people are so weird about dog reproductive organs i promise you it is not inherently good or bad to spay/neuter OR leave your dog intact can we all calm down
on one side you've got people who are convinced that any intact dog will inevitably have 45 accidental litters in its lifetime no matter what and also be intensely aggressive and that it should be required by law to neuter your dog as soon as it hits 6 months
on the other side you have people who think neutering a dog will fundamentally change its personality and is also animal abuse and that animal shelters should just adopt out intact dogs to everyone
like i want to make myself clear because i feel like some people still aren't getting it: this is a very very nuanced topic with a lot of moving parts. lots of "ands" and "buts" and "ifs" involved.
i am absolutely not saying that every single dog should be left intact forever and ever. I honestly would not trust the average pet dog owner with an intact dog to be completely frank. I think most pet owners (at least in the states, I cannot speak for other countries) are barely responsible enough to handle a dog at all (and that's being generous) let alone a dog that can create more dogs. I also completely understand why shelters do early speuters and this was not meant to be an attack on them. I very clearly say in my post that i disagree with painting spaying and neutering as an inherently bad thing that should never ever happen
HOWEVER. I also think it's a mistake to act like it's inherently bad to keep a dog intact. Most sport/show dogs, for example, are kept intact for at least the first couple years of their lives and the vast majority do not have oops litters or behavioral issues because they are owned by people who know what they're doing. I think there are actually many advantages to keeping a dog intact and if Roswell wasn't a spay/neuter contract I'd let him keep his balls because I'm confident in my ability to manage him, I intend to compete in dog sports with him and he displays very few of the annoying intact male behaviors (so far, there's still time for those to crop up lol). as it stands i will wait as long as I possibly can because I think it's generally a good idea to allow a dog to finish cooking before messing with their reproductive organs
I understand that some of you have known some badly behaved intact dogs but I think maybe it's worth asking yourself if those dogs were badly behaved because their owners didn't train them properly or because they had their nuts. I'm willing to bet it was the former.
It's also worth mentioning that in a lot of countries, spaying/neutering "just in case" is simply not done. I think @fjordfolk has talked a bit about this on their blog, it seems to be the norm in Scandinavian countries. The countries in question also do not have an overabundance of oops litters so clearly it's possible to manage an intact dog withoit accidentally making 500 puppies.
Basically this is a complicated topic and I don't think it does anyone any favors to flatten it in either direction. "most american dog owners are not responsible enough to properly manage an intact dog" and "there are multiple very good reasons to keep a dog intact and if the owner is not an idiot it's not a problem" are statements that can and should co-exist. there are pros and cons to both speutering AND keeping a dog intact. I think it's silly to act like either option is inherently wrong full stop.
