Could i have your advice and thoughts about castration.  My German Shepherd Jack is 5 months old and my vets advice is 6 to 7 months for castration!!

I've always had both my males and females done at 6-7mths.,when i've had them from pups, Never had any adverse affects! I've also had entire adults who i've castrated and there has been no difference between the early spays and the later adult ones :)

I would rather avoid all the hormones,seasons etc and get them done before any bad habits can take hold ;)

You'll probably get a tonn of posts saying the complete opposite to me :p neutering before adulthood seems to be frowned upon here

Hi jack29, I'm against routine neutering of either sex unless there is disease involved.  However 6/7 months is extremely young, puppies have not fully developed either mentally or physically, and you will probably find that Jack becomes stuck at the gawky leggy teen stage, and not ever develop fully into his adult frame.

If you have definately made up your mind to castrate him, my feeling is that it should be between 2 and 3 years old, considering his breed.

Dawn R.

Hi jack29

This unfortunately is almost standard advice from many vets :(  Neutering either sex should not be taken lightly and is certainly not the "cure all" it is often portrayed to be - it has some preventative benefits but IMO it carries more risk than leaving the animal entire, certainly until full physical and mental maturity have been reached.  In a breed such as your own I would expect that to be a minimum of 24 months, probably more, and frankly by then you may have good reason to question why it should be done at all.

There are lots of threads on the forum already providing detailed info and a variety of opinions re this very subject and it's probably worth you doing a search on the forum and having a read through them.  It should help you make a more informed choice.

Best wishes, Teri :)

mum in laws dog got castrated at 6 months and he is now a 6 year old puppy! has never properly matured into his own- quite sad as hes a lovely boy- wouldve beena lovely man :(

i was fuming the other day- a gorgeous gsd boy came into be castrated- he was 7 months- his 'bits' werent even there! soooooo angry.. the vet didnt even think twice before taking them away.

i would advise the same as the op's- say after he turns 2 ;)

mum in laws dog got castrated at 6 months and he is now a 6 year old puppy!

Yes I've got one like that as well.........

Hi Jack

Personally, I would wait until you dog is fully mature physically and mentally before castration.  The testes produce hormones, just like they do in the human male.  These hormones play a major part in the development of secondary sexual characteristics (ie puberty and growing up), again just like they do in the human male.  If you remove the testes before they can play a part in this, there is a chance your dog will remain puppyish in some way - physically or mentally - permanently. 

Not everyone experiences this, who has a dog spayed or neutered before puberty, since hormones are also produced in other sites in the dog's body and not just in the testes/ovaries. 

Unlike a bitch owner, you don't have to deal with the inconvenience of seasons or the risk or pyometra developing, so there aren't even as good health reasons to castrate as there are to spay.  I would wait until your dog is fully mature - perhaps 18-24 months old, before thinking about castration.

I second that.  Wait until he is fully developed.  :-) 

I'll "third" that :D

Gosh i must just be plain lucky that none of my dogs developed these things you talk about :)

Yes, you probably are. :)

It sounds as though you are Hailey :)   Around half the (male) dogs we meet up with on a regular basis are castrated and two family members' dogs also - everyone of them has had problems with immaturity, agression or feminisation syndrome :(  

My limited experiences of bitches I've known intimately which have been spayed has been that both have remained immature mentally, lacked in physical substance in relation to their size and one had mild incontinence.

That's even before I start on what's happened to the coats ..... :rolleyes:

Regards, Teri :)

  

Can anyone report on guide dogs and how they develop - they are routinely castrated at 6 months, I believe?

Well I can tell you that in Sweden they did a study on this and found they must not castrate guide dogs neither too early nor too late as it did affect them in various ways, and so they came up with a suitable age which I believe is over 12 months -might even be 18 months. They found for instance if done too early they would never develop the muscle mass an entire dog would, and so would not be physically capable of as much as a dog neutered later or not at all, and if they neutered later most of the benefits of neutering would be lost, as the behaviours would have been learned and fixed.

Last I heard (when I went for an interview at the breeding centre) they weren't castrated till at least 9 or 10 months.

Either way this is before full maturity, so I wondered if anyone knew of them experiencing problems with immaturity or aggression in the dogs.  I really do not know the answer on this one but I thought that would be a large enough number of dogs to be revealing.

Speaking only anecdotally Goldmali - a local guide dog does seem to lack muscle mass, actually.  Interesting!

Hailey I'm with you on this one having had dogs castrated at 6& 7 months and at over 2yrs and it has not made caused any of the problems others mention.  I prefer to get it done before any habits are formed.

Bev

Our GR puppy came from a rescue centre and part of the agreement we had to sign with them was to have him neutered at some point  between 1st April and 30th April. He will be about 8 months old by then and we have to get the vet to fill in a form to confirm that the neutering has taken place. This is standard procedure for all  puppies from this  particular national rescue society and older dogs are neutered as a matter of course before they can go to their new homes. We were given a neuter voucher worth £50 towards the cost of the procedure which is valid only between the dates stated.

Personally, I think it's terrible that rescue shelters insist on such early neutering of dogs.  :(

my dog is 18 months old and i wish now that i had had him castrated at a younger age as now his hormones have kicked in , i have been told that it wont make any difference to his bad habits that he has got into e,g humping.is that true?

Not necessarily. Bad habits can be cured by good training. Also, once he's mature his hormone levels will naturally lower.

I had my springer done at 15 months, so i would've thought he was mature, and since then he has become very aggressive towards other dogs, mainly males. I wonder if this would've occured had he been done earlier?

There's no way to say for sure Lucy & Meg - there are different possible answers.

For eg - perhaps he was still immature when you had him done at 15 months, seeing as springers do tend to mature slower than a lot of other dogs.  As a result, he could be over-compensating because his testosterone levels dropped massively and now, due to almost no testosterone in his blood, he feels threatened and afraid of other males, so responds to this threat with aggression, to defend himself (in his eyes).

OR perhaps he was mature when you had him done at 15 months, but was quite an alpha male.  It is usually said, that if you have 2 males and want to castrate one, you should actually castrate the LESS alpha one, because that will make the "gap" between them, status-wise, much wider, and they will no longer want to fight for ranking.  (Because the castrated one's status is now much much lower, and the uncastrated one's still very high-ranking - so no need to fight, to sort it out anymore.)  So, perhaps your male was quite alpha, and when you had him castrated, he was still quite high-ranking, in line with other males, and there was still a need to fight to resolve rank issues.

Just two possibilities - I"m sure there are more...