point I'm trying to make now).

Now, it's very easy for me to use this to say "this dog died because he was neutered too young!" And well, it's possible that's true. But I can't (rationally, at least) have any confidence in that. If I look at his family tree and see that for the last three generations, 60% of the males have contracted hemangiosarcoma at middle age, well, then that begins to show a different story entirely. And even if I *don't* see that, it still doesn't mean anything one way or the other. Statistics are gathered from hundreds or thousands, and can't be used to determine what caused something in an individual. It's risk analysis, at least in the kinds of stats we are talking about. A risk doesn't "make" your dog get this or that. It's just something you use to make a decision.

And it's also possible that _this specific individual_ would have developed hemangio at age 5 regardless of whether he kept his boy bits or not. Nobody can know that.

But if we look at 100,000 dogs, and find that 5,000 of them died of hemangiosarcoma at middle age, and 90% of them were neutered before they were six months - we can reasonably conclude that neutering is a _likely_ a risk factor with hemangio. We can't conclude causation, but we know it's correlated with that. If I saw a statistic like that, for instance, I would probably conclude that it's likely that sex hormones play some sort of role in preventing or delaying hemangio in those that are genetically predisposed to it. But it is 100% illogical for me to say that neutering killed this hypothetical dog I'm talking about because it "made" him get hemangio.

Where people make the mistake is translating all of that over to "solve" an individual case. When I'm making decisions about the future, then sure - because I'm looking at risk of something that may or may not happen. I need to be careful about not generalizing it too much to my dog, but they can be useful for decision-making. Just not problem-solving, at least in the context I'm talking about. Statistics on how many dogs get disease and for what reasons doesn't tell you anything about why _your_ dog has it (unless there's some statistic concerning causation - aka, 95% of dogs with disease X were neutered prior to 6 months, and here's the precise, exact, scientifically proven mechanism as to why disease X can develop as a side effect of neutering).

And mind you I don't know of any statistics like that whatsoever, and I very much doubt any like that exist. But some people read these stats and that is exactly what they think they mean. IE - if only you would have neutered/not neutered him, then he'd be alive/healthy.

But the relationship really is not that clear. Or it is clear, but insignificant (for instance, I wouldn't have surgery done on myself to prevent something with a half a percent risk of occurring). IE, it's hardly meaningful to tell someone "if only you'd left him intact, he'd be better off." 

Well, okay, but, that's also called hindsight is 20/20. I'm not going to make a major decision solely based off a statistic that is talking about a .2% risk. It wouldn't have been a good decision then and it still isn't a good decision now. Generally speaking, apart from being quite cruel and heartless, it's at the very least illogical to berate someone for a decision they made (in part) over a risk that amounts to just a few percentage points.

I mean, you have a certain percent risk of dying in an alcohol-related vehicle crash every time you drive somewhere. Would you decide to _never drive again_ just because of that? Would you decide to get on the roads and drive everywhere you could as often as possible?

Then why is it foolhardy for someone to choose to neuter their dog because it was the best solution for them, even if risk X Y and Z were raised? Answer: It isn't. It's a reasonable precaution taken in light of the risk factors. Neither of those two scenarios I gave above are reasonable actions to take - I bet you would probably continue to drive on an "as-needed" basis. For some people, testicles exist on an "as-needed" basis. 

On a more serious note, though, heh, I hope that comparison makes sense. I know I was getting wordy.

~

I would just encourage everyone to take a look at their own lifestyle and the things you want to do with your dog. Those sorts of things come into play far more strongly, I feel, than medical risks.


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