Spaying and neutering domestic animals is an important part of being a pet owner.  Keeping the stray and abandoned population down, it is a means to free animals from the torture of being homeless.  These surgeries also benefit the individuals' health.

    Okay, for a while I did think it was pretty awful that we were cutting out parts of other creatures bodies that seem so important to nature, but in domesticated animals, I can see why spaying and neutering is also important.  I recently took an online, no-credit vetrinarian assistant class.  The teacher was a full-fledged vet who had been in practice for a while.  He told us a story about the local shelters and the over-adundance of cats.  There was so many cats and so little people adopting them that they had to be put down.  Each week a vet went into the "Death Room," as it was called, to put them to sleep.  On my professors turn, he put down twenty-five cats!  Since so many people are incapable of caring for their pets, to fix them is really a way to save the torment of animals that don't have a family. This really is the way to do it, so please, have your cats and dogs fixed and don't breed.

    So many stray cats are left to fend for themselves.  Some become ferrel and are unable to live safely in the human world.  These cats may end up breeding, increasing the population of homeless and unwanted cats.  Dogs, too, become overpopulated.  Many people breed a specific breed of dog, enticing the pure blood of their animals to other people.  This leaves the mutts and shelter dogs to continue to wait for willing owners.

    Other animals, such as rabbits and mice, may not get into any contact with others of their kind.  Depending on the situation at home, use your judgement on whether these animals need to be spayed or neutered.

    The benefits of being spayed or neutered extends not only to the homelessness.  Females are freed from going through heat, during which they often howl about their discomfort and males flock to them, anticipating the mate.  Stress enables animals to be more susceptible to disease.  Dogs over five years of age also decrease the chance of getting mammary tumors from 50% to 1% after being spayed.  The chance of having uterine infections and tumors of the ovaries and uterus are eliminated.  Males will lose some of their territorial aggressiveness.  They will be less likely to mark their territory by urinating.  There is also less of a chance of them wamdering off and getting themselves hurt.    Dogs over five years of age who are intact have a 60% chance of prostate enlargement.  These are great health benefits to our animal community, including those who are not dogs and cats.

(below are also some links about when to go through the procedure and that sort of information)