Thousands of beautiful, healthy, intelligent, life-loving, and affectionate dogs die each month because there aren’t enough homes. Spay/neuter is one very effective way to reduce the number of pets that wind up living at large, or in overburdened shelters where they may be euthanized. If you plan on breeding your dog or cat, please reconsider. Even if you have arranged for homes for all the puppies or kittens, there are other equally wonderful puppies or kittens that desperately need homes, too. If you want to experience the miracle of life and watch them grow from tiny, helpless things into competent, rollicking frolicking dynamos, consider adopting or fostering a mom and her newborns. We took in several mothers last year from shelters around New Mexico. One had puppies just one day old. Contact us or your local shelter to find out more about this. You will save lives and help solve the problem of overpopulation. If you have your heart set on a pure breed puppy, contact us, a local shelter, or a local breed rescue group. You’d be surprised how many pure breed puppies and adults are euthanized every day.
At Bridging The Worlds, we feel strongly about spay/neuter. Not only does it help reduce the number of homeless animals, it’s also healthier to spay or neuter your pet before it reaches puberty. While spay/neuter can be done on animals as young as 8 weeks old, we usually wait until they are 3-5 months old. Young dogs recover quickly. Older dogs benefit from spay/neuter, too. It reduces the risks of cancer (a major cause of death in dogs), reduces aggression, males tend to “mark” their territory less, and most dogs will have less of an urge to wander off.
There is a growing movement in the animal rescue community toward “no kill“ policies. We do not euthanize healthy animals to make room for other healthy animals. We are working to educate the public on the problem, and solve it. It begins with spay/neuter. But even more important is advocacy for humane treatment of these dear animals. If we can put ourselves out of business by ending the cycle of over breeding, abandonment, and inhumane treatment, that will be a glorious day.
Breaking News! Gathering our 2004 year-end figures, we verified spay/neuter of 128 BTW adoptees. According to the population pyramid our 128 verified spay/neuters have prevented another 2,000 puppies needing rescue in the next year, 16,000 in the year after, 65,000 in the third year, etc. The sixth year figures would be 8,576,000. Clearly, the figures do not account for euthanasia by traditional shelters, deaths from cars, disease, starvation, other dog packs, etc. Still, the first year number is astounding — even if it were only half that much.
For a low cost spay/neuter clinic near you, click here or here. If all else fails, call your local shelter — or us.
