Almost all cat lovers face castration in one way or another: sooner or later a situation arises when it becomes impossible to continue to tolerate the cat’s “falling in love” and all the problems associated with it. And then he will be sterilized. Many owners have no idea what features characterize castration of a cat: the testicles remain or are removed, does the animal’s behavior change, how should the castrate be fed? All these questions are quite fair, but still some breeders are interested in the fate of the testes. Are they removed during castration? The answer is not as clear-cut as one might think.
General information
You need to immediately conduct a short educational program. In general, what is castration? If you think that this is the process of surgically removing the testes, then this is a very common mistake.
In fact, castration should be understood as the suppression of an animal’s sexual activity, and there are several ways to do this:
- Surgical castration , in which the testicles are actually surgically removed. The method is extremely common not only in our country, but throughout the world (of course, in those countries where there is some kind of culture of keeping pets). The operation is very simple, cheap, and does not take much time.
- Chemical castration . But here everything is much more interesting. In this case, a sclerotizing agent is injected into the testis itself, that is, a chemical that promotes the replacement of the “native” testis with connective tissue. Roughly speaking, the testicle shrinks, turning into one large colloidal scar. The main advantage of the technique is that the cat does not need to be put under general anesthesia to carry out the procedure, and after about five days the animal fully recovers from the effects of sterilization. Thus, with chemical castration, the testes “de jure” exist, but become inoperative.
- Radiation sterilization . As you might guess from the name of the method, the testes are irradiated under a directed beam of gamma radiation, after which their tissues also die and become sclerotized. Accordingly, as in the previous case, the organs are present, but they serve as “filler for the scrotum”, since they can no longer perform their physiological function.
- Medical castration . This is the only method of castration in which the cat’s “equipment” not only remains with the cat, but also continues to function. The meaning of this method is to introduce an implant under the animal’s skin, which will gradually release medications that suppress the animal’s sexual activity. This sterilization method can be considered temporary, since after the implant is removed or its resource is exhausted, the pet’s libido is gradually restored.
There is also a vasectomy, but it cannot be considered castration in any sense . During this operation, the veterinary surgeon ligates the vas deferens, but the organs themselves remain intact and continue to release sex hormones into the bloodstream. But in this case, the cat is by no means a castrato: he retains his sexual activity completely, the pet chases cats and mates with them, leaves odorous marks, etc.
In addition, in the recent past, in some places percutaneous castration . For this purpose, special tongs were used: the “most valuable” was clamped in them. The gonads were ground into mush with a characteristic crunch when the handles of the instrument were squeezed. Strictly speaking, in this case there was no question of preserving the integrity of the testes: of course, their tissue remained inside the scrotal sac, but soon they were also replaced by colloidal scars.
In addition, during percutaneous castration there was a fairly high percentage of defects: if the specialist does not squeeze the forceps tightly enough during the operation, the testicle will not be completely crushed, part of it will remain viable. In such cases, the cat’s sexual function will be completely restored after some time, he will again run after cats, fight with other cats and engage in other “indecencies.”
Castration of a cat. Photo and description of the operation
In this article we will show photographs and talk about how castration of a cat is carried out. We were inspired to create this material by a fairly common question from our clients: “Why is it so cheap?” We want to show how this is done, and then ask you - “Why is it expensive?”
