Spaying Quotes

“There is a tendency to oversimplify the issue of spay/neuter and to promote the essential benefits without recognizing that our animals do suffer some harm, even if it is only the harm of deprivation—the harm of having their sexual and reproductive experiences stolen from them. It is possible to take this argument to the extreme and assert that we should never interfere with something as basic as sexuality and reproduction. Good stewards would allow their animals to exist in a “natural” state. The problem here is that our companion animals have no “natural” state; as domesticates, they are artifacts of human manipulation, and human control over the processes of reproduction is at the heart of domestication. As Karla Armbruster notes in her essay “Into the Wild,” we cannot simply hand control for reproduction back to our companion animals; this would be an abrogation of our responsibility to them. But we owe it to them to acknowledge their losses.”
― Jessica Pierce, Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets

“Women often reason that an unspayed cat is a way to teach the facts of life to their children. That's what they say. Actually, it all boils down to a type of voyeurism, with more interest in breading and birthing than any true interest in children or cats.

The wife of someone we know refused to have their female cat spayed because, she said, "I want my children to watch the miracle of birth." When too many kittens accumulated, her husband took them up to the top of a mountain road near us and abandoned them in the brush.”
― Paul Corey, Do Cats Think?: Notes of a Cat-Watcher

“In Sweden, only about 7 percent of pets are desexed, and in Norway, it is currently illegal to desex a healthy animal.”
― Jessica Pierce, Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets