When I was little our family cat was an entire tom; that is, a male who had not been neutered. As a cat person today, I think of this as irresponsible. But should I?
He joined the family in about 1955. Was it typical for responsible non-breeder cat owners to castrate male cats then? Or am I judging people back then by today’s standards?
This. As I remember, spaying or neutering pets wasn’t routinely done when I was a kid in the 60s, at least when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. For one thing, they didn’t have free clinics, so you had to pay for them.
Not wanting puppies, my childhood dog was spayed, and my childhood cat was neutered because we wanted him to stay around the house, which he did, but lots of my friend’s pets weren’t, and that was always an issue when they went into heat.
Spaying and neutering pets didn’t become common until the late 1960s and early 1970s. Animal shelters were becoming horribly overcrowded and had something like a 90 to 95 percent kill rate. Groups like the Humane Society and the SPCA went on massive marketing campaigns to reduce the unwanted pet population. According to The Google, the SPCA did not start requiring adopted pets to be spayed/neutered until 1972. Bob Barker also started his “spay and neuter” sign-off on the Price is Right in the late 1970s.
I don’t know about the 1950s, but in the 1940s if you had a litter of unwanted kittens or puppies, the common way to deal with them was to take them down to the local river bank and drown them, something that would be considered horrific by modern standards.
Times have definitely changed.
When I was a kid, we had a pet dog (we got her as a puppy in 1969), and a pet cat (got her as an “adolescent” kitten in 1977); my parents had both of them spayed soon after we got them.
The cat was an indoor-only cat, and the dog didn’t really mix with other dogs, either (though she occasionally got loose and ran around the neighborhood), so I don’t think my parents’ primary concern was around unwanted litters of kitten or puppies; rather, it was probably about not having to deal with a household pet going into heat.
Either way, I’m not sure how common spaying/neutering was with the other pet owners we knew. I don’t remember a lot of stories about unexpected/unwanted litters, but I’m fairly sure it was a thing.
We (my parents) had spayed and neutered cats by the mid to late 50’s, so it was possible; but it wasn’t common. And it was still very common, IME, for people to have unspayed cats and dogs well into the 80’s – when I wanted a puppy in the late 80’s, I just checked the ads in late spring for a suitable mix; ads were full of free puppies. Excess were by then usually taken to a shelter, not drowned; but many of the shelters killed most of them.
Entire cats are still very common on area farms. Excess puppies have almost disappeared; but if I want a kitten, I don’t have to go very far. (The last couple wandered in on their own, however, and my household is currently full up – all of them spayed and neutered, once I take a cat in I like that cat to stay home! and not to add to the local excess kitten production.)
Wow… where else but the Dope are you going to fight ignorance this much right off the bat?!
Thanks!
How does a dog express her preference to remain puppy-less? By whining/growling when she sees a puppy?
My parents didn’t want puppies would be more accurate. The dog didn’t express a desire one way or the other, although, to be fair, her vote wouldn’t have counted for much anyway.
Though barn cats aren’t really pets, and aren’t even really domesticated: They’re basically wild animals that farmers have found it beneficial to have around.
I was a kid in NYC. It was possible going back pretty far (at least the 1920s), IIRC stories I was told, to get male cats neutered in order to make them suitable apartment pets-- that is, prevent them from spraying. Tom cat spray is a nasty odor. But if you fix a boy cat young, he never learns to do it. Once he starts, though, fixing him won’t stop it.
On many farms, that’s a very good description: they’re treated as wild beneficials who one provides general habitat but not individual care for, not as domestic animals who the farmer has an active duty to take care of.
On some farms they’re very close to pets, and are fed, petted, and maybe even at least occasionally vetted – including possibly being taken to a neutering clinic. It varies a good deal.
It can’t be guaranteed, once they’ve started spraying; but it does stop some of them. And the rest of them won’t smell as bad – urine from a full tom has a particularly pungent odor.
Some cats neutered early will also spray; including some females, spayed or not. But that’s usually a stress reaction, and can often be dealt with if the stress can be reduced.
– it may well have been possible to get toms neutered some years before it was possible to get queens spayed. It’s a much less drastic operation – abdomen doesn’t need to be opened – and people had, after all, been neutering other male domestic animals for a very long time.
I grew up in the 60s-70s. We always had male dogs so we didn’t have to worry about puppies! Neutering was never a thing. Our dogs never roamed around though either. My dad would get our puppies from what was then called the dog pound. Free puppies galore, no questions asked and I doubt there were even any forms to fill out.
Very different times.
We got our first cat in 1986. He was an intact tom, and sprayed only once that I recall: the day we took him to the vet for his first visit. I’d put a towel in his carrier to make it more comfortable, and he expressed his opinion of the crate, on the towel. A vet tech came into the room we were waiting in, sniffed, said “Oh, did he spray??”. At my request she grabbed the towel and threw it into a trash can in the next room. A minute or two later, I heard loud protests from several staff members in the next room. That odor was truly rank.
He never sprayed again, once he was neutered. The second cat we got, a few months later, was probably less than a year old, and we had him neutered immediately; he never sprayed, though he did pee everywhere but the litterbox.
Getting back to the OP: I grew up in the 1960s (not 1950s) and while we never had cats, neutering male dogs was not a routine thing. Of course, nor was keeping the dog safely fenced / leashed - a practice that cost our household every dog we ever had. 1) regular runaway (intact male), one day never came back. 2) Hit by a car 2 blocks from home. 3) Wandered a lot, tended to bring home “prizes” (objects, not animals), “sent to live on a farm” (obviously, I now suspect this meant she was euthanized; my oldest brother says he is not certain either). 4) Fell in love with the neighbors (who reciprocated - kind of funny, as the husband had HATED dogs), and moved in with them. Yes, the parents were irresponsible dog owners regarding keeping the dogs safe - but that was common back then. Poor doggies :(.
All of the dogs (except #1) were female, and spayed. The parents had considered keeping #4 intact and letting her have a litter of puppies before spaying. Just as well they did not, all in all. But the one time she did go into heat (before they decided not to let her reproduce), we had every male dog for miles around hanging out in our yard.
Note that we were in a suburban / semi-rural area. A “city” dog (or cat) might have been likelier to be fixed - at least, one owned by a wealthier household - but on the other hand, would not have had the opportunity to run around and get into mischief. Or would not have survived long, what with cars, buses etc.
Hell, my first cat was free-range, back in 1980. Now, my roommate and I were a BIT more responsible than my parents’ generation: we kept her inside until she’d been spayed, and we did take her to a vet for care. But we had to periodically have her wormed (fleas → tapeworms, ewwww), and I had an emergency vet visit with her when she ran into another cat, which bit her, as I was calling her inside. The next cat I had was the tom mentioned above, 4 or 5 years later, and we never even CONSIDERED letting him go outside - which was partly due to evolving safety expectations, and partly because we’d found out he had feline leukemia and we were not completely irresponsible.
My personal speculation is that the increase in neutering has developed from a combination of PR campaigns, the evolution of a dog / cat’s role in the household, and the availability of the discretionary funds to spend on veterinary care. While dogs / cats were certainly pets prior to my era, a higher percentage of them were considered working animals, not something to be coddled and kept healthy. Dog gets sick / injured from a fight with other intact dogs? Get a new one. Cat has kittens? Drown 'em (as others noted).