Birds are not, and should not be, lightly spayed or neutered because of the difference in their anatomy from a mammal and the higher sensitivity of their lungs.
A mammal like a dog or cat’s testese are external. In young individuals whose testes have not descended yet, you don’t have to dig all that far into their abdominal cavity to find them.
A litter bearing mammal’s ovaries and uterine horns are stretched out along the sides of its abdomen, cushioned by the intestines.
A birds testese are about where our kidneys are.
Unlike relatively exposed human kidneys, though, bird testese are protected by the base of the lower ribs.
A bird’s ovaries are in about the same location as its testes, but less close to the spine.
A mammal’s abdominal cavity is pretty easy to get into.
There is just soft skin and muscle to cut, intestines to move to the side, and you’re in.
The keel of a bird (the blade shaped extension of the sternum, to which the massive wall of muscle that pulls down their wings attaches and is anchored) extends beyond their rib cage all the way down their abdomen to nearly touch the pelvis.
Cut any of that wall of muscle, and the bird can not only no longer fly, but will have difficulty breathing because of the interconnection between the wings and lungs of flying birds.
The pump of their wings up and down acts as a mechanical aid to the expansion and conraction of their air sacs that pulls air into the back airsacs, pushes it through the lungs into the front air sacs, and then back out of the bird in a nearly constant cycle.
With their wings still, as in perching, you will see the tail lightly bob as they take softer breaths.
On its back, with its wings held open, as it would be in surgery, a bird other than a psitticine or corvid struggles to breathe because the lungs are mechanically stuck in the expanded inhale position and can’t as easily push the air back out.
Whiiiich brings us to the very often lethal issue of anesthesia which doesn’t fill the more simple bellows like mammalian lungs to nearly the degree of a bird’s more circular respiratory system.
Lungs full of anesthetic, on their back, with wings taped open (preventing the bird from easily exhaling), the vet would have to cut the thin line between keel and pelvis, remove enough of the excessively tightly packed organs (whiiiich include the rear air sacs, by the way) to get to the tiny sex organs on either side of their spine, under the mostly fused ribs, cut those without cutting anything else, put everything else perfectly back in place without twisting or pinching anything, and close it up before the anesthetic kills it outright or it suffocates from the mechanical difficulty of breathing on its back with its wings spread.
Gallifomes and Anattids are bigger, with shorter keels, and are easier and thus safer to get into, but surgically desexing any other type of bird is a last resort treatment for the sort of medical emergency where they will definitely die if you don’t, and dying on the table under anesthesia is better than dying more slowly of a ruptured or cancerous sex organ.
Getting a pigeon spayed or neutered to change its behavior is to risk a VERY high liklihood of killing it over at worst a mild annoyance physically incapable of inflicting injury on a human or even damaging their belongings.
If their (literally harmless) behavior will be THAT intollerable, a different species would be a better choice of pet…
blakekathryn
gummygunk
tangentwithtanner
snowghoul
jbbartram-illu
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
prguitarman
