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DNAHelicase -> RE: My female German Shepherd Xena is acting weird. (9/17/2012 9:44:27 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: defiantbadgirl
Unfortunately, any part of the body can develop cancer. I can't remove all of her organs or my own. I'm glad your dogs weren't part of the unlucky 20%. Xena is too young to have puppies. Even when she's older, where would I keep a litter of peeing and pooping puppies in a carpeted house? A professional carpet cleaner told my father that the only way to completely remove the smell of pet urine is to replace the carpet. One of his cats peed on his basement carpet several times before he had it put to sleep and he had to replace his carpet to eliminate the smell. Right now, I have old carpet but I won't always. Even if we install laminate flooring there's still vehicle upholstery. My German Shepherd likes car rides and I like taking her places with me. Why would my father tell me pet urine ruins carpet if it wasn't true?
I'm going to preface this by saying that I don't mean this as an attack on you. I'm not trying to be snarky or mean. My intent is to educate, not shame.
Yes, any part of the body can develop cancer. Some types of cancer are far more common than other types, and mammary tumors, both malignant and benign, happen to be one of the most (if not THE most) common forms of tumor bitches get. But the risk of them developing is very, very small if the bitch is spayed before her first heat. It's still lower in bitches spayed before their second or third heats compared to unspayed bitches. Spaying after the third heat offers no protection against mammary tumors compared to intact bitches, but it still helps with other reproductive cancers (uterine and ovarian) and infections of the uterus.
You said your dog is 8 months old. She IS old enough to get pregnant. This is the first sign that she's headed for a surprise litter, if you don't even know at what age dogs can become pregnant. It is possible to keep a bitch in heat away from dogs, but do you understand that you can't leave her outside alone even for five minutes for the entirety of her time in heat, every single time she goes into heat throughout her life? Do you know how long heat lasts? Do you know how long it takes for dogs to mate? Are you able to recognize when she's starting and when it is completely over? Do you know that dogs can mate through chain link? If you take her for walks during her heat, are you prepared to literally have to fight off dogs (which may be highly aggressive) that might try to mount her with an obsessive determination while you're walking? Do you know that even though Thor is neutered, he still might go through mating behaviors with her and the two of them both might be aggressive towards each other, other dogs, and you every time she's in heat and for a few weeks afterward? Again, not trying to be mean about any of this, but you really *need* to educate yourself on what's going to happen every time she goes into heat and how often that will be if you've decided to keep her intact and you want to try to avoid letting her breed.
I can tell you that a six foot fence is no deterrent, not at all. I worked with a humane society for years and I volunteered in kill shelters for almost a decade. I cannot even begin to count the number of "oops" litters I saw (many of which were killed, btw) because the owners thought a fence would be a deterrent and they left their intact bitches or dogs outside. Both the bitch in heat and the dog that smells it will climb, dig, jump, or do anything else they can think of to get to each other if you are not standing right over her to keep her from doing it. You'd be amazed at how tenacious and creative they become, moving cinder blocks and 2x4s, digging a foot under buried fences, scaling brick walls, and so on. And as you pointed out, if she DOES get pregnant, which is highly likely unless you are committed to keeping her on maximum security lockdown for a few weeks every year, you can kiss your carpets goodbye. Puppies are cute, but holy shit they are messy. There will be pee and poop and little bits of soft, wet puppy food *everywhere* for a minimum of eight weeks, not to mention the bloody mess that comes with the whelping if she decides she doesn't want to have them in the whelping area you set up for her.
One last thought...a bitch in heat is going to have bloody discharge for several days during each cycle, with two cycles per year normal for most dogs. I would think that would be worse on the carpet than a possible urine drop here or there on the very, very small chance she became incontinent from spaying (which incidentally is FAR rarer than 20%, and I say this coming from a perspective of having dealt first hand with hundreds of neutered dogs of both sexes long term through rescue groups, personal dogs, and fosters). You can put the little pad/diapers on her, but that doesn't mean she might not get spots on the carpet the first day she starts each cycle, or that the diapers won't leak occasionally, or that she won't chew them off and leave a mess everywhere (or that Thor won't chew them off for her--even for a neutered male, the scent of a bitch in heat is pretty intoxicating).
OK, I lied. One more one last thought. Before you believe that 20% of dogs develop incontinence from a routine medical procedure, please do a lot of research into it instead of just believing what you're told (in fact, you should do that about everything--people make shit up on the internet all the time!). Talk to vets, look up scholarly articles on it. Google Scholar is a great, free source of scholarly articles on any subject you can think of. Make sure the sources you read have some credibility, some authority on the subject, not just somebody who has no experience with dogs beyond owning one Golden Retriever and then writing up an article about it for a website that doesn't deal exclusively with veterinary or canine issues. Here's an abstract from one study with a few interesting associations with incontinence in bitches. Google scholar has many more abstracts and some full articles on the subject (just use keywords "bitch spay incontinence"). Some of the studies did find an association, but of those they all report numbers much lower than 20%.
Edited for a typo and correction.
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