Can They Make You Spay and Neuter Your Pets?

So, 2009 is barely a month old and already numerous states and cities across the country are looking at mandatory spay and neuter legislation ("MSN laws") for dogs and cats. Florida is considering legislation mandating sterilization of all dogs and cats within 30 days of turning 4 months old.

Obviously, the goal here is to limit the number breeding animals so that fewer puppies and kittens will be born, thereby relieving pressures on burdened city animal shelters and animal control facilities. But, how well does it work?

In Feb 2008, Los Angeles mandated spaying and neutering of all animals over 4 months of age and began enforcement in June of that year (letting people have time to schedule the surgery). According to KC Dog Blog, numbers of relinquished animals are increasing as are euthanasias in the LA area. His blog has several links for following the data trail, but I found that this link to an internal LA government document most revealing.

Within this document from the City Controller's office are numerous concerns. One of the most glaring examples of why mandatory spay neuter programs don't work well comes from page 20 of the document. On this page, the controller's office notes that:

Department management indicated that they have attempted to aggressively
increase the number of sterilizations performed. Employees at Care Centers
know this is a priority, which has resulted in lax controls for the distribution of the
Free Certificates. Rather than prevent or deny a subsidy because an individual
does not meet or cannot prove their eligibility, it appears that staff provides a
subsidy to anyone that requests one.

Furthermore:

While the surveyed municipalities had strong controls in place to ensure limited
resources benefit a well-defined target population, the Department lacks clear
and consistent guidelines. Since the Department can only distribute a finite
number of Free Certificates, the ambiguous eligibility criteria and lax control
procedures to verify the individuals’ eligibility may result in the denial of
assistance to an implicitly prioritized group of residents that genuinely need it.

So, what I read into this is that in an effort to boost spay and neuter numbers, employees of the city's Animal Control division were handing out certificates for free or discounted spays and neuters to ANYONE who asked! As you can probably imagine, this leaves fewer resources for pet owners who are the ones in most need of the help!

And this is just one of the eleven major problems found by the audit. Solutions to all of these problems are marked as "urgent" or "needed".

Now...don't get me wrong. Controlling pet population through appropriate spaying and neutering is a good thing, but mandating sterilization of your pet is not the way to save lives and get pets into homes. Even the American College of Theriogenologists (veterinarians who study reproduction in pets) agrees that MSN is not a good idea.

The biggest concern comes from veterinarians who believe that mandating sterilization will give people another reason to avoid going to the veterinarian. Believe me, this is true!! Many pet owners equate veterinarians with authority and erroneously believe that the owner will be "reported" for not neutering their pet. Recently, Chicago's pending MSN law was amended to exempt veterinarians from the need to report intact animals.

Bottom line, these type of laws put way too much government interference into the daily lives of pets and their owners. There are many factors to "pet overpopulation" and it will take a multi-faceted approach to resolve this issue.