Would a spay/neuter tattoo genuinely have a little heart?
Edit: after getting some replies from people confirming, I looked it up and it seems indeed standard practice, if not perhaps outdated now that microchipping is so common
Yup! My kitten got one when she was spayed, and I called it her “tramp stamp” until her fur grew back to cover it!
Edit to add: Adopted from a county shelter in California this year, where they spayed and tattooed before adoption with an in-house veterinarian. It stops another vet from trying to go in again later if she were to ever get lost and picked up, because they’d see it when they shave the belly.
Oh no, he was completely fine. They do it while they're under for the spay/neuter. It's a common practice there, matter of fact I have only had two cats that did not have the ear clip.
I honestly never gave it more than two seconds thought until we moved out of state - then everyone started mentioning it. Someone even thought I had done it to identify my own animals lol
I shadowed at a veterinary hospital for a while and one of the doctors there had this story about this owner who wanted to get a stray they had taken in sterilized. No microchip, no tattoo, not even a noticeable scar on her but when he was operating on the poor cat he realized that it was already spayed. He felt bad about putting her through unnecessary stress but there was no way he could have known.
California here. I haven’t seen pet tattoos since I was around 13 and I’m 33 now. You’re lucky because I wish they would’ve tattooed mine. I worry about them getting out and potentially I don’t get them back but someone takes them in and then they get cut open all over just to find out they’re already fixed. My cats aren’t all microchipped because I only have one young one I got this year and the others I’ve had since I was a teen and few years older than a teen. Microchips weren’t as common to do at the time upon them getting fixed where I was.
microchips are a tiny injection under the skin at the neck. theyre super fast and not expensive to have done, and if you need to, you can contact shelters and ask about sliding scale/income-based clinics. ❤️
please get it done! pets are sometimes reunited months or even years later, and every vet and animal control has a scanner.
My cat came from a shelter and she was neutered/microchipped in a government action (the town does some huge actions like this, it's free for the shelters and almost-free for regular people) and they still made a blue mark in her ear which is know as the "neutered" mark country-wise.
My cats went to different vets for their spay. One didn’t get marked at all and I guess they just updated her microchip data or something, the other got a little “N” which I assume means “neutered” even though it’s a female.
I think basically any tattoo inside the ear probably indicates that the animal is fixed
The “Oregon humane society “ cuts the tips of an ear off to show being fixed I wondered why my cats had an ear clipped and someone who worked for the OHS informed me that’s how they mark them.
I also can't help but think it says "AGE" on the upper part. Can't make out the bottom but idk, definitely doesn't seem like a standard practice. The SPCA gets a lot of abused and mistreated animals as well as strays
Tattoos typically identify the clinic, the year, and the animal by using a combination of letters and numbers. It does not identify their blood type. It is usually done during a spay or neuter surgery and serves as a means of identification if the animal goes missing. Over time they can fade or blow out, so they are not always reliable. That is why microchipping is preferred. In this particular case, the owner may have requested a heart as well.
This is the most likely explanation. They cut the tips off of ears or do a tattoo, often. My cat who has a tattoo, it's on the inside of his thigh... but you'd have to shave him to see it. I could see this as a fix for a visible marking spot without having to shave a cat.
in canada, tattoos were done for identification before microchips became a thing.
i’d guess this cat is probably senior, or they had a weird owner at some point who deliberately chose a tattoo instead of a chip.
we have provincial pet registries, so the tattoo would match what’s in that system
edit: alright i get it, the tattoos still happen. i shouldn’t have assumed based on my experiences. it still seems like an odd choice to me, but to each their own
Also done in some southern USA states, and cutting off the tip of an ear is another thing they do. In the Northeast, I'm not actually sure what they do, as most folks I know have their pets microchipped, myself included. We don't have as much of a stray cat problem as more rural areas though.
It’s my understanding that the ear tip clip is done with freak cats that have been trapped, spayed or neutered before being released again into their feral colony. This so that if the cat is trapped again, they know the cat is fixed.
My daughter’s one rescue was part of a feral colony & has the tip of his left ear missing.
Not all ferals can be socialized. So they get released back to their colony.
Others who can be socialized eventually are put up for adoption like my daughter’s kitty.
I understand the need to clip the ear but in looking at rescue sites, there are some poor cats that are truly disfigured by having almost half their ear clipped off.
To me, anyway, that seems excessive. It’s not like the cat is awake & struggling when it’s done. They’re still zonked from being put under for their sterilization procedure.
I’m in the Southern US and have never heard of a cat tattoo before. Feral cats have their ear tipped so it is readily apparent they have been spayed/ neutered. Dogs have a small green mark on their abdomen to reflect their surgery.
Yeah I wonder if even gets state or local area specific. I am in the south but in my area they tattooed a very very small line onto the stomach of my female cats. I'm not sure where they tattoo if it's a male LOL. And for feral cats they clip off a small bit of their ears to show they've been spayed and neutered. I definitely have never seen a tattoo in the ear before like that.
I told my parents to tattoo their Siamese cat's ear when she got spayed. She's so cute that if she ever got out, some people may not bother to check her for a microchip and try to keep her. My thinking was that if they saw her tattoo, they'd feel guilty trying to keep her because they'd know she has a family.
Yes, of you are in Germany there is a database vets can access to register cats and that can then be used to find out a lost pets owners that uses tattoos in the cats ear.
The cat might have been in a Canadian shelter but rescued from a country where the ID tattoos are either still a thing, or were a thing recently enough. It's not uncommon where I live for rescues to come from poorer countries where adoption chances are practically zero, I imagine there might be similar programs in Canada ?
Sterilization tattoo. Where I live they do it close to the surgery site, where it will be covered by hair but still be very visible to anyone shaving them to try to do the surgery again (the idea being they will shave the site, see the mark, and go "ah nevermind, this one is good to go")
In the ear is standard in Australia, not to this degree though. Usually it’s just a small circle with a slash through it. Maybe there were complications in the surgery that needed extra tattoo to be communicated?
Doing it in the ear is way easier to see and you can avoid wasting the vet’s time and stressing the cat out by knowing they’re sterilised without needing to shave them.
ID tattoo. They usually do that as a courtesy at shelters in case the cat or dog gets lost. Last cat was a stray I adopted (CDS), and when getting him spayed, they offered to tattoo my driver's license number on the inside back leg, which I had them do. A nice alternative to ID chips for pets.
If the cat was originally from a rescue or was neutered/spayed at a low cost clinic, many times they tattoo a cat to let others know the cat has been fixed or is cared for. They usually do this when the cat is under anesthesia while getting spayed or for some other surgery.
Could have been a rescued lab cat. We got a crop of them once at the humane society I used to volunteer with, and they all had similar tats inside their ears. Could also just be an old fashioned vet or prior rescue, though.
Most animals just get a little dot or dash ( mine have green dashes on their tummies ) but some vets allow you to pick a select few shapes to do instead. I met a cat with a little lightning bolt on the inside of their ear. Something about shapes being more defining than a dash that gets hidden under fur
I used to work for the SPCA in BC. This is definitely a tattoo ID. You can call them and let them know you're the new owner of this cat so they have your info on record in case kitty goes astray.
The heart signifies a heart from a rat this cat killed in prison. Others have touched on it but clearly a gang leader. Tread carefully and increase the treat count to make sure you are safe. That’s his house now.
They used to do this in the 2000’s as tracking before microchipping was common. You registered your pet’s ear tattoo with the spca so they could track them if they were lost.
I recently found the adoption papers for my 6-year-old cat, I found out he has a tattoo on his stomach to mark that he was neutered. It either means they're spayed/neutered or microchipped
Is it possible that they were a blood donor cat or part of a university study? My cat has a tattoo on the inside of her ear as well (not really discernible) - she was a blood donor at a vet school before being adopted out.
Sometimes they do actually and honestly a lot of neuter tattoos kinda blow out since they’re not really meant to be perfect tattoos
I’ve seen a wide variety of things. The pet is under and few lines of ink doesn’t do anything. I actually have seen a decent amount of heart shaped neuter and spay tattoos online
That's a relief to know. I was slightly worried someone had taken one of those cheap tattoo machines you get online to this poor cat before OP (and their friend) found them. It seems far fetched, but some people will do cruel things that would never occur to me in a million years
Yup my cat has one. Tattooed little guy. And now my city cancelled funding to the BCSPCA, so no more animal control, so seems pointless. I hope after the election they bring it back.
Under anesthesia. It’s common for surgeries like spaying so future vets/owners will know it’s been done even if the cat gets lost and re-adopted. Never seen one in the ear though, it’s usually at the surgery site, so I find this odd.
The ear is the only place I've seen it in BC, but it was also used for ID before microchipping. You would get the tat done at neuter because they're under anyway so it's safer/easier.
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u/LazyEyeMcfly 3h ago
Prison tattoos. Dos locos Meowtos if I remember correctly from my time as a feline reform officer in the 90s.