Just something that occurred to me when thinking about my elderly cat, who’s spent almost 16 years without her uterus or ovaries to no apparent detriment.
In: Biology
Much like the flea meds that work systemically to make it your pet’s body toxic to parasites, the pet just doesn’t live long enough to have “long term effects” like bone loss, heart problems, certain cancers and organ failure.
You’ll notice Off! doesn’t make handy-dandy seasonal mosquito pills. Not that I’m scared of heartworm… I just hate mosquito bites.
If dogs lived for 80 years like us, maybe we’d do something else. Lopping off the old meatball hamper just seems a lot simpler than hiding daily birth control in a wad of cheese.
Animals do end up with health issues as a result of sterilization.
They can be more prone to bone problems and certain cancers, among other things.
It’s just that we’ve bred the animals that we tend to neuter to rely on us so heavily for reproductive decision making that it ends up being a lot more convenient to just do it anyway, in turns of managing their behavior, and we can mitigate some of those problems with certain foods, medicines, and lifestyle adjustments, anyway.
It also prevents *other* health issues.
Because even though I might have lost my testicles, I still want to “be human” in the sense that I would like to be able to “be with” my wife. If no hormones I would just loose all sex drive (and other complications). When I neuter my dogs – thats sort of the point. Male dogs that have been neutered has little to no sex drive, and therefore they often become sort of lazy, just wanting to lay around and eat.
Ovaries and testicles naturally produce hormones that effect demeanor and physical development but they aren’t require to “stay healthy.
When an animal is neutered, it has a large effect on the animal in both of those ways.
For instance, veterinarians will generally prefer to hold off on neutering a male puppy until its body has fully developed. If a male puppy is neutered while it is still growing, the dog’s bone and muscle growth will be affected.
But if a male dog never gets neutered, the hormones have a large impact on their demeanor. Once a male puppy has been neutered, the dog’s demeanor and physical development changes quite a bit.
Humans become used to the effect that the hormones have on their body and don’t want to have the changes that the lack of hormones will cause them.
People who have their ovaries or testicles removed, generally, do it for some underlying health reason besides changing their body or mental state. So they take hormone replacements to keep them the same as they were prior to loosing their hormone producing organs, ovaries or testicles.
Both men and women produce testosterone and estrogen, small amounts are produced in the adrenal glands and other tissues. The testicles aren’t the only source of testosterone.
Some are arguing that spaying/neutering actually does have negative health effects. Most of those people are pushing for vasectomy, etc.
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If dogs and cats lived to be 80 like us humans then suddenly they would suffer from having there gonads removed. This is because the morbid effects of surgical menopause/andropause take decades to manifest, so humans don’t get these morbid diseases until they are elderly. Back in the old days when our life expectancy was much shorter, castrating men was much more common because the long term affects on life expectancy were less significant. If you cut out a humans ovaries and uterus when they are young (like your cat), and don’t give them HRT, 16 years later, they won’t have heart disease, alzheimers, (but they might have mild osteoprosis), because these diseases require many decades to take effect… but 50 years later, that lady might have had 2 heart attacks, fractured both her hips, and also her mind might be a bit frail. Now if your cat was able to live another 50 years, then it might experience the same
HRT for humans after losing their gonads is also really sucky. It doesn’t actually fix half the problems losing your gonads causes and causes a whole plethora of new problems that are potentially life ending. Animals that we tend to neuter, with their typically drastically shorter life span, don’t really suffer from the side effects as much. In part due to that one of the major side effects of loss of your gonads is early onset dementia.
An old dog is about the same as a puppy, cognitively, just a little more experienced and maybe a little more tired that mellows them. A fully adult human is drastically more advanced than even a legal adult human. Your frontal lobes continue to develop well into your 20’s. You know how forgetful, absentminded, and slow your grandparents seem? It’s not all just getting old… it’s also a significant decrease in the production of sex hormones. The biggest “benefits” of gonad removal are prior to the onset of puberty in animals because it practically eliminates the risk of sex based cancers like breast cancer. But humans don’t finish developing at puberty… we continue to develop major parts of our anatomy and brains for another 10 years at least!
The average age for menopause, when hormone production decreases drastically in women, is 52. And there are active adults at 90 (The previous Queen of England, Maggie Smith (honorable mention), my grandma). White brain tissue mass decreases, bone mass decreases, your immune system becomes weaker. HRT mitigates some of these but they don’t typically provide HRT just for menopause. Any doctor worth their salt won’t want to provide HRT just due to old age because of the risk of developing cancers in the tissues that use the specific hormone the most. Breast and uterine tissue in women, for example. They prefer to provide topical ointments, creams, or blood pressure medication (viagra, lol) to resolve the minor discomforts the lessening levels cause.
So humans regularly go for 30-50 years with steadily slowing hormone production. Few pets live anywhere near that long. The primary reasons for HRT in humans is improved sexual function and a reduction in uncomfortable symptoms like hot flashes. Humans who actually get their gonads removed… HRT does not really fix that. It might help with the same minor things as the reduced production in elderly humans deal with… but it does not really replace the lost function of the gonads. And the trade-off being cancer makes it really a tough sell unless you find one of those money grubbing unscrupulous doctors who wants to prescribe based on feelings instead of science.
I’m going to start HRT in the next year and part of my health plan involves the removal of all the tissues that would be at increased risk for becoming cancerous due to the HRT. It is no panacea and I would not do it if being dead by 50 were not my alternative.
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