Behavior How does spaying and neutering affect behavior between the sexes?

[EmmaFranson]

As a little side note - I have no intention to get myself another GP for at least a year. I'm just curious - my bf and I were talking randomly about what situations we could have had instead of our current one, and it got me curious about this.

Say I had two boys, left them intact, and also had a spayed female. Would the girl go into heat, causing the boys to fight with each other and anything that got in the way of getting to the girl? Or would the girl even go into heat? What exactly does spaying do - I know that spaying a female means putting her through a relatively risky surgery to remove some or all of her reproductive organs - but does it affect the girls' natural cycles (I would assume it does) ?

And along side that, what does neutering do for a male - cut down on his natural urges to reproduce? Just make it so he can't impregnate a sow? Take the above situation (2 boys, 1 girl) - if you left the girl intact, but neutered the boys, would the boys still be affected by the girl going into heat?

Also, just thinking about it now, would even just having neutered males cut down on their aggression? Ive read almost everywhere that it doesn't really do anything, but Im curious if there is anything to contradict that.

I decided on getting boys to avoid having to deal with this, but after talking to my boyfriend about the times we were sexing our boys, Im curious about it all

 

[Soecara]

For the first hypothetical scenario no the sow would not go into heat as her reproductive organs which are the driving force behind the heat cycle have been removed when she is spayed. The boys would still be very likely to fight over her tough, multiple boars in a heard is not recommended unless the heard is quite large with multiple females (even then it really hinges on the personalities of the boars in question, some are fine with other boars and a smaller numbers of girls, others will not tolerate other boars around the girls regardless of how many girls there are).

For the second scenario some boars do have lessened sexual urges after neutering, others don't. There are theories that the age the boar is neutered at has a impact on this but there is nothing conclusive. It is reasonable to expect no change in a boar after neutering other then the loss of the ability to reproduce. For the most part people agree that neutering has no impact on aggression as the complex social structure (dominant and submissive members of the herd) of guinea pigs seems to be largely (if not almost entirely) independent of hormones. As in the first scenario the boars are still likely to fight over the girl.