Which pets should not be neutered?
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With their thck shells and long recovery time, turtles are not good candidates for sterilisation
In an email, a reader asks about the birth-control measures for turtles that I mentioned in last week’s column.
My small townhouse is certainly overpopulated with turtles. Just a day after I set three of the larger turtles free in a local pond, I still couldn’t reduce the number of turtles in my house - three Indian roofed babies appeared in their parents’ tubs.
These turtles, once known as “Kachuga kachuga” but now as “Pangshura tecta”, are quite small, the ladies around 12 cms long and the boys 8 cms.
When their babies started appearing a few years ago, I was delighted. This species is, I’m told, not only endangered but also difficult to breed in captivity, and here I was, with eight babies appearing that first year.
By last year, though, when two more babies appeared, I wasn’t too pleased. The turtle population was growing too fast. I gave the two away to a friend with instructions on the babies’ care and feeding, but she didn’t follow what I told her. Within one month after I had given the babies to her, they died.
In this way, I learned that you can’t just hand out turtles, especially babies, to well-meaning friends.
The simplest way (I think) to keep the population steady in my house is to separate the boys from the girls.
Now this reader, in his email, asks why I didn’t take all the adults to my vet for an operation to neuter them. “In this way, at least you can leave the males and females together, the way Nature intended,” he writes.
It’s so difficult sometimes to tell in an email if the writer is joking or if he’s genuine in his concern to keep turtles as naturally as possible.
If you have a chance to hold a turtle in your hands, though, you’ll understand immediately why a neutering operation isn’t a good idea. The first thing you'll notice is how hard a turtle’s shell is - on the top and on the bottom.
A turtle could be surgically neutered, I suppose, but the resulting trauma from the operation would probably kill it before it could recover. Besides, reptiles, unlike mammals, heal very, very slowly. If it did survive, it would be months, if not years, before the turtle recovered from its shell being cut open.
How completely different it is for your dog or cat to be neutered. Your pet recovers within days after the operation, whether a male or a female.
If you feel that neutering a dog or cat is “unnatural”, please choose a soi, any soi, and check out all the sick animals hiding in the shadows. If you stay in the area any amount of time, you’ll see dead kittens and puppies who didn’t survive on the street.
To me, reducing the number of unwanted and suffering animals through neutering keeps nature in balance.
