Dog castration. A trauma for the dog owner but good for the dog

Recently, we have decided to take a radical step and castrate our dog. After several years of careful consideration, we have finally accepted our vet’s advice and scheduled our lovely dog for castration. It was a very painful step, especially for my wife. Apart from our concerns about the safety and success of the procedure, we were uncomfortable with the fact that our dog will never have puppies and we wanted puppies so much. Simply because we wanted to have a living memory in the form of a puppy…Our dog is amazing so his puppies must be too…

There is no going back

Once you decide to go for castration there is no going back. Castration is a procedure which surgically removes dog’s reproductive organs. It is usually done for various reasons. The most common is to limit uncontrolled reproduction of “street” breeds, as these dogs usually end up in shelters, or their lives are ended prematurely by putting them in sleep. But there are other reasons as well. Health reasons for example. Castration can prevent future health problems of your dog. Both of these reasons led to our decision to have our dog castrated.

Breeds with no certificates

Although our dog is a purebred border collie we have no “papers” and we did not want to breed puppies without proper registration certificates. At the same time we also knew that border collie puppies are in great demand and we have plenty of friends who love border collie. We also know that “our” puppies would be in good hands and well taken care of but still…we decided to castrate our dog, mainly to prevent possible health problems.

Photo: Pixabay

Castration

The surgery is neither difficult nor dangerous. It is a routine matter.The dog is given a cannula with anaesthetics and sleeps within ten seconds or so. The procedure lasts about twenty minutes. When the procedure is over, the dog receives another injection to recover and wakes up after about ten minutes… This phase is probably the hardest. Both for the dog and for the owner. 

Recovery

The dog wakes up with a collar around its neck and is still heavily drugged. The dog cannot even stand on its feet. It will sleep for the next few hours and even after that it will be tired and fussy. But do not worry. It will recover quickly – in about two to three days. You still need to take it easy and do not let you dog to go wild because it still has stitches and they need to be taken out. This is usually done twelve days after the operation. After that everything should be back to normal. So far, we have not observed any mental changes in our dog. It still behaves the same. However, the surgery changed its metabolism and increased its appetite so, we have reduced feed portions. Other than that, the dog is fine and we are relived that everything went well.

Preview photo: Pixabay