Dew Claws??

I know breeders who do remove dewclaws on all their puppies. However none of my dogs have dewclaws removed and I don't do it on litters. So not every dog shown in AKC has them removed!!


Oh jeez... 2-3 yrs ago I took a sheltie bitch in for an exam/check up for the handlers I work for, the vet looked at the dog for a couple seconds and said she wanted to do a urinalysis because she had just a little bit of blood on her rear end and she thought it was a UTI. I looked up at the vet and said, "Um.. yeah, that's because she is in season" LOL

11 pages on dewclaws? lol

:rofl1:
Of course not!
This is Chaz, where we have mastered the art of multisubject threads.

Another argument for promoting "Train and Contain"! The vast majority of dogs aren't in shelters or being rehomed on CL because of an "overpopulation. A large number are there because their owners have failed to properly train and socialize them and now don't want to deal with a teenage dogs with what they see as unsolvable problems. You know unsolvable problems like jumping up, stealing food, tearing the couch apart, running away when off lead - really serious stuff

I used to do "behavior night" at a local shelter. This was a night of free behavioral counseling for anyone who wanted it. It was offered to any one calling the shelter hoping to surrender their dog, anyone who just adopted a dog and anyone who wanted to return a dog they adopted. You'd be surprised at how many people will keep their dog if you can give them a workable solution to the problem they are having. If they don't keep the dog, you can bet that most will be getting a replacement dog for the one they just gave up. And the cycle continues unless they are lucky enough to get an abnormal dog who is good with no training or socialization. In a way, we have done a disservice to dogs in our country by allowing altering to become the hallmark of a responsible owner. Altering has extremely little to do with responsible ownership. My family always had intact male dogs - my parents and my grandparents. None of those dogs ever produced one litter and my family was not "dog people", just pet owners who kept their dogs at home.

The question was raised earlier in the thread about how to identify a dog that's had a vasectomy. Simple - tattoos. They used to be common in altered dogs (and in some places still are) but I don't see why it wouldn't be feasible to make tattooing standard with a vasectomy. I think a more difficult thing to do would be to find a vet actually willing to do a vasectomy. I honestly don't know of any around here, though I really am considering it for Logan when he's done showing.

On that note, I get strange reactions from people with Logan, too. When I took him to work with me for doc to look over, the office manager (doc's wife ) asked me how old he is, and when I told him he was a little over a year she gave me this horrified look and said "And you haven't got him CUT yet?????!!!" Uh, no, he's a show dog for one, and even if he wasn't he STILL wouldn't be neutered yet. Doc knew better than to say anything to me about neutering. He know I don't stand for his early neutering ****, but he also knew he's a show dog. When I started Logan in his BN class the girls with the other dogs (all early-neutered doodles ) were freaked out by his testicles and why he was still intact. My trainer assured them it's okay, he's a show dog and they need their balls to show for whatever reason (personally I think it's a stupid rule...Logan's not going to be bred either way so do testicles really matter THAT much for showing?). But even my trainer was shocked that I had NO plans to breed Logan. Come on people, just because a dog has testicles doesn't mean he has to use them! And then my coworkers and my former roommate totally have testicle phobia and have said they find Logan's balls disgusting. But what else would I expect of people that have been brain washed (and get a chi puppy spayed at 4 months and 1 pound).

As to why there's talk about speutering in this thread: 1. It's Chaz. Is it really such a surprise? 2. That's how conversations flow. 3. It was mentioned earlier in the thread, and is relevant to the discussion IN THIS THREAD and 4. it's been used in the context of responsible and unreasonable rescue policies and as a comparison to dewclaw removal earlier IN THIS THREAD.

Well considering that the basic purpose of a dog show is to evaluate breeding stock...Yes, testicles DO matter. Can't breed if you don't have balls.

I was the one who brought up identifying a vasectomized dog, and I had not considered a tattoo. Our shelter tattoo's our animals with their ID number, so the thought of using it for other purposes slipped my mind totally.

Standard of every male dog calls for two testicles descended fully into the scrotum. Remove the testicles there is no way to tell if they ever descended or not.

How did those dogs get in those homes? Were they dropped.out of the sky, or "bred" by people who didnt give a care where they wound up? Or a result of oops? Dogs and cats jet don't happen along. Someone, somewhere, is responsible for their being here.

We do behavioral counseling as well as basic training advice when we get owner surrender requests, basically the same thing you did, so no that doesn't surprise me

PS...I've even contacted.people on CL when they have solveable.issues and offer them solutions!

The people responsible for dogs being in shelters are the owners who surrendered or abandoned them.

I see no need to remove front dews. They're actually functional digits. Eve uses hers to grab things, almost like a mini-thumb.


Wink has both rear dews. I completely forgot to ask the vets to remove them when she was spayed, but if she ever goes under anesthesia again I will be having at least one of them taken off. One rear dew is built like the front dews are - firmly attached to her hock by bone and tendon, and a strong healthy nail is growing out of it. The other one is what worries me as far as potential injury goes - it's floppy, useless and is hanging on by nothing but skin.

True but the bigger picture is someone is responsible for them being there in the first place.
Had the dogs parents been altered they'd not be in that position.

Of course, if we stop breeding dogs people will stop abandoning them. No more dogs, no more dogs in shelters. I personally don't care for that idea though.

The big picture is, dogs are in shelters because they had owners who put them there because they couldn't or wouldn't commit to the dog's long term care and training and didn't or couldn't find another option for the dog. The responsibility of what happens to the dog rests on solely on the owner.

We could sit all day talking about the chicken and the egg. The simple truth is there are too many pets for the homes available.
Without irresponsible people placing dogs willy-nilly, the shelters would be empty.
Even with training classes, etc. you're still getting a ton of people who simply do not value their animals lives. But responsible placement can't happen when you have people having their "oopsies" litters all over and deliberately breeding on top of that.

Anyone who thinks there is not a pet overpopulation problem in this country needs to spend a day in a county shelter here in the rural south. And those are the lucky ones. More commonly dogs are shot or dumped out the back of a truck on some back country road. Some actually make it long enough to breed and we have a rather healthy feral dog population around here too.

All of my girls have front dews and we've never had a problem. I have noticed that they use them when playing with toys. That being said I wouldn't have someone having them removed if they were already under for something else and were going to be on pain meds anyways. JMO of course.

I do disagree the general feeling that is being thrown around in this thread that intact animals can't be kept without reproducing. Hell by that logic Mina should be at least on her second or third litter by now. When it comes down to it, I would much rather see a dog be able to grow properly and then be altered before a pediatric s/n and I would never adopt from somewhere that required me to have the dog s/n before they were done growing (especially if I had explained to them WHY I wanted to wait), to me the risks don't outweigh the benefits. Again JMO

Trust me, it is bad here too. Just a glance through our craigslist has a litter of oops - "black lab mix x "I think father's husky" lovely combo also numerous other free litters, and then of course some pit bulls for sale and a few other misc. litters.
Where are those going to wind up? The freebies? Eventually the pound - after possibly siring and giving birth to multiple litters. Even the ones for sale, I doubt they'll screen homes well

FTR I never said you cannot keep an intact animal from reproducing.
But if you think that's the majority of people you are sadly mistaken.
Visit a kill shelter any day of the week to see the results in motion.

And this has more to deal with the rising irresponsibility and fads than it does with the animals themselves. There have ALWAYS been intact animals. However, there wasn't always such a giant craze over "doodles" and "movie dogs" and not every Joe Schmo out there had a dog. They used to pretty much be kept to the working dogs of the blue collar class and the pampered pooches of the elite.

All this push towards mandatory s/n, especially pediatric, is going to do nothing except keep the big millers in business, because where else are you going to be able to get a dog if all this poorly thought out legislation passes and half-baked arguments are passed around?