karen@hp-pcd.UUCP (04/03/84)
I have two cats, a male and a female. I am planning to wait until they are a year old before getting them neutered/spayed. What is the best age to get cats neutered/spayed? The youngest my vet will do is 6 months for females and 9 months for males. I had my previous cats done at those ages. However, later I heard that waiting until they had their full growth (~ 1 year) was better. My cats are 7.5 months old right now. On the subject of declawing, I guess we have been lucky. First, I wouldn't declaw my cats since they spend a fair amount of time outside (or will when the weather gets better and they get neutered/spayed and I stop being overprotective due to the death of my previous two cats). Second, the need isn't too great. They have learned to use the scratching post and in fact seem to like using it. Our previous cats were trained to a scratching post when we got them, so it was easy, just show them the post. The cats we have now were younger when we got them, so we had to train them. We used the same method discribed earlier. We also praised them if they used the scratching post on their own. It took a little while, but they finally got the idea. We won that battle but lost the table battle. We can't keep them off the table. The male, Rusty, isn't so bad. He just likes to sit on the table beside you. The female, Sheba, is the problem. She tries to steal your food. We have tried the water bottle method, but she just gets soaked (sometimes she will run away). Any suggestions will be appreciated.