Granted, spaying of late has become less and less contentious. Fashionable even. So many people owning cats know the 2 essentials of cat ownership: to vaccinate them and then to neuter them. Nobody questions it anymore because ‘hivo ndio inakuwanga’.
I was reading through a popular Facebook group in Kenya dedicated to all matters pertaining cats and randomly skimming through their uploaded posts. I would so frequently find posts pertaining to birth of kittens and breeding being banned in the group as this would contradict the group’s standing narrative that all cats should be neutered. People would even go to the extent of saying that if you really love your cat, you wouldn’t allow them to go through the pains and throws of birthing another. You need to spay or castrate your cat if you truly care for them.
Detour: Let me just mention how refreshing it is to meet people who actually care for their animals (particularly pets) and not just because they are able to offer back something in return like security or rat control. It’s refreshing because the narrative in Kenya is quite the opposite. You are the minority if you care for your cat’s needs, and people would often wonder what in the world is wrong with you because ‘It’s a cat for God sake’. It’s normal around here to fling a rock at a cat because you just don’t like how it looks at you, or to actually beat one up because he/she climbed in through your window and stole the meat off the kitchen counter. In the lower income regions of the nation, it’s especially bad, and cats are really mistreated. One person was telling me, without flinching or any show of remorse, how a cat ate omena in his neighbour’s house. This said omena was going to be their supper and the man, so infuriated by this cat’s audacity, grabbed the cat and placed him in a gurney sack and tied it to a tree, proceeding to whack the living daylights off of this cat with a piece of wood like it was a pinata. This went on until his fury was quenched. I don’t know if the cat survived that ordeal and based on my narrator’s account, so did he. He didn’t really care to know what happened after that, but what he does know is that this is a common occurrence where he lives. So generally, when I hear about stories from the other extreme end, about caring for the wellbeing of your cat enough for you to want to do all that is humanly possible to promote their welfare, then I know that our hearts are in the right place and it could definitely, DEFINITELY be worse. Tumetoka mbali!
So back to spaying
. Let us proceed to define some terms commonly used around this topic. First off: NEUTERING. This comes from the word ‘neutral’ meaning in this context neither male nor female. So, neutering a male refers to removing the characteristics that confer an individual their male qualities so that the resulting individual is no longer male in function. Neutering a female is vice versa, so that the resulting individual is no longer female in function. Here male function being the ability to impregnate a female and female function being the ability to get pregnant and bring forth offspring.
Second term: SPAYING. To spay is a specific term for females. It means neutering a female. 99.99% of spays that are carried out involve a procedure named ovariohysterectomy, which is just a mouthful of a term meaning complete removal of both the ovaries and the uterus. It’s important to detail this because one time when working at a vet clinic, a lovely lady came in wanting a spay done for her cat. A day later, when the spay had been done and she had come to collect her, we were chatting on how the cat looked post-surgery and what else to expect. This is when I realised that she had no idea what we did to her cat.
‘Ai, kwani what is a spay?’
‘A spay is when we remove your cat’s ovaries and uterus, so that she doesn’t give birth.’
‘What!!? Why did you have to remove my poor cat’s ovaries? I just didn’t want her to give birth! Will she now get hot flushes and other menopausal changes? Did you really need to remove the ovaries?’
The lady was a medic, so she inquired on the specifics of the surgery, mortified that she hadn’t thought to simply ask what a spay was before the surgery.
There are some spays that are called ovary-sparing spays which basically means removing just the uterus but preserving the ovaries. However realistically when someone says spaying, they almost always mean ovariohysterectomy.
Then we have CASTRATION. Yep! That one usually doesn’t have much confusion. It’s removing both testicles; complete obliteration.
When that medic cat owner asked me why the ovaries had to go, with the sincerest look in her eyes, something stirred in my belly. The short answer was ‘I don’t know’ and the worse answer was ‘Actually, your cat’s ovaries didn’t have to go.’
I had to really introspect and go back to my student days in vet school and wonder whether in fact we had been taught any alternatives to ovariohysterectomy. We hadn’t. It was a procedure so common, so routine and so perfected that our focus was on how to execute it within the shortest time possible and with the least risks possible. I never actually paused to think on the appropriateness of such a procedure. I never got to the crux of really, why both the ovaries and uterus had to go.
So, I implore you to let go of your pre-conceived knowledge for a minute here and think for yourself why a spay is so necessary for your cat. Prior to writing this, I engaged with a number of cat owners who have proved themselves to be very pro-neutering. For most of them, the primary challenge that they combat with their pro-neutering campaign was population control. That’s to say, that there are too many cats uncared for and it is better that cats are unable to give birth so that we don’t have so many strays. They were sick of cats getting pregnant, birthing kittens and their owners abandoning them because there are now too many mouths to feed. So, the reasoning is that if the one cat had been spayed, then the owner would be more inclined to care for his/her cat better. Also witnessing some mother cats being so terrible at mothering, with some abandoning their infants and others going so far as to maul their young. Most of their concerns surrounded cats getting babies, so ideally, they were championing for birth control. For others it was a question of the diseases that could be prevented by spaying/castrating. So basically, because ovarian tumours usually affect some cats and is fatal, then spay your cat so that she never has to experience this, or since testicular tumours are a real problem in dogs, then you should castrate your dog and your dog will remain protected.
There are two problems with that argument. I will equate it to the human scenario. Breast cancer in humans is on the rise with so many women being affected by the disease which most of the time is fatal. As a parent, and knowing this grave risk, is the solution then to have your daughter’s breasts removed to prevent her from undergoing the pain and agony of breast cancer? Or since prostate cancer is increasingly common among older men, is it prudent to do away with your prostate in advance when you get to a certain age, so that you don’t stand the risk of acquiring prostate cancer? Well of course not! Regardless of how high the statistic of predisposition is, because the bottom line is ‘I don’t have breast/prostate cancer now! Why in the world would I get rid of my breasts/prostate when it’s not certain that I need to?’
Similarly, just because there is the possibility of a cat getting ovarian tumours shouldn’t be the reason you spay your cat if your cat actually doesn’t have ovarian tumours. When she gets the tumours, then we can spay, because this time we are solving a problem that actually exists.
With that kind of avoidant justification, then one can justify removing virtually any organ of the body for the fear that it could be diseased. We could remove the gall bladder so we don’t get gall stones, or just remove the spleen to avoid getting spleen related conditions, or remove the kidney, so that we don’t get kidney disease. Of course that would be wrong in every sense.
The second problem with that reasoning is that spays and castrations don’t come without their effects and side-effects. Needless to say, that these organs perform a role in the body, the full extent of which is actually not yet fully defined by scientists, but it goes over and above just reproduction. There are hormones that are produced by these organs, the most important being: oestrogen and testosterone in the female and male bodies. These as you know confer the gender-specific qualities to an individual. There are other hormones regulated by these reproductive organs that don’t just affect the reproductive system, but literally most organs of the body; thus affecting metabolism and quite unfortunately, predisposing your pet to OTHER diseases that they would have otherwise been less predisposed to, had they kept their reproductive organs. Some of the long-term health complications that your pet would be predisposed to include:
- Obesity
- Urinary incontinence
- Bladder stones
- Hypothyroidism
- Diabetes mellitus
- Hip dysplasia
- Cranial cruciate ligament rupture
- Cognition problems
- Leukemia
- Prostatic cancer (believe it or not)
- Bone cancer
- Skin cancer
- Splenic cancer
- Bladder cancer
These are from actual scientific results from many studies done over the years. So, spaying and castrating does in fact come with its risks far beyond the common weight gain. I am sure many of you cat owners have gone through the list holding your breath because you recognised one or two of those names being flung at you as the diagnosis of your pet’s ailment. This doesn’t mean that it is your pet’s neutering that caused the disease, but the neutering certainly put your pet on the pedestal calling out to the disease ‘Pick Me!’ Statistics show that he/she was less likely to acquire the disease before he/she got neutered than after they did.
Ultimately we as vets have a job to adequately educate our clients fully on the pros and cons of neutering and give other alternatives, rather than proposing a blanket campaign for spaying/castrating because it is ‘just good for your cat/dog’.
As it stands, there are actually alternatives to spaying e.g.: ovary-sparing spay (removing just the uterus), salpingectomy (removing a portion of the fallopian tube),
and alternatives to castration e.g. vasectomy.
So, if it is just a question of birth control, there are alternatives that will stop your cat from giving birth and actually preserve the natural make of your cat, and your cat can still be able to mate!
Granted, there are some instances where the owner desires a modification to the cat’s behaviour like: indiscriminate mounting (humping plants, your leg, our guest’s leg), urine spraying (to mark territory), roaming (to look for a partner) and extreme aggression.
Moreover, some diseases are actually solved by a spay/castration e.g.:
- Pyometra
- Mammary tumors
- Ovarian tumors
- Prostatic hyperplasia
- Prostate infection
- Perianal gland adenoma
So neutering is more complicated than it looks and must not be used as a blanket approach for all cats. Instead, each cat needs to be individually assessed and the best solution found that is suited to them and their owner’s preferences. It is not a one size fits all. For those who are simply in need of birth control, there are alternatives available. Whatever is normal needs to be preserved. If a knee is injured, only the knee needs to be addressed; we don’t need to take out the whole leg.
God created animals perfect, as they are. If neutering was such a necessary life alteration, they would have been born when they are already neutered. There is a reason that things are as they are in nature, and too much tampering, even for a good cause, always causes backlash. I’m pretty sure we’ve learnt that from history by now.
‘So male and female he created them, and he saw that it was good…’