Part 1: The Coddling of the American Dog
This is a story about dog nuts. Testicles, if you want to be scientific about it, those fleshy little sacs, plums in panty hoes that half of dogs are born with but mostly, these days, get snipped. It’s also a story about the relationship between dogs and humans, a bond that has existed since the first wolves dared to edge near our ancestors’ fires, hoping for cave scraps. And it’s a story about my own dog, his nuts, and a moral dilemma that I never thought I’d have to consider.
I’ve never been exactly what you’d call a “dog person” (or a cat person, or a people person, for that matter), but my family did have dogs growing up. First there was a lazy Golden Retriever named Dixie who moseyed everywhere she went, shaking her butt slowly back and forth like a woman with hips. At 13, Dixie walked into the woods one day and never came back. The next spring, we found her collar and bones nestled among pink lady slippers. Then, there was Tsali, a fat yellow lab who was, somehow, even lazier. Later, there was Maggie, an ill-tempered mutt my parents let me take home from the local Humane Society after my twin sister went off to boarding school. We all hoped she’d be a good replacement but, unlike my sister, Maggie bit.
I liked our dogs, maybe even loved them, but I treated them all with a sort of benign neglect. This was the ‘80s and ‘90s in the mountains of North Carolina. No one put their dogs in costumes and posted photos of them on the computer. We didn’t call them our “fur babies” or worry about them getting lonely when we left the house. We didn’t even take them for walks: We just opened the door and if they wanted to walk, they were welcome to it. If you’d told me to pick up their poop and carry it around in little plastic bags, I’d have thought you were nuts.
In this respect, I was not unusual. Most of the dogs on my street were free-range to some degree. The dog next door, a Lego-shaped mutt named Peaches, would frequently walk herself to the university campus a mile down the road and wander into offices and classrooms. This, I thought, was normal. What would not have been normal was, say, taking your dogs on vacation. No one did that.
Those days are long over. I’m not sure the last time I was on a plane without at least one fake service dog. The last time I flew, a fake service corgi snarled at a fake service Yorkipoo in line at the gate. Both were still allowed on the flight.
There are now doggie hotels, doggie spas, doggie photographers, even doggie Bar Mitzvahs (called, of course, Bark Mitzvahs). You can get surveillance cameras to watch your dogs while you’re away, including some that let you speak to your pet. I imagine it’s like the voice of God coming from the camera, telling Luna or Finn or Mabel that Mommy loves you but get off the fucking couch.
Of course, why leave the dog at home when you could just… not? I see dogs in grocery stores, offices, shops, even in restaurants. Yes, restaurants—where people eat. There’s a bar catering to dog lovers not far from my parents’ house. It’s $175 a year to join and when I drive by, it’s always packed.
I’d observed the trend for years but none of it made any sense. Why were dogs everywhere all of a sudden? And when did people start treating them like children? When a friend posted on Facebook that one of her many rescue dogs had died (or, as she put it, had “crossed the rainbow bridge”) and that the loss of Bingo was no less tragic for her than the loss of a human, I thought, “Wow, that’s so sad.” But what I meant wasn’t “how sweet,” it was “how pathetic.”
What was wrong with everyone? I was about as likely to refer to an animal as my “fur baby” as I was to follow a stranger into a van. And I complained about it. Until Covid hit, I was a staff writer at the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, and on slow news days I would use my column to rail against the coddling of the American dog. It seemed like every time I went out to buy coffee, there would be some panting, farting, shedding animal in line before me. I didn’t get it. I didn’t like it. I wanted it to stop.
And then I met Janna, the woman who would become my wife, and not only did I change my mind about dog fanatics, I’m ashamed to say I even became one myself.
Janna, unlike me, has always been a dog person. She’s also allergic, which allowed me to postpone the inevitable, at least for a while.
“Of course I’d love to get a dog,” I told her when we were moving into our first Seattle apartment together (which, in typical lesbian fashion, we did approximately five minutes after we met). “If only you weren’t so itchy. How about a pet spider?”
She assured me that there are hypoallergenic dog breeds that don’t shed but said that we should wait until we had a house with a yard to get one. I agreed, assuming that a massive earthquake would break Washington state off the map before I had to worry about that. “Definitely,” I said. “Can’t wait.”
Four years later, we bought a house with a big yard about an hour ferry ride outside Seattle. Janna wasted no time looking. She had just the breed in mind: a goldendoodle, the dog of choice for people who like their pets to resemble teddy bears with teeth. This was not just an aesthetic choice: Janna had lived with a big, bouncing Goldendoodle named Charlie before we met, and his temperament was just right. He was obedient enough to come when he was called but not so smart that you had to worry about him getting into much mischief. And he was cute, with a mop of curly hair and eyelashes any drag queen would envy.
After we settled on a breed that wouldn’t trigger Janna’s allergies or my complaints about fur on the couch, we started looking. First, we tried PetFinder, the largest dog and cat adoption repository in the U.S., but there were few hypoallergenic breeds available, much less Goldendoodles puppies, which weren’t exactly languishing in American shelters. We applied for a few poodle mixes, including a four-year-old named Mitzi who was, according to the website, anxious in “all situations.”
The application for Mitzi was surprisingly thorough. We had to supply references and give detailed information about our living situation, our prior experience with dogs, and how, exactly, we intended to raise her. “What is your plan for letting the dog relieve itself?,” the application asked, and I thought for a moment before typing: “Open the door and let it out.” I was surprised we weren’t required to do a home visit. For some reason, we never heard back.
When that failed, it was time to look at breeders. I knew there might be some judgement cast our way for shopping rather than adopting, so I told Janna that if anyone ever asked, we would just say, yes, our dog was a rescue. We’d rescued him from a very expensive breeder.
After several weeks of scouring the internet for puppies, Janna found one in rural Washington. It wasn’t a puppy mill or a professional breeder, just a family with two Goldendoodles and a litter of pups on the way. It was perfect. Janna did all the communicating with the breeder which, in retrospect, was a mistake. She texted him that we’d prefer a girl to a boy, and when he said the girls were all spoken for, she replied, “That’s too bad. We would really like to avoid the ‘lipstick,’ situation,” a reference to the disturbingly pink look of a dog’s erect penis, something I’d seen once as a child and explains why I’m gay.
Unbelievably, the breeder did not block her number, and on a rainy, windy day in December 2019, we drove three hours to his house to pick out a pup. As soon as we arrived, the parents approached us, wagging. The female was a gorgeous brown with a glossy coat and honey-colored eyes while the dad had a big, white, poofy afro and the goofy, cartoonish face of a clown. They didn’t bark or leap or get aggressive when we walked into the pen to play with their puppies, as though they were more than willing to be done with them. And maybe they were. By eight weeks, puppies are fully weaned, with sharp little teeth that anyone who has raised one likely remembers. These teeth can easily pierce human skin; just imagine what that’s like on a nipple.
While all the girl puppies in the litter had been claimed, we had our pick of the boys. It wasn’t unusual that the girls were more popular: Girls are more popular, possibly because people (maybe looking at our own species) intuit that males will be more trouble. As for the actual behavioral differences between boys and girls, that’s up for debate. Michelle Behrns, a doodle breeder in South Dakota, told me she gets about 75 percent more requests for girl dogs than boys, but, she said, she actually prefers boys herself because she finds them more trainable. There’s a reason, she told me, the term “bitch” has entered the lexicon. “A good female will be a great dog,” Behrns said, but if you get an alpha female, she will be a bitch to train.”
We picked up the four-week-old puppies one by one, trying to detect subtle differences between nearly identical creatures. Each had a ribbon tied around its neck so the breeder could tell them apart, and there was one in particular we kept coming back to: a dark brown little boy who was so sleepy he could barely open his eyes. When he did, they were bright blue, and I’d hoped they’d stay that way forever. “That’s Mellow Yellow,” the owner told us. “He’s a lazy boy. Loves to cuddle.”
Lazy? Loves to cuddle? That was it. Mellow Yellow, we decided, would be ours and we’d call him Moose. We put down a $600 deposit and made plans to meet up in another month, when Moose was fully weaned and ready for rescue.
Before Moose arrived, I insisted we would have clear rules and boundaries. No people food. No dogs on the furniture. No begging, no coddling, and definitely no calling ourselves “dog moms.” This was not my fur baby. This was a dog, and he would be treated as such. But as soon as he was home, I immediately forgot all of the rules. Not only did Moose jump up on the furniture whenever he liked, I coaxed him to do it. Not only did he sleep in our bed, he slept with his head on my pillow. And how could we not let him? We’d stolen him from his family. The least I could do is share my bed. Janna was supposed to be the dog person, but here I was, slyly googling “fake service animal vest” and wondering just how hard it would be to take him on a plane.
Moose became my constant companion. Paranoid about him getting parvo, a potentially deadly virus that lives on surfaces, I carried him like a newborn in a makeshift baby Bjorn until he was old enough to be fully vaccinated. This was probably unnecessary, but at least one of us liked it. When he got too big for that, he trotted along by my side, never straying more than a few yards away, even when I (illegally) took him off-leash in our neighborhood park. And he was a quick study, learning to sit, come, and stay in just a few weeks. I wondered aloud if it was possible that our boy was a genius. “No,” Janna said. “He just really likes treats.”
At the time, both of us were working in Seattle three days a week, so we staggered our schedules as much as we could, making sure Moose spent as little time alone as possible. Intellectually, I knew that the dog would be fine at home by himself, that he was a dog, not a baby, but I hated the idea of him being lonesome. I hired dog-walkers to drop in when we were both gone, including a precocious, homeschooled 10-year-old named Lucy who was using her dog-walking money to pay for her harp lessons.
While I hated leaving him, I loved coming back. Each time I would open the door after work, Moose would rush me like I was the second coming of Jesus or maybe a giant stick, wagging his whole body so hard I feared his tail would fall off. Of course, he was equally as excited when I came back inside after taking out the trash or checking the mailbox. But I didn’t care. This was love.
I’ve often wondered exactly why I feel so different about Moose than I did the dogs of my youth. They were fine dogs, sure. Good enough. But I wouldn’t have let them sleep on my bed, much less donated a kidney to them. But Moose was different. Or maybe it was me who was different. Maybe my love for him was some thwarted maternal instinct and all the care I should have been expending on my own children was redirected toward this dog. It’s a common assumption: Millennials, in particular, treat dogs like children because we don’t have actual kids. But the thing is, I don’t like kids. They are fine from a distance, and I have a collection of nieces and nephews I’m fond of. My friends’ kids are okay. Well, most of them. But I’m about as naturally maternal as a spider—the ones that eat their young. I have as much interest in raising children as I do in raising a herpes infection. So I don’t think my bond with Moose is some misplaced desire to mother. I think it’s actually much simpler: Moose, unlike my childhood dogs, doesn’t shed. I just don’t think I could truly love an animal that leaves fur on my couch.
Whatever the reason, once covid hit and I was laid off from The Stranger and stuck at home, our bond grew even stronger. Instead of looking for work, I spent most of that first summer focused on Moose. We went for hikes three or four times a week and swam nearly every day. We visited every dog park within a 60-mile radius and I anxiously watched as he tried (and usually failed) to make friends. I felt like a mom watching her kindergartener on the first day of class, part of me wanting him to venture out on his own, and part of me hoping that he’d never grow up.
But there’s no delaying the inevitable. His silky baby fur grew into tight curls, and the soft sound of puppy feet padding along the floor turned into nails clicking on wood. His tail, which, as a puppy, resembled a scraggly Caucasian dreadlock, bloomed into a gloriously feathered poof. After months in the sun, his hair faded to blond on the ends, the sort of ombre that women pay handsomely for. His eyes, ice-blue at birth, turned his mom’s golden brown. When his sharp little shark’s teeth fell out, giving way to canines that tore through flesh and bone, we put them in a little box on a shelf. On the day Janna and I got married, at the height Covid lockdowns, our entire wedding party was an officiant, two witnesses, and, of course, Moose. In the only photos of the ceremony, Janna’s holding my hand, and I’m holding Moose.
It was about this time that I started seriously thinking about Moose’s testicles. On a camping trip at the end of the summer, I mentioned to a friend that I needed to schedule Moose to get neutered.
“Can I ask why?,” she asked, and I realized I didn’t actually know the answer other than, well, everyone does it. And when I thought about it, that didn’t really seem like a good enough reason to cut off a part of Moose’s body—especially a part he seemed particularly fond of. We say our pets are our family, and yet, would you cut off a family member’s nuts? Certainly not without asking first.
This got me thinking. Why do we neuter and spay man’s best friend? The obvious answer is to prevent unwanted pregnancy, but Moose was in about as much danger of knocking up another dog as he was of knocking up the pillow he occasionally liked to hump. Unlike the dogs of my youth, there’s nothing free-range about him. He’s loved (adored, even) and well-cared for, but when it comes to autonomy, Moose is basically a fuzzy, four-legged prisoner. There’s no sex in his future unless I decide I can no longer live with a virgin. So why do something so permanent, so extreme, to prevent a pregnancy that’s unlikely to happen?
It turns out, the answer to this question is more complicated than I expected, and it involves thorny ethical issues like animal welfare and bodily autonomy, and decades-long fights between veterinarians, breeders, animal rights activists, and dog rescues, most of whom are just trying to do what’s right. But what is right for our pets? That was my question, and I decided I wasn’t chopping Moose’s nuggets until I could answer it.
Part 2: What’s Happening to My Doggy?
At barely over a foot tall, Suzie was stout, speckled, and loved nothing more than getting her butt scratched.
I met Suzie, a 2-year-old bulldog whose legs splayed out like a duck, at the sandy, fenced-in dog park that was my primary source of human contact at the start of the pandemic. Moose had mixed feelings about the dog park. Sweet but shy, he would edge up to groups of dogs chasing each other in circles or wrestling like four-legged gladiators, but if anyone snapped or growled or tried to sniff his butt, he would run back and hide behind my legs before slowly venturing out for more.
As a puppy, Moose was less hesitant around strange dogs, but when he was about six months old, he was attacked by a snappy little bitch. He was fine, protected by his think curly hair, and I was probably the more traumatized of the two of us, haunted by the fact that rather than kicking the aggressor in the face like I’d always imagined, all I’d done was yell at the dog’s owner to get his “ugly fucking mutt off my baby.” Ever since, Moose had seemed slightly nervous around big crowds of dogs, but I hoped that with enough socialization, he’d open up.
As Suzie and Moose circled each other, I chatted with her owner, a woman in her mid-60s with grown-out roots and a Seahawks mask around her neck. She told me that Suzie was her son’s dog, that he’d moved back in after he lost his job during the pandemic, but she ended up doing most of the work.
“It’s just like when he was a kid,” she told me. “Mom cleans up all the shit.” I laughed, and then she asked the question I’d come to dread. “When are you getting him fixed?,” she said, pointing her Chuckit at Moose, who was, at that moment, squirming around on his back as Suzie inspected his genitals.
“Soon,” I lied. “Waiting until he’s a bit older.”
Moose’s balls came up a lot at the dog park. While his butt fur usually covered the offending organs, when he ran they flapped in the wind like a flag and were nearly impossible to miss. Because testicles are a rarity, people had questions. Or, at least, they had a question: When was that nut sac getting chopped?
The first time this happened, I was honest. I said I hadn’t decided yet and launched into a monologue about bodily autonomy and health effects, but I quickly learned it was better just to lie. No one wanted my musings about ethics and consent; what they wanted to hear was that Moose was going to get snipped. When I told one guy that I was thinking of keeping Moose intact, he picked up his Shih Tzu as though Moose was going to assault his precious Tiffany at any second. “As if,” I thought to myself. “She’s not his type.”
Clearly, there was one acceptable narrative at the dog park, and that narrative was that responsible owners fix their dogs. But I’d spent the previous few months educating myself on neutering, and the more I learned, the less I was sure that Moose needed it. And that, I was realizing, put me in the dreaded category of “irresponsible dog owner.”
If you visit the website for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, one of the largest animal welfare groups in the world, there’s a clear message: Spaying and neutering is good for your pet. It not only reduces unplanned puppies, it’s healthier for the dog and all owners should do it.
But is this good advice for all dogs?
To find out, I called Ben and Lynette Hart, two of the foremost animal researchers in the U.S. Both longtime faculty at the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of California, Davis, the Harts have published hundreds of papers on everything from elephant yawning to urine spraying in cats, but they have a particular interest in the health effects of spaying and neutering on dogs.
In 2013, the Harts completed the first major study on joint disorders and cancer rates in dogs that have been spayed or neutered. For this study, they analyzed hospital records of golden retrievers and they found that rates of some cancers increased in dogs that had been sterilized, particularly in females. They also found that spayed/neutered dogs were more likely to have knee ligament damage and hip dysplasia, a disorder my childhood Lab suffered from that made walking so painful she sometimes dragged her back legs behind her when she walked.
Rates of these disorders varied by sex as well as the age at which the dog was spayed or neutered—and of course, there could be many other forces at play here, including both genetics and environmental factors—but the Harts had clearly tapped into something important. Golden retrievers are one of the most popular dog breeds in America, and their findings showed that spaying and neutering might actually be causing them harm. You’d think that the veterinary establishment might have been receptive to this information.
Initially, it wasn’t. The Harts had so much difficulty getting a major journal in their field to consider their paper, they ended up publishing at the open-access journal PLOS-One, where it’s available without charge to anyone. By now, their paper has been viewed nearly half a million times. Compare that to most academic papers, which are viewed by, well, almost nobody.
But still, Ben told me, some vets didn’t want to hear it.
“At first, there was a lot of pushback within the profession. They said, ‘We don’t want you to talk about it. We don’t want to disturb how we’ve been handling this.’”
Lynette broke in: “We joked about tomatoes being thrown at us.”
The Harts did not stop talking about it. At the time we first spoke, they’d analyzed 35 pure breeds as well as five categories of mixed breeds, and Ben told me that the ASPCA’s recommendation to spay or neuter every dog is, “in a nutshell, bad advice.” There’s just too much variation for there to be one hard and fast rule for all animals.
While the effects of spaying and neutering vary across breed, age, and sex, as a general rule, the Harts found that the bigger the dog and the earlier the desexing, the greater the risk of debilitating joint disorders and some cancers. Most small breeds, however, are a different story. “Small breeds get some cancers and joint disorders, but there’s very few in which neutering plays a role,” Ben said.
Moose, however, isn’t small, and he’s also part golden retriever, a breed that does have high rates of cancer in general. And because he’s the dog I care most about, and the dog whose testicles I was considering cutting off, after I talked to the Harts, I added another tick to the Keep Moose’s Balls list I’d been keeping. Cancer? In my boy? I pictured Moose in a chemo ward, confused, in pain, and bald as Jean-Luc Picard. I really didn’t want to shave my entire body in solidarity.
But what about his behavior? Conventional wisdom tells us that spaying and neutering makes dogs easier, more trainable, less of a headache. And in some ways, this makes intuitive sense.
Spaying, which involves removing the dog’s ovaries, fallopian tubes, and uterus, prevents female dogs from going into heat, which, if nothing else, is definitely more pleasant for the owner. The estrus cycle, as it’s known, can involve vaginal bleeding, and while no one has made doggie tampons yet, they do make a sort of period panties for pups. (Growing up with only spayed dogs, I had no idea that this happened until my 20s, when a friend’s terrier bled on my rug. I can see why people want to prevent this.)
Male dogs aren’t exempt from the changes either. They can reportedly smell a bitch in heat from far away, and intact male dogs are more likely to stray in the attempt to find a fertile partner. This, of course, puts them at risk of getting lost or hit by a car.
Neutering, which involves removing the testes, dampens the sex drive by eliminating the dog’s main source of testosterone. But this, like estrogen in females, is an important hormone for development, and it’s one of the reasons dogs that are neutered before they reach doggy puberty are more likely to have joint disorders. Still, as we know from the effects of testosterone on humans, it can also make dogs kind of nuts.
I saw an example of this shortly after I spoke to the Harts. While on a walk with Moose in some woods, I ran into a couple with a young female pit bull. They were lost, trying to find their way out of an unmarked labyrinth, and stopped to ask for directions. As I was telling them where to go, Moose, who tends to be shy (and, I always thought, preferred the company of males), was uncommonly interested in their dog. “She’s in heat,” the couple told me as Moose sniffed her like a steak. That explained it.
“Damn,” I thought as I dragged him away. “I guess he’s straight.”
This type of behavior is certainly something to consider when weighing whether or not to desex your dog. Moose has never run away but I did take him off-leash on trails and in parks all the time. He always stays close and returns when I call him, but if we encountered a dog in heat while he was off-leash, I could not guarantee he wouldn’t try to make puppies. He’s an animal, and that’s what animals do. Did that mean off-leash was over? I made a mental note to add a tick mark to my Chop the Balls Off list.
And yet, while there is anecdotal evidence that spaying and neutering may calm your dog down, studies also show that neutering can make your dog behave worse.
James Serpell, professor of Animal Ethics and Welfare at the University of Pennsylvania, is the developer of a survey about dog behavior. Since its inception in 2005, Serpell and his team have collected data on over 100,000 pet dogs and their behaviors, including things like aggression, fear, anxiety, attachment, and excitability. (Moose, I am proud to say, got nearly perfect scores, although he was marked down for barking at the mailman.)
After analyzing this data for differences in dogs that had been spayed and neutered, “We found very dramatic differences in male dogs,” Serpell told me. But here is the surprising part: “The neutered animals had less good behavior on 26 variables.” he said. That was a bit of a surprise since it seemed to go against what everyone was saying.”
These variables included aggression, fearfulness, and excitability. Spayed and neutered dogs, contrary to common belief, were also rated less trainable than their intact counterparts.
Serpell and his team did the same analysis with female dogs, and while the effect wasn’t quite as dramatic, there were still at least six variables in which spayed females seemed to perform worse, especially when the procedure was done early.
Still, Serpell told me, the data doesn’t show the whole picture. In fact, if you look at dogs that are given to shelters because of behavioral problems, intact male dogs are over-represented.
Serpell explained it this way: “There’s something going on, and my guess is that it’s to do with an adolescent surge in testosterone that is causing people to relinquish their teenaged male dogs who are suddenly starting to show obnoxious behavior.”
And the behavior can be really obnoxious. While Moose (thank god) seems to have a low sex drive and only occasionally humps my leg, I’ve heard stories. One friend told me she got her dog neutered because he was leaving “deposits” on her husband’s pillow every morning. The writer Meghan Daum, who has written beautiful essays about her life with Newfoundlands, told me that, as a puppy, her 165-pound giant Hugo attempted to mount her daily, and if you’ve ever tried to tell a Newfoundland “no means no,” you’re aware they aren’t great with consent.
Luckily, many of these more annoying behaviors can dissipate on their own, whether or not you decide to neuter. Just like with humans, testosterone levels naturally deplete as dogs age, and the sex-craze can wane in adulthood. But I understood why Meghan got Hugo fixed as soon as she could—how much dog humping can one person really put up with, especially from a fuzzy giant? And, in the end, it worked. Post-neuter, Megan tells me, Hugo only humps her, for some reason, when she’s doing push-ups.
Besides the possibility of unplanned puppies, I wondered if keeping Moose intact would make him more of a target for other dogs’ aggression. I’m not worried about Moose being aggressive—not only does he look like a teddy bear, he’s got the personality of one—but he had been attacked at that dog park. I asked Serpell if his nuts might have something to do with it. In short: it’s possible. “Perhaps neutered males feel more threatened,” he told me.
Did this mean it wasn’t safe to take Moose out in public unless he was neutered? Well, maybe. He’d only been attacked once, and he wasn’t actually hurt, but it was certainly something to weigh when making the decision. Moose likes leaving the house. We both do. Could I responsibly keep doing this if he kept his nuts? Or would we have to be shut-ins, both of us staring at the window and barking at the mailman as life passed by us outside. But then, on the other hand, there are risks with desexing too. What’s worse? No dog parks or a higher risk of joint disorders and cancer? I was honestly torn.
In an ideal world, these are the things vets would talk about with their clients. But instead, we’ve largely had a one-size-fits-all model, where the recommendation from most veterinarians, animal welfare groups, shelters, and the ASPCA is that all dogs, no matter the breed or the lifestyle, should get fixed.
The Harts would like to see this model change.
“We’ve argued for this new approach to neutering,” Ben told me. “Veterinarians should sit down and talk with their clients. They explain what the data is so far and help that client arrive at a decision. It’s a paradigm shift.”
And the paradigm is shifting. The American Veterinary Medical Association now endorses individualized healthcare rather than across-the-board desexing, now noting that “there is no single recommendation that would be appropriate for all dogs.” Getting that message out to vets, rescues, breeders, and dog owners, however, is another question.
Part 3: To Spay or Not to Spay?
These days, It’s become a sort of orthodoxy that responsible owners neuter their dogs. We tend to treat this as almost a law of the universe. But while de-sexing of animals has a long history in agriculture, the de-sexing of pets is a relatively recent phenomenon, and to understand why spaying and neutering became so monolithic in the first place, we have to look to a time when the world was quite literally being overrun by dogs. And for that, we need to go to 1960s India.
In the 1960s, Madras, India, (now known as Chennai) had a major dog problem. Mangy, emaciated street dogs would congregate by sources of food—usually garbage dumps—and there were tens of thousands of human deaths from rabies across India each year.
For over a century, the local government had run a catch-and-kill program, in which stray dogs were shot in the street, but it wasn’t working. Every year, thousands of dogs were being executed, but there would be just as many street dogs the next year. In fact, culling the population may have exacerbated the problem: by temporarily reducing the number of street dogs, the remaining dogs’ chances of surviving—and reproducing—only went up. By the 1970s, so many dogs were being killed that a research institute specializing in leather reportedly designed neckties and wallets from dog skins.
Looking around and seeing this problem, one of the founders of the Blue Cross of India, an animal lover named S. Chinny Krishna, had an idea. If a dog was picked up, it could be examined, treated, vaccinated, de-sexed, and released back where it had been found. What’s more, he proposed, dog owners should be encouraged to have their pets spayed/neutered and vaccinated—all free of charge. He called the program Animal Birth Control, or ABC for short, and, he told me in an email, the name was meant “to show the municipalities that control of the street dog population was as simple as ABC.” It would have been the first city-run spay and neuter program for street dogs in the world.
Unfortunately, the local government didn’t listen. The municipality rejected his proposal, and although the Blue Cross continued to spay and neuter dogs on its own, for the next 35 years, the stray dog population grew. By 1995, the municipality was killing 135 dogs per day. That year, they finally adopted Krishna’s ABC plan.
Meanwhile, across the world, U.S. cities were having dog problems of their own—and had been for decades. Streets were littered with shit and piss, and people regularly had negative encounters with stray dogs. And so, like in India, cities killed them.
In the late 19th century, dogs in New York were picked up by dog-catchers, imprisoned in a cage called the “canine bathtub,” and drowned in the East River. They could kill 750 dogs before early afternoon. My father, Hal Herzog, a scholar of human-animal interactions and the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, described it this way: “Forty-eight dogs at a time were jammed into the heavy cage. It was then lifted up by a crane, swung over the East River and submerged. Ten minutes later, the cage was hauled to the surface, the carcasses removed, and the cage reloaded with another batch of strays.” Quite a way to treat man’s best friend.
By the time Krishna was developing his program in Madras, drowning was out, and the dog management business in the U.S. had largely been outsourced to municipal pounds and humane societies, many of which at least tried to adopt dogs out before they killed them. And a lot of dogs were being killed: In 1973, for instance, an estimated 7 million dogs were euthanized out of a nationwide population of 35 million. in fact for many years The majority of dogs that ended up at pounds and shelters were put down.
In an effort to reduce the executions and address the homeless dog problem, the first low-cost spay/neuter clinic opened in North Hollywood in 1971, and from there, the idea started to spread to veterinary medicine.
Spaying and neutering quickly took off. Animal protection groups and humane societies urged people to de-sex their animals and vets started advising spay and neuter as part of basic wellness. In 1970, less than 10 percent of licensed dogs were spayed or neutered. Today, about 80 percent are. In some places in the US, it’s even the law, and at least 30 states require shelters to de-sex dogs before adopting them out.
This isn’t true everywhere in the world: De-sexing dogs is largely prohibited in Norway, where it’s considered cruel if performed for non-medical reasons, and it’s rare in Sweden and Denmark too. And yet, these places are not overrun with feral dog populations. Why? Well, if you ask the typical dog owner in Scandinavia, I’m guessing they’d say it’s that they’re more responsible with their pets. They don’t have mass sterilization programs simply because they don’t need them.
If you look at just the big, population-level picture, the current spay/neuter paradigm has been one of the most successful animal welfare efforts in human history. The days of mass executions are, thankfully, long gone. No one is drowning dogs in canine bathtub in the East River. “Dog-catcher” sounds like one of those jobs like “lamplighter” or “elevator operator.” I’m not sure it still even exists. All this is good for dogs and for the people who love them.
This success, however, has led to other problems. Rather than a dog surplus, what we have is a shortage, particularly of puppies from more desirable breeds. And I understand if this is hard to believe: You’re probably picturing a big-eyed, floppy-eared homeless beagle as Sarah McLachlan sings in your ear. Campaigns like Adopt Don’t Shop have convinced many of us that there are millions of puppies in shelters just waiting for some loving person to take them home all over the US. And there is, of course, some truth to that. The Humane Society in my own town is perpetually overrun. Just last month they had to close down for a day when 50 cats and dogs (and one pig) were confiscated from one probably very smelly house.
But despite the ad campaigns, and the horror stories, there is a real mismatch between the dogs people want and the dogs that are actually available. In the US, it’s estimated that it takes
between 7 and 9 million new dogs a year just to maintain the current pet population and meet demand. That’s far more than shelters and domestic breeders can supply, and the shortage is often filled by sophisticated transportation networks that move dogs from region to region—usually from the south and the southwest to the north—and by importing dogs from abroad. This explains why, if you’re looking to adopt, you’ll frequently find dogs from far away… sometimes really far away. Over a million dogs are imported each year from Puerto Rico, South Korea, Mexico, Central America, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. Often these are either adult dogs that were living quite successfully on their own before being scooped up and taken abroad, or they are puppies purchased by American rescue groups from breeders with fewer regulations than in the US. In other words, buyers who may never support commercial breeders at home may very well be getting puppies from the international equivalent of puppy mills, but because we call them “rescues” like they are being freed in the night and not simply bought from sometimes unscrupulous breeders, the consumer can feel good about it. It’s almost a sort of moral laundering.
Of course, being adopted into a loving home can be the best thing that’s ever happened to an animal. Many shelters and rescues do good, necessary work, and there are volunteers all over the U.S. fostering dogs or schlepping them from state to state and country to country because they genuinely love them. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say these people are heroes. But bringing in animals from abroad comes with risks. Dogs bring whatever diseases or parasites they have with them. One flesh-eating parasite has been found for the first time in the U.S. and Canada, and experts think it was imported with dogs from abroad. In other words, in trying to solve the problem of unwanted puppies, the solution, as so often happens, introduced new problems too.
In the years since I first started on this journey down testicle lane, the data has become more clear. Ben and Lynette Hart, the researchers from UC Davis, continued to add more breeds to their repository. The research is fascinating—and kinda troubling. They found, for instance, that female German Short Haired Pointers that had been fixed before the age of six months had a nearly 20 times greater risk of developing joint disorders compared to those who were left intact. They also found that the cancer risk for male mastiffs jumped from 7 percent to 28 percent if they were neutered in their first year of life. That’s something their owners probably would like to know! Of course, because nothing is simple, with some breeds, sterilization has no impact at all, and the Harts compiled their data into a handy timeline so dog owners can see exactly when, and if, their specific breed should be fixed.
But despite the risks, the more I learned, the clearer it became that, on net, the mass -sterilization effort has been good for dogs. There are 90 percent fewer dogs killed in shelters each year than there were in the 1970s—that’s millions of dogs who won’t get the needle, in part thanks to spay and neuter.
But when it came to my dog, I was less compelled by the big picture than the small one. Two small ones, actually, wrinkly, flesh-toned sacs that didn’t seem to be doing Moose any harm. In the end, after consulting with vets and researchers and trainers and briefly considering paying $1500 for a doggy vasectomy, we decided against it. Moose kept his nuggets. Both of them.
He’s now six—or what some horrible woman at a park recently referred to as “middle aged”—and he’s grown into a truly great dog. He’s not perfect: He likes Janna more than me, and when he’s overly excited he screams like a pig being slaughtered. He’s also illiterate and a terrible host. But he’s happy, healthy, energetic but not annoying about it. He comes when we call him, more or less. He’s oddly funny for a dog, and genuinely beautiful, with that curly blonde hair that makes strangers ask every day if we dye it. We don’t. It’s all natural. Just like his nuts.
I’m still not sure it was the right decision. It’s always possible that my choice will come back to bite Moose in the dick. Maybe he’ll get testicular cancer or, god forbid, he’ll get some bitch pregnant. He’d be the talk of the town: Moose, the cad, the fuckboy, the slut. But that’s the thing about dogs: They can’t make these choices themselves, and if they could, I’m pretty sure the neuter rate would be zero.
In the end, what it comes down to is this: What works for one dog might not work for another, so the best we can do for these panting, farting, shedding animals in our care is to treat them as they are. As individuals. And so the next time some guy at a dog park asks when I’m getting Moose snipped, I’ll be honest. I won’t go into cancer rates or population effects or the risk of spay and neuter on joints, I’ll just smile and say, “I’m not. Now when are you snipping yours?” And then I’ll throw the ball again and again, just a normal American dog mom with her fur baby.
