Yesterday Able turned six months old. He is 53cm tall and weighs 21kg – about the same size as my older dog Rik, and his sire Blitz. He eats an astonishing amount – more than twice what Rik eats – so I suspect there is still a bit more growing to happen.
I am now entering uncharted territory in one regard. All of my previous dogs were desexed at around six months of age, but Able won’t be. It’s unlikely that I will ever breed from him, but I have decided not to desex him until he’s at least eighteen months old … and quite possibly never. Since I last had a puppy, there has been research to show that early desexing affects a puppy’s growing skeleton, so I want to wait until he’s all grown up. More on that later, but first …
Supermarket Distraction Training
I am continuing to work on Able’s Very Very Excitable greeting behaviour. It’s hard to find strange people to train near in the middle of winter, so we go to the supermarket a couple of nights a week and train in the car park.
We’ve made some good progress. If Able is sitting or lying down when a person comes out of the supermarket, and the person doesn’t come within a metre or two of us, he can stay put and watch them like a calm sensible dog. If he’s standing still he is a bit more interested. He usually goes out to the end of his lead to greet them, but then he responds to the pressure by backing up a couple of steps.
He still turns into a whirlwind of flailing limbs whenever somebody tries to pat him – but luckily fewer people want to now that he’s not a cute little baby puppy. A cuddle with a stranger is waaaaaaay more stimulation than my puppy’s brain can cope with at the moment, so I try to avoid this as much as possible.
Instead I’m working on his ability to focus on me while we walk past people who are also moving. This is hard work for Able, and at the moment we need to have quite a large distance between us and the person. This distance is a bit smaller than it was a couple of weeks ago, though, and I’m hopeful that one day we will be able to walk past another person on the footpath without my puppy molesting them.
My secret weapon in this training is “Legs!” (weaving through my legs while I walk), a trick I taught him a couple of months ago. I trained it partly because I hadn’t done it before with another dog and I thought it would be fun, but also because it would be Able’s first trick that involves a chain of behaviour – I can require him to weave through my legs multiple times for each reward. We’ll also need a few different tricks for our pre-agility routine later.
Able absolutely loves this trick. One of the benefits I hadn’t thought of is that it encourages him to stand next to me and look at me with rapt attention. He’s a big puppy, and I can’t bring my other leg forward until his back end has finished weaving past it, so there’s a small delay between each step when he is just standing and waiting.
This hidden bonus has made “Legs!” very handy for getting us out of too-close-person situations without Able trying to bounce on them. He can remember how to do his “Legs!” even when he’s fairly hyped up. It quickly brings him to the other side of my body, so that I am between him and his chosen victim. And he completely forgets about the other person anyway – he’s standing there waiting for me to untangle the lead so that he can do his “Legs!” again!
Speaking of legs …
Bone Growth and Desexing
Disclaimer: I am not a vet and I am probably over-simplifying. Sports vet Christine Zink wrote this excellent summary of relevant research in 2018 – all the studies I refer to are listed there.
What are Growth Plates?
Your puppy has softer bits called growth plates at the end of his long bones (the ones in his legs and elsewhere that grow much more in one direction than the other as he matures). This is where your puppy’s new bone tissue comes from. The growth plates contain the material needed to grow new bone tissue, which gets added to the adjacent end of the existing bone. When the bone has grown to its adult length, the growth plate itself “closes” by turning into bone.
Growth plates are the reason why it is important to be careful with how much high-impact exercise a young puppy does, and especially to avoid falls from height. Growth plates are more easily damaged than bone, and an injury to the growth plate is likely to stunt the bone growth and leave your puppy with one leg shorter than the other – not ideal for an agility dog.
The exact time that each growth plate closes depends on which bone it is (the tibia in the hind leg takes the longest) and on the adult size of the dog (small puppies finish growing earlier than larger dogs). The only way to be certain whether all of your puppy’s growth plates are closed is to x-ray him. We have a rule in agility that dogs can’t compete until they are eighteen months old, by which time most dogs will have finished growing.
How Does Desexing Affect Bone Growth?
The exact time that the growth plates close also depends on other factors – including the puppy’s sex hormones. Puppies that are desexed before they finish puberty have lower levels of sex hormones, and this causes a delay in the closure of the growth plate. The result is that some of the bones in the dog’s leg will finish up a little bit longer than they would have otherwise.
And because the bones close at different times, the ratio of length between bones will be different. For example, the femur in the back leg closes several months before its neighbouring bone, the tibia. A puppy that is desexed just after its femur has finished growing will have a normal-length femur but a tibia that is significantly longer than it would otherwise have been. This leads to a different angle in the stifle joint.
What Are the Consequences of Delayed Growth Plate Closure?
One study found that dogs that were desexed at a young age have a higher incidence of cruciate ligament rupture – a very common injury in dogs (pets and sports dogs alike) that often shortens a dog’s agility career. Other studies found higher rates of hip dysplasia and patellar luxation as well.
Studies in German Shepherds and Golden and Labrador Retrievers found that the total incidence of joint disease in puppies that are desexed at a young age is more than double what is seen in intact dogs of the same breed.
What About Cancer?
Twenty years ago I believed that desexing a bitch before her first heat reduced her lifetime risk of cancer. There’s been research into this area since then too, and the answer is a lot murkier than I first thought.
Speying a bitch does prevent some forms of cancer, and also prevents a common and life-threatening uterine infection called pyometra. It’s impossible to get an infection or a cancer in a body part that’s been amputated, after all. It also reduces the risk of mammary cancer.
But early desexing seems to increase the risk of other cancers, in male and female dogs alike. The higher rate of these cancers, and the high mortality rate of some of them, means that speyed bitches may be worse off overall. Again, I encourage you to read Chris Zink’s article.
What About Behaviour?
For a long time people have assumed that intact male dogs were more aggressive than castrated ones, but there isn’t a lot of science to support this either. A pair of recent studies on dogs and bitches suggest that the picture is more complicated – some behaviour issues are more common in intact dogs and others in desexed dogs.
All in all, I’ve decided that the risks of castration probably outweigh the benefits for Able – particularly if it’s done before he’s finished growing. I am lucky that I live in a situation where it is fairly easy to own an intact dog – I don’t have any intact bitches, and I will be putting up high (hopefully dogproof) fencing at the end of the year. I’m not sure if I would make the same decision if I was still renting, or if I had a bitch puppy. It’s up to everyone to consider the risks and choose what they think is best for their dog and their situation.