Eugene Weekly‘s Pet Issue:
Cooking for Canines Get baked with Fido
Neu Day Rising Make your dog’s life testicle-rific with fake balls
Are You a Badfish Too? Exploring the toothy side of freshwater aquarium-dwellers
The Furriest Firefighter Firedog is much more than a mascot
Sasha at Serbu Hero dog needs a home
The Healthy Hound Holistic pet care in Eugene
Pure Pixelated Cuteness Popular cat videos, explained
Neu Day Rising
Make your dog’s life testicle-rific with fake balls
By Rick Levin
As any caring pet owner knows, having your dog’s nards removed is no less heartbreaking for being the right thing to do. Neutering may be morally righteous, but biologically speaking, emptying Rover’s piñata makes my dolce vita seem a lot less sweet. As Clint Eastwood said (sort of) in Unforgiven: “It’s a hell of a thing, nutting a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”
Guilt, salted with empathy, can drive folks to do just about anything. Leaving your Labrador with no anchor for his shaft — what would you do to salve your conscience? Apparently this is the same question one Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Mo., asked himself when the time came to get Buck the Bloodhound balled. According to his web site, Miller “was really surprised when it was discovered the testicles are permanently removed when the pet is neutered.”
Hence, with the assistance of his vet, Miller and a team of crackerjack technicians began work on what, in 1995, would become the Neuticles©™ product line. Through a procedure called Canine Testicular Implantation (CTI), loving (and very rich) dog owners can have their best friend’s sac refilled with solid-silicone fake huevos “replicating the animals (sic) testicle (sic) in size, shape, weight and feel.”
According to the website, Neuticles©™ come in four models, from NeuticlesOriginal, to NeuticlesUltraPLUS with Epididymis — each of which is “equally superior” (sic). Neuticles©™, of course, are crafted in the U.S.A. “under strict FDA requirements,” which, of course, is why Neuticles©™ are “firm yet soft and natural when implanted.”
Setting aside, for a moment, the idea thant Neuticles©™ are about as useful to your dog as replacing an amputated foot with an Argyle sock, your intrepid reporter phoned the Neuticles©™ hotline for some answers but instead was forced to leave a message; EW also attempted to track down Neuticles©™ inventor Gregg A. Miller in Missouri, to no avail.
So we called up Eugene-based veterinary assistant Bill Barnett, of Animal Health Associates on Willamette, and asked him about the popularity of Neuticles©™ — given that they really exist.
“They are for real,” Barnett confirmed, though he immediately added that you’d be hard-pressed to find any Neuticles©™ swinging around this part of the country. “Maybe in New York, Chicago,” he said.
“It’s not practical in real life,” Barnett said of Neuticles©™, which run anywhere from $94 (a nut) to a whopping $329 (a nut) and up. “They’re a big joke,” he added, noting that he was working at a vet’s in Chicago when Neuticles©™ appeared on the scene.
“When it first came out, we all had a big laugh,” Barnett recalls. “We had no takers.”
But it’s difficult to put a price on assuaging your guilt about putting Snoopy’s droopies on the chopping block of good intentions. As the Neuticles©™ site says: “We feel the removal of a God given (sic) body part — leaving a male pet looking unwhole after the traditional form of neutering is not only unethical but unnatural. With Neuticles©™ it’s like nothing ever changed.”
That’s what they used to tell lobotomy candidates, too.
Still interested? You can have all your Neuticles©™ questions answered (including “Can Neuticles©™ be implanted in people?”) at www.neuticles.com
A Note From the Publisher
Dear Readers,
The last two years have been some of the hardest in Eugene Weekly’s 43 years. There were moments when keeping the paper alive felt uncertain. And yet, here we are — still publishing, still investigating, still showing up every week.
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Thank you for standing with us!
Publisher
Eugene Weekly
P.S. If you’d like to talk about supporting EW, I’d love to hear from you!
jody@eugeneweekly.com
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