Neuter-spay

The Shreveport, La., City Council voted to require all pet dogs and cats in the city to be spayed or neutered, according to SmartBrief....

Most pet cats are spayed or neutered. Dealing with pungent male urine sprayed to mark territory or the histrionics of a female cat in...

I need information on spraying. I have four neutered males that are housed exclusively indoors, and I am having problems. Can you provide any advice about how best to address this issue?

Not too long ago, conventional wisdom held that animals felt little pain and providing relief was unnecessary after spaying and neutering. Veterinary medicine today emphasizes the recognition and management of pain in animals, with professional organizations issuing guidelines, offering courses for members and expanding efforts to educate owners. Researchers, too, are pursuing pain relief, in one case discovering that a novel method of drug delivery for spayed cats provides relief.

If you want to check out a potential clinical trial for your cat, these are questions to ask his veterinarian and the studys research coordinator.

When you adopt a kitten or a cat, the traditional plan calls for spaying or neutering as soon as possible. This common procedure is usually effective in rendering your cat sterile but does carry health risks and requires time to prep, operate and provide post-surgical care.

Researchers have struggled for years to develop a nonsurgical way to sterilize dogs and cats. Now the Gary Michelson Found Animals Foundation has awarded a Harvard professor of bioengineering a $700,000 grant to develop a vaccine to sterilize animals by disrupting gonadotropin, a hormone that controls reproduction.

When your lovely new purebred kitten reaches maturity, you may want to breed her, and you may already have a carefully worked-out strategy for doing so. Otherwise, there is no good reason to avoid having your new pet spayed while shes still in the early months of her life - and there are a number of compelling reasons for doing so. First and foremost among these reasons, says Andrea Looney, DVM, a lecturer in anesthesiology at the Cornell University Hospital for Animals, is that spaying - also called ovariohysterectomy - will help curb rampant feline overpopulation.

Researchers studied the effect of distance and neighborhood-level demographics on the number of pet adoptions from an animal shelter ("Use of geospatial neighborhood control locations for epidemiological analysis of community-level pet adoption patterns," American Journal of Veterinary Research, 2010). The methods used to perform the study included client segmentation, geospatial tools, and epidemiological techniques that evaluated locations of 1,563 adoptions from an animal shelter in eastern Massachusetts.

The yowls of a cat in heat are unmistakable. When a female cat needs to mate, you should expect incessant crying, strange posturing and constant attempts to escape outdoors to waiting males. The best thing you can do about your cat in heat is to prevent it from happening in the first place. Its a smart idea to have her neutered before her first heat cycle. However, sometimes thats not possible. So if youve never witnessed a cat in heat, heres what you should expect.

A study published in the Journal of American Veterinary Medical Association ("Characterization of animals with microchips entering animal shelters," July 2009) determined that 7,704 microchipped animals entered 53 animal shelters between August 2007 and March 2008. Of this number, strays made up more than half (53 percent), with the remainder considered as owner-relinquished animals (41.9 percent) and other (5.1 percent). The results showed that animal shelters were able to find the owners of three-fourths of stray dogs and cats with microchips. The sucess in finding owners was higher in dogs, animals that were purebred and animals that were spayed or neutered. Animal shelters had a much higher likelihood of finding an owner when the owner information was in the shelters own database or registered with a microchip registry. The results emphasize the importance of the registration process in successfully reuniting pets and owners.

We live in a litigious society. We have laws governing birth, death and the taxes in between, so its no surprise that we also have a host of laws relating to the animals weve taken into our homes. At the federal level, laws generally address issues such as the safety of pet food, the impact of hazardous products on pets, evacuating and transporting pets during emergencies and regulating the use of animals in research. But most of the laws directly affecting our pets are made at the state and local level. These ordinances can differ by city, township and county, and pet owners should contact local officials when getting a new pet or moving to a new place to find out what possible laws pertain.