Are you restricting her food, or feeding her "just" a small portion daily, once a day or twice a day. My vet always suggests these tiny babies weigh 3 lbs.....but, she may not ever "fill out" ....that might be as big as she is going to get. Is she "skinny" or is she just a tiny dog? If she is "skinny" and you cant get weight on her, I would be questioning what is the reason for that. Usually, more calories/more food intake= weight gain.
As far as the heat cycle goes, if she is not in danger of getting mixed in with an intact male, I would concentrate on her gaining some weight and let her have her first heat cycle, then consider spaying. She may be having some hormone issues with her size being so small....I had "a breeder" that never got over 3.5 lbs and was almost 14 months old before she came into season. Well, it was clear by the time she was 8 months old, she was very likely never going to hit the best weight for a "breeder"....so I quit concentrating on that thought, and started focusing on hormone issues....as it turned out, she had only one ovary and it was only 1/3 the size it should have been.
I would say you need to determine if she is "skinny" or is this her little bitty body build. If she is skinny, why is she not gaining weight? Her diminutive size could be hormone related, which is going to throw off her cycles, etc. If she is just an itty bitty baby girl, I would let her gain more weight, up to 3 lbs, before I worried about spaying....there are many, many vets that are quite capable of spaying these little bitty kiddos, but it just scares the heebie-jeebies out of me! Her having one heat cycle before spaying is NOT going to hurt her. |