You don't like sleep, right?

Lisa Milton, Squish's Mom, @summitLisa, lisa.miltonwork

Depending on where you get your next animal from, you may or may not have a choice of whether or not to spay or neuter your animal. Squish wasn't spayed when I got her and for a while I really struggled with that decision.

In my first few years working for PetLynx I spent a lot of time working directly with the Calgary Humane Society. Educational is the way I describe it now, it's amazing how much I didn't know about animals. My family had cats and dogs as I grew up and by that time I was actually living on a farm raising cows and horses, I had every opportunity to be more educated.

What I didn't have the opportunity to understand until then was how many animals have unintended litters and how overwhelming that can be for a pet owner. Imagine your cat or dog starts to get a little chubby, you think "Chubby can be cute, but maybe a few less treats and a little more exercise." Eight weeks later, out pop six kittens or puppies! Your pet is a first time mom so she's not very good at it and you spend the next eight weeks hand-feeding six little runts first every two hours, then four hours then six hours ect.... Eventually you're exhausted and stuck with six animals you somehow struggled to get to an appropriate age and now you have to find them new homes. You post an ad online and have a multitude of people you don't know tramping through your house for the next few weeks until hopefully you get them all into a new home. While you've been busy homing her last litter your lovely little lady has gone and gotten herself knocked up again.

Ok admittedly that last part might be a stretch, and I stress might, but either way, just writing that left me feeling exhausted. It's no wonder that so many animals end up in inappropriate homes or surrendered to shelters. Imagine if that whole story happened to you and to top it off you had a brand new baby or a sick parent you were caring for or even a hospital stay! My time at CHS really helped me to understand how easy it is to become completely overwhelmed as a pet owner and wind up in a place you never intended to be.

It's true there are a number of studies that attest to the medical reasons why spaying or neutering is a good idea but for me they weren't nearly as convincing as the scenario above. Squish was, and still is, the cutest dog in the whole wide world (ok I'm a little biased) and that legitimately made me consider breeding her at least once or at waiting until she got a little older to make the decision but the second I thought of the care, process and stress involved in the aftermath of that decision there was NO way I was going to risk it. The truth is there are lots of intentional sources of animals out there who do a much better job than I ever would. Just think of all the sleep I gained from that one tiny decision!