Q: Stormi, my new kitten, will be an indoor-outdoor cat. I know she needs to be vaccinated and eventually sterilized, but isn’t it better to let her have one litter of kittens before that?
A: Cats live longer, healthier lives if they don’t have kittens and are sterilized between 2 and 6 months of age. Later sterilization increases the risk of mammary (breast) cancer, the third most common cancer in female cats.
Mammary cancer is aggressively malignant. By the time it’s discovered, it has already spread to the other mammary glands, lymph nodes, and lungs. Surgery and chemotherapy are ineffective, so survival is less than a year….