[Kay]

As much as I would love to wait until Sasha is older, we are travelling to an obedience trial out of town in late Feb and I don't want her to go into heat and have to cancel the night before :/ She'll be about 10 -11 mths at the time, as her birthday is early March. She'll be competeing for her PCD (I've never trialed before and I think it would be great exposure for the both of us). Then her CD in late March.

My question is, if she is supposed to trial in late Feb, when should she go in for her spay, giving her enough time to recover from surgery? I'd like to wait as along as possible(1.5 yrs), but my significant other doesn't want to deal with the heat cycle, and I kind of agree with that haha. My annoying inlaws keep telling me to get her fixed now (it will "calm her down" apparently) and were upset that I didn't do it the day she turned 6 mths.

 

[bmasplund]

We just had my Sasha lol spayed and the vet said 10-14 day recovery. Suchers get taken out then too.

 

[Cassidy's Mom]

Well, the main problem that I see is that you don't know when she'll go into heat - it could really be any time between now and a year or so old. She might go into heat next month and be over it well before your trial, in which case you'd just wait a few months after she's done and spay her then.

The only way to be sure that she won't go into heat before spaying her is to do it pretty soon. I'm not saying that's what you should do, just that by the time she's 10 or 11 months old there is a good possibility that she will have already gone into heat and this will all be a moot point.

I wouldn't do any hard physical activity right after a spay, but there's no reason she couldn't do an obedience trial a few days or a week later. My girls always bounced back within a couple of days and seemed perfectly fine, but Brad is right, the stitches remain in for 10-14 days after surgery.

Since you really want to wait until she's older you could just wait and see what happens. If she hasn't gone in to heat by mid-February you can spay her then if you want. If she has, your SO may not be happy about it, but oh well, what can you do? Heats CAN be a huge PITA and very messy, or they can be no big deal at all, depends on the dog. We had one bloodbath (looked like small animals had been butchered all over the house :rofl and three that were not bad at all. With the britches you can buy Cassidy's heat would have been much more manageable, but we didn't know about them at the time, so I followed her around the house with a bottle of spray carpet cleaner.