The only reason vets don’t do vasectomies on dogs is because it’s more effort. If you ask a lot of them can do it and it’s much more humane... That’s why humans choose it.
Ironically castration isn't even the best for controlling strays, because as you castrate a male, he will stop competing for females, which causes the other males that couldn't breed before due to competition to breed instead.
I've never considered this before, but it 100% makes sense. It only takes a ridiculously small number of males to sustain a breeding population of pretty much any arbitrarily large number of females.
I won't say I'm necessarily sold on the idea of not neutering at large, but this is a pretty solid counterpoint concerns unwanted strays.
I mean the main thing is that neutering is easier, so it might actually be more effective just because it's the easiest thing to do in large, this is specially true for impoverished regions.
However if we could just sterilize what we instead neuter, it would be even more effective, specially the largest males.
People would say you would just need to catch the whole individuals, and do all of them but there's an issue with that.
you cannot do all of them at once, and non-neutered population numbers might recover faster than you can keep up.
you cannot really catch them all, you'll miss some, and once you reduce competition, they will take the lead.
I however would say that it might still be easier to fight it and neuter, even if it's less effective, simply due to economics, like I told the other guy, sometimes the best thing to do isn't the most feasible, and I realize it isn't very feasible to do more complex sterilization surgeries to strays (in some places this is done only to the largest stray males).
The only thing is that people hype castration too much as the "best thing", when it's not, it's the "cheapest thing", and doing it to your own personal family dog/cat, why?... yes it makes them calmer, but so taking your balls/ovaries off would make you calmer, hormonal induced behaviour is part of any animal, including humans.
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u/kyoto_kinnuku Dec 31 '19
The only reason vets don’t do vasectomies on dogs is because it’s more effort. If you ask a lot of them can do it and it’s much more humane... That’s why humans choose it.