Hello! I have a quick quiestion about spaying/neutering.
I’m going to be purchasing a puppy from a reputable breeder soon, and in the meantime I’ve been trying to plan out when I’ll be taking the pup to the vet for shots, ect. On the breeder’s website, it says they recommend waiting til the puppy’s 9 months to spay/neuter but my mother who is a vet (although she works a desk job now and hasn’t practiced in 7 years) says that 6-7 months should be fine.
I was wondering what the pros and cons of waiting longer to neuter are. Is there much of difference in waiting the extra 3 months to spay/neuter?
vet-and-wild here.
The current recommendations for desexing are to wait until skeletal maturity. However, there’s some really interesting new evidence that the optimal age varies by breed and even by sex. Some breeds it may not make a difference if you desex early, while others may have increased risks if you do it too early, and others may have increased risks if you do it too late! That research is still new and being further investigated, so for now I still recommend skeletal maturity to clients. For a small dog that may be 6-7 months, but for a giant breed that’s probably 15-18 months. There appear to be some benefits for musculoskeletal health and potentially reducing some cancer risks if you wait (again, new research is finding that this isn’t necessarily universal for all breeds/sexes). The risk of waiting is that with each heat, the risk of mammary cancer increases. Mammary cancer is about 50/50 in terms of malignancy.
