Does neutering male cats make them less strong?

I have concluded that neutering male cats is likely to make them less strong. The word “neutering” applies to male cats, as you probably know, although it can also be an umbrella term for spaying and neutering. It is the removal of their testes (testicles). As you might also know, the operation is considered morally mandatory and is unquestioned. It has to be like this in order to stop the creation of unwanted cats. It’s a method by which people manage the domestic cat population. I’ve recently written about how spaying female cats might affect their mood and in this article I want to address one aspect of the neutering operation on male cats, namely, whether it affects their muscle mass and therefore strength.

A Google search on this topic results in nothing! I find this interesting. Is it because nobody is interested in it or is it because no one’s thought about it? There is a great acceptance of male cat neutering. It’s almost as if people have been indoctrinated by the establishment to accept it as normal; rampant male cats screwing females willy-nilly in a nighttime orgy, it must be stopped.

I am not, incidentally, in any way suggesting that it should not be normal. It is necessary but it is also useful to ask questions about it, to go back to the original question and re-examine what we are doing. Sometimes the things that people do become so entrenched that they are normalised without question but if you examine these behaviours some doubts can be thrown up.

I don’t know any studies by scientists of the effects of muscle mass on male cats due to the neutering operation. The medical term is orchidectomy which describes the removal of both testicles. It is not invasive and cats can go home the same day. It is done for the benefit of people and they say that cats are improved by it. I have addressed the deeper issue of how male cats feel after the operation in an article that I wrote some time ago. You can read that by clicking here.

Is it fair to compare the effects on the human body in terms of muscle mass after been castrated to the effects of the same operation on the muscle mass of cats? I think that we have to agree that it is a reasonable comparison because the fundamental anatomy of cats and people is the same and the chemistry of hormonal interaction is the same, as I understand it.

In humans, my research indicates that castration results in the loss of muscle mass which makes men less strong. There’s one guy on the Quora.com website who goes into a long discussion on how we changed after being chemically castrated. It’s a gruesome story which he seems to delight in telling! He does state unequivocally that, “My muscles became less strong. Probably there was some atrophy. And I felt physically weaker and slower. Sometimes I felt like I am very old man.”

Another man on the same website who had a bilateral orhiectomy said that he lost upper body muscle and strength. I conclude therefore that removing testes can make men weaker.

Therefore I further conclude that it has the same effect or is likely to have the same effect on male cats. In effect, you could say that it feminises male cats. You can see it in the faces and body conformation of unsterilised male cats. They always look more chonky with square faces than the more feminised faces of castrated male cats.

How does this affect us? Well, it should not change our attitude towards the neutering operation. It has to be done but I don’t like the effect that it has on male cats. I will discuss mood changes again in another article to add to my previous article referred to above.

You might know that many veterinarians neuter male cats as young as seven weeks of age. One veterinarian says that early neutering results in slightly taller size due to delayed bone growth and the inability to extrude the penis. And if a male cat is castrated before six months of age his penis may remain small. How do you feel about that? This, by the way, squares up with what men say about been castrated. It has the same effect on the male of the human species as it does on the male of the feline species in terms of penis size.