18/09/2021
To Castrate or Not To Castrate!
For decades castration has been recommended routinely for young dogs as a cure for:
🐶 Barking, lunging and reactivity at dogs or people
🐶 Dog-dog interaction challenges
🐶 Hu***ng, inappropriate toileting
🐶 Adolescence (as if it needs curing like it’s a disease 😂)
⚠️WARNING!⚠️ What I’m about to discuss relates to castration and health and behaviour. This does NOT relate to overpopulation management. However, of note, in some countries, castration is considered a mutilation and these countries have less of an overpopulation issue than countries where it is routinely recommended, highlighting how intrinsic overpopulation is to societal beliefs around and respect for dogs.
👉 What actually happens when we castrate a dog?
Well, to put it bluntly, the testicles get chopped off. What does this lead to?
It completely removes the dog’s ability to reproduce.
It removes a major source of testosterone; the Leydig cells that produce testosterone reside within the testicles and so experience a extracorporeal relocation too! Important to note here that I say a major source as the adrenal glands in both sexes as well as the ovaries in the bitch produce small quantities also.
👉 What consequence does this have?
Importantly, testosterone is valuable as a hormone from a behaviour perspective. In multiple species, it has been demonstrated to be closely associated with confidence. Why is this protective against behaviour struggles? Well, behaviour struggles are often driven by lack of confidence, anxiety, fear and situational pessimism and certainly never the result of positive emotional states that testosterone would promote.
“There is absolutely no benefit to reducing an animal’s confidence when working on their behaviour. Confidence is never a bad thing!”
👉 What the SCIENCE Says!
In 2018, McGreevy et al published a study in Plos One (It’s open access so you can check it how here if you are feeling geeky: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5931473/), assessing how the length of time a dog maintained their go**ds for influenced the risk of behaviour struggles.
👉 What did they find?
The shorter the time they keep their go**ds and, in turn, the sooner they lose most of their testosterone, the less likely the dogs’ owners were to report two behaviour struggles - howling when left alone and indoor urine marking.
Oh! Easy! Question Answered! To theatre we go….
Wait for it.
The findings didn’t end there. The longer the dogs in the study (sample size of 6235) kept their go**ds attached and, in turn, their testosterone, the less likely their owners were to report 26 (Yes, TWENTY SIX!) mostly unwelcome behaviour struggles!!
AND
7 (yes, SEVEN!) of these behaviour struggles that were much less likely the longer a dog remained entire would be labelled as “aggressive” (including “aggression” directed towards people and other dogs).
So let’s dive into the reasons why castration is often wrongly considered and wrongly recommended…
😱Barking, lunging and reactivity! This behaviour struggle is often driven by an underlying pessimism, dogs perceiving novelty in the environment (whether that be a human, another dog, a cat or a kangaroo!) to be something to worry about. Pessimism and lack of confidence are closely linked and so it is no surprise that castration doesn’t help this situation and often makes it worse as the McGreevy findings suggest!
😱Dog-Dog interaction challenges! This refers to unpredictability in a dog’s interaction with another dog. It might be that your dog unpredictably snaps when having a nose-nose interaction. It might be that your dog stands over another dog and raises their hackles. It might be that your dog charges and barks at other dogs upon the approach. The thing is, a successful interaction can only occur with three skills: 1. Optimism, 2. Disengagement (seeing value in moving away from the interaction), 3. Calmness. Any weakness in these will lead to unpredictable (or very predictable!!) breaks in the chain. I’m sure we can all relate to a time in our lives where we’ve had a fail in one of these departments and had a bad interaction with someone (maybe a partner….) - it didn’t come from overconfidence, it came from all the rubbish that went on at the office that day and your sore back!
Now I have a saying when it comes to dog behaviour and that is -
“If you want more of something, BUILD IT! Don’t attempt to squash something else to make it seem bigger!”
Success in’t about trying to correct, inhibit or STOP a behaviour. This is about growing the skills needed to behave effectively and go through the world feeling great! So again, castration has absolutely no place here and again often makes things worse!
😱 Hu***ng and Inappropriate Toileting! These behaviours were long hailed as the ultimate in dogs disrespecting us and, therefore, by some twisted logic, if an animal is disrespecting you, you must chop off a body part, reduce their confidence, show them who is boss. Crazy right?! 😂 Of course not - in fact, these behaviours (just like the ones above) are just a couple of behaviours a dog might select from when feeling worried, anxious, scared or a little bit like “I don’t know what to do here.”
Have you ever had an interaction with another human where you were nervous for whatever reason and you said something crazy or did something completely weird instead of just shaking their hand? Meet the canine equivalent: hu***ng!
Again this is driven by LACK of confidence, not overconfidence and so castration won’t make it better and might again make it worse! Inappropriate toileting and marking behaviours can be much the same, and so while research shows that castration might improve marking in the house in some instances, it can equally make it worse based on this and so, importantly, we should never do something irreversible when reversible (non-body-part-chopping) options exist.
😱 Adolescence! Adolescence is not a disease! In fact, none of this is a disease!
“These are not BEHAVIOUR PROBLEMS! They’re DOG BEHAVIOUR!”
Adolescence is a period of development! It’s associated with structural brain, cognitive and hormonal changes. It’s a period that actively promotes conflict between the animal (human or canine) and their carer as an evolutionarily beneficial temperature check on the relationship (more on that another time maybe). What all the research agrees on in relation to human and canine adolescence is that confidence and relationship are key! The Asher et al 2020 study on canine adolescence found that conflict (in the form of ignoring a sit cue) was much reduced with increasing relationship between dog and owner. What do we take from this?
Chopping off body parts will not help.
Spend the time and money you were going to spend on castrating your dog and invest it in your relationship bank account instead - invest in positive interactions, games, play, whatever you and your dog love!
🩺👨🏼⚕️ Health Benefits of Castration
Castration has also been recommended from a health standpoint, reducing the risk of a variety of diseases. However, the health benefits castration brings (such as prevention (and resolution of) benign prostatic hyperplasia) are only of significance after the age of 5 in most dogs when they become at increased risk of such. Equally, there’s early evidence to show that castration before one year of age could increase the risk of joint disease, cancer risk and allergic skin disease, further reinforcing the idea that early castration (if even at all) is not nor should not be a procedure that comes with a blanket recommendation for all young dogs.
Reversible Options!
Finally, we must consider if it is appropriate to give a blanket recommendation on anything that is irreversible and not completely benign when reversible options are available. Short-term implants have the same whole body effects as surgical removal of the testicles while still being reversible! These can act like a test drive of the new hormonal system where castration is being strongly considered without the fallout of an irreversible procedure.
👉 The Future!
So, that’s the wrap on castration with a focus on behaviour and training! Whenever I talk about this, it often causes of a wave of remorse and grieving for the now lost testicles of your dog’s youth. BUT I work with people on a daily basis whose dogs have had their go**ds inappropriately removed at some point and yet they are achieving amazing results and living the lives that they dreamt of when they got a dog in the first place.
The first step they took was ditching the labels, the limiting beliefs and the story of how they arrived where they did. The second step they took is they took their dog-owning dream off the back burner and they made it a MUST.
The reality is that castrated or not, you can unlock real-life results and amazing transformations with your dog with the right plan, the right tools, the right games and strategies!
This is an opportunity to spread the word, save some go**ds along the way and change the blanket advice for the better, so if you know someone who this might benefit, please share it far and wide 🙂
