Dear Editor,

With reference to Syeada Manbodh’s letter of January 6 (SN, ‘Spay pets in 2010’), I must say what a great advocate Syeada is for the voiceless animals. I wish I was there helping her, but I will never return to Guyana again, due to ill health. My thanks, at least, go out to her for doing a thankless job which she loves so much.

I agree with everything she said, and I can’t believe that people in Guyana have so many animals which they really can’t look after properly. Wouldn’t it be far better to have perhaps two healthy, sterilised dogs, than to have 6 or 8 mangy, diseased, unsterilised and underfed dogs, which are usually on the roads, reproducing unwanted puppies? Guyana has too many strays as it is.

It is so imperative to sterilise both male and female dogs – females, to lengthen their lives and not to become diseased from the constant pregnancies, and males, to prevent them from getting testicular cancer and to stop them straying into unwanted areas, where cruel people live and want to harm them. It goes both ways: neither will become diseased; they become more calm after sterilisation and are more affectionate. It’s a simple operation for both sexes.

It’s also important to sterilise both male and female cats, because they reproduce every 4 months (unlike a dog after 6 months) and can therefore produce many, many offspring over a short period of time.

The larger animals like stallions, should be gelded (the horsey word for sterilising a male), to calm them down and to thwart any fights with other stallions while they are working when there is a mare in season. I’ve seen fights between two stallions outside the lumberyards in Georgetown while I was living in Guyana, when there was a mare in season, and injuries can be terrible for these majestic animals. This operation is not even an hour’s work for a competent vet.

Life would become much easier for everyone in Guyana and around the world if all male and female animals were sterilised unless one were breeding them in order to improve the breed in general.

Yours faithfully,
Nicole Fitzsimmons
Ex-member of the GSPCA