``Bandit, ah Bandit.  His gender is so evident.  He came back from
the pound with his gender and other bits of nobility all out of
order, and he peed on the porch, and Mr. Redd whupped him with
that switch for a while, and Bandit bit him in the arm, and Mr.
Redd, recognizing as no one else did the mistake he had made,
said to me at one point, ``So he bit me.  Fair is fair.  There's
more man and more backbone to that dog than to any of these folks
who want to kill him.''

Is gender safe?  Of course it isn't safe.

There are people now how are in the full-time business of being
kind to animals and who recommend that all dogs and cats be spayed
and neutered and ``phased out'' so that we can return to ``a more
distant, symbiotic relationship'' with animals, in the words of
Ingrid Newkirk, cofounder of People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals.  Dr. Michael Fox of the HSUS says everyone should spay
their dog, and that dogs ``don't miss what they don't know about.''
By which he means, not gender, but gonads.  There are humane
societies, more and more of them, that require that adopted animals
be spayed or neutered before their new owners take them home.  This
does not diminish the amount of trouble the dog is likely to be by
all that much, but it does diminish the animals.  Sometimes spaying
or neutering a dog is a medically correct decision, but the new
turn of events that makes it into a politically correct decision, a
matter of good citizenship, is not enhancing the lives of animals
or of citizens...

Sometimes there are laws, the most recent and notorious of them
in my ken being one passed in San Mateo County, that punish people
with heavy fines for owning intact animals.  Spaying and neutering
and euthanasia, all of which hurt and diminish animals, are done in
the name of kindness to animals, and sometimes in the name of
animal rights.''

Vicki Hearne _Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog_ p.236: