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Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, executive vice president at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for Jewish learning and community building based in New York City. You can check us out and learn more at hadar.org. We're going to do a question today about a topic that I think neither of us have first-hand experience with, because it's a topic about pets.

I think we've covered this previously on this show, but I grew up with no pets at all. I think that's right for you also? Yep. Okay, so the questioner says, "I was surprised to hear recently that Jews are not allowed to neuter pets. Is that true? What is that about? Where does it come from? And are there ways of getting around it given that most people I know have pets that aren't able to reproduce?"

Rav Eitan: The old "most people I know".

Rav Avi: So this is a like "Hey, I never heard this" and also they seem to be presumably maybe they know a lot of Jews, they're like, "Hey, I know a lot of Jews who do have neutered pets." So what's the deal here? Is this the case that Jews are not allowed to neuter pets and where does it come from?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, it's true, it's a thing. We'll get to some of the finer points here.

Rav Avi: Does it have like a Hebrew name, concept of like, you know, what when people refer to this?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, the terminology used later on is serus, which means to neuter, really to neuter or to spay. Neuter used for the male, spay for the female, generally in English.
But it is the same word like a saris is a eunuch, right? Someone who has been castrated. So that is what the language eventually becomes and the origin of the prohibition is in the Torah.

Rav Avi: Okay, old school.

Rav Eitan: You might be surprised. You might just blow past this verse. It's in Vayikra chapter twenty-two and there's a verse there which I'll read it to you in the original actually because it has, I don't know if lyrical is what we'd say about this topic, but it has a striking sound. U'mauach v'chatut v'natuk v'charut lo takrivu l'hashem uv'artzechem lo ta'asu. So those first four words, mauach, chatut, natuk, charut are basically different ways of having mutilation or severing of, in this case, the male sexual organ of an animal.

And the context here is: don't offer an animal like that as a sacrifice. You can't offer any animal that has had its testes bruised, severed, etc. And this seems to fit in the larger context which that chapter talks about about not offering animals, not having priests who have certain kinds of deformities or, you know, injuries that they've sustained that make them in this case unfit to be offered as a gift to God on the altar.

Rav Avi: So even before you would get to the idea of the sacrifice part, it sounds like this is a practice, neutering animals, that is very, very ancient, right? Otherwise you wouldn't need a rule against it.

Rav Eitan: Yes, neutering animals is definitely a fundamental part of most animal husbandry as practiced in the world.
The word ox, right, means a bull that has had been castrated. That is what oxen mean, it's not just another word for it. And the reason there's a whole word for an ox is because bulls are like impossible to deal with, they're violent and then when it's, you know, they see a female they'll immediately go after them. It's only actually by neutering a bull into an ox that you can usually make it a more useful, predictable tool for plowing, for pulling things and all that stuff.

Rav Avi: So it's really a domestication tool, meaning I was thinking, like, well, we don't think of the ox in that narrative as a pet, but there is something actually very similar about pets and animals that you are trying to domesticate and keep them from being wild.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so you are one hundred percent correct, this is a part of the world. From the first part of the verse here it sounds like, and that's a perfectly fine part of the world, it just can't be a sacrifice. But the end of the verse...

uv'artzachem lo ta'asu, and in your land don't do this, is understood by the rabbinic tradition to say, hey, you can't offer this as a sacrifice, and just so we're clear, I don't want you doing it in the first place. Right? This is a practice that is not just neutral, but non-ideal for sacrifice. It's actually non-ideal for sacrifice as a subset of: we disapprove of this practice.

Rav Avi: Of its being forbidden. Yeah, so this is pretty clear and pretty early, right? To say, like, it's in the Torah.

Rav Eitan: Pretty clear and pretty early, but now we gotta flesh out the scope a little.

Rav Avi: It's actually, this is a short episode.

Rav Eitan: Let's keep in mind, the animals that are going to be offered on the altar that are in this category are a behemah, a behemat tehorah for that matter, a pure, a kosher animal.
So, sure, this would tell you that you are not allowed to castrate a bull or a goat, right, or a ram, things of that sort. But the Sifra, the Midrashic commentary on this verse, says, well, all I can get from this is that kind of animal. How do I know that wild animals like a deer, okay, yeah, or birds for that matter, who right also can be castrated, but are clearly not the context of the verse here in Vayikra 22? How do we know that they're included, which the Midrash assumes they are? And the answer is, well, it says uv'artzachem, in your land don't do this, implying sort of any male animal roaming around your land is subject to this. And then lest you say, oh, maybe it only applies in the land of Israel, but maybe in the diaspora you're allowed to do it? No, no, no, the tenor of the verse, says the Sifra, is uv'artzachem- lo ta'asu, and in your land don't do this, and it ends on "don't do this."

Rav Avi: Meaning it's like, it's not "don't do this in your land," it's "in your land don't do this." Exactly.

Rav Eitan: And so the emphasis is: you're in your land, so that's why I'm saying in the land. The land just means in contrast to the temple. But the emphasis is: don't do this. This is a terrible thing to do.
That's what it seems to be. bechol makom she'atem, wherever you find yourselves. Okay? Now, as far as what's going on here, the verse doesn't play it out, the Midrash doesn't play it out. I don't think you have to be overly speculative to say it's somehow in line, and any number of commentators will say this.
It's in line with the notion that, well, you know, what does God say to the animals, first the birds and other things on day five of creation? p'ru u'rvu, be fruitful, multiply, fill up the land. These are reproducing beings, they were given this gift, it's not for you to take it away from them.

Rav Avi: So you think it's about reproduction and not stopping reproduction as opposed to, like in the context of the sacrifice sentence, you might think of it as it's about injury. Don't injure animals, and this is one subset of injury. That's very different than saying animals must reproduce and one subset of them needing to reproduce is that you can't castrate them.

Rav Eitan: Right, so I think the thing that leads people towards the more reproductively focused thing is why is the verse talking about the reproductive organs, right? If the verse was focused on don't cause any kind of blemish to any animal, it should have said that more generally. But it seems to be focusing in on if that part of the body has been cut, disabled, etc., you have a problem. So, I think when you just sort of start in that opening part of the verse and the Sifra, that Midrash Halacha, somewhere in there seems from that you would just get to yeah, you can't neuter or spay animals.

One qualification on that: we still are plausibly only talking here about animals that are permitted to eat. That is to say, first of all, the context of the verse was sacrificial, sacrifice, and even when we move out to the category of chayah, something like a deer or something like that in the Midrash, we're not yet at the level of a pig or a dog or a cat. How do you know, you know, and if I almost want to think about it like What do I care if the pigs don't reproduce? What do I care if the dogs don't reproduce? If these are animals that I consider to be things, well, I don't eat, they're not part of my field of vision. Yeah, maybe you could say it shouldn't apply there.

For that, you have to go, there's a separate discussion in the Talmud where Ben Zoma is asked in tractate Chagigah, someone had the same idea, hey, can I neuter a dog? Specifically a dog? Specifically a dog.

Rav Avi: Okay, that's pretty clear.

Rav Eitan: Can I neuter a dog? And he answers and says no, the verse said u-ve-artzechem lo ta'asu kol she-be-artzechem lo ta'asu, in your land don't do this, anything that's roaming around.

Rav Avi: He's like, and does your dog walk on the land?

Rav Eitan: You've got your answer, right? It does and therefore you can't do it. Okay, so you combine that midrash and that Ben Zoma piece, you essentially have a statement that you're not allowed to spay or neuter animals. There's one more hitch, one more hitch on the scope. The Sifra continues to ask, does this apply without respect to gender? In other words, the animals we were talking about in the verse were male animals offered up for sacrifice and seems to be talking about the testes specifically. How do we know that you also can't spay a female animal? And the answer is well the end of the verse says ki moshchatam bahem mum bam, there is a corruption or a mutilation in the body as a result of doing this and that applies equally to a female as to a male animal.

But at that moment Rabbi Yehuda jumps in and says no female animals are not covered by this prohibition. Doesn't explain why.

Rav Avi: Cause if because if we had to you know our sort of hypothesis was because animals need to reproduce like you're going to need both.

Rav Eitan: Right and so the first position the majority position here makes no distinction makes sense it's just kind of like you can't touch the reproductive organs of animals.

Rabbi Yehuda says no it is gendered. He may just be reading the verse and saying well the animals we had been talking about were male and I don't buy this postscript at the end is changing that. There might be a different kind of theory going on here in terms of the balance between male and female animals certainly traditionally when you're dealing with when you're dealing with animal husbandry you generally have one bull that's going to impregnate a hundred cows right and in that sense obviously the incentives can go different ways that way but without getting too deeply into it there may be some background there also of Rabbi Yehuda saying this is not a balanced picture in the world and it's not a balanced picture on the prohibition. That said while the language there is Rabbi Yehuda says oh female animals aren't covered by this it's not one hundred percent clear what that means.

Does it mean it's just permitted or as the language of a parallel text in the Tosefta indicates it might just be you're not subject to punishment if you do it like the Rambam says.

Rav Avi: Like don't do it but it's not as bad?

Rav Eitan: Yeah the Rambam thinks it means it's rabbinically forbidden like it's not forbidden by the Torah. The Taz goes further and he says no what that means is there's no prohibition there's just a prohibition of pain of tza'ar ba'alei chayim like you couldn't do this to a female animal because it would hurt it but opens up the possibility we'll get to this later like oh if you were doing it with anesthetic or something the Taz might think it doesn't matter. But the Vilna Gaon and others are like no no it's biblically forbidden even for Rabbi Yehuda he just thinks there's no punishment attached.

Okay but it introduces an axis which will be relevant later maybe gender matters. Okay so that kind of gives us I think the background here on what's covered and as you said it's pretty old.

Rav Avi: Yeah and then and then give us a sense of like through so throughout Jewish history this is something that meaning where I feel like oh that's funny now I've never heard of it like throughout Jewish history is this something that was a given that it was like oh well you know how Jewish those Jewish farmers they don't you know do this to their animals.

Rav Eitan: Great so this is I think a perfect segue into the there's a couple Talmudic passages that give us So Rabbi Yochanan in the Talmud, he's clearly dealing with a rooster that you want to neuter.

Rav Avi: Because it's waking him up in the morning?

Rav Eitan: Who knows, it's wreaking havoc in one way or another. And he knows you can't neuter the rooster because that's covered by what we said. But he says here's what you can do.

You can cut off its comb on the top of its head. I know, kind of sad. Seems like Rabbi Yochanan's actually okay with neutering an animal if you do it somehow indirectly. Rav Ashi hears this thing of Rabbi Yochanan, basically cannot imagine that Rabbi Yochanan is actually allowing even indirect sterilization of the rooster.

So unimaginable. He says that's not what happens with the rooster. What happens with the rooster when you cut off its comb, it becomes so depressed
that it no longer wants to have sex with the hens.
You haven't actually sterilized it, like its equipment still works, but you will effectively take away its honor, as it were. All right, it's kind of sad, right? But this is a very complicated relationship.

Rav Avi: Therefore you can do it or you can't do it?

Rav Eitan: So Rav Ashi thinks you can do it, but it's not actually a technique of sterilization. It essentially pushes the rooster to abstinence or takes away his sexual drive.
Yeah. So this would be the equivalent of you just

Rav Avi: have a depressed rooster.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, somehow you sort of chemically alter someone where it doesn't actually change the functioning of the organs of the animal, but it affects their disposition. What's important about that little text is it just indicates the only way they were even imagining a Jew taking action to neuter an animal was potentially in this indirect way and even that basically kind of gets shot down.

So that's going to bring in who you can imagine becomes the Jew's best friend in a situation like this, the non-Jew. Oh, interesting. The same way there's a rich tradition in the context of Shabbat of figuring out are there ways non-Jews can do this for Jews on Shabbat, and we've talked about this in other episodes in the past. One of the questions will be, well, how does this prohibition interact with people who are not Jewish?

Rav Avi: This is a little bit surprising to me actually because again, if we're starting from a place of this is about being pro-procreation, it shouldn't matter who the vet is, right? This should be a matter of like, this is the way we want the world to be, as opposed to something that has to do actually with the Jewish person.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. So Rabbi Hidka, who was one of the Tannaim, the age of the Mishnah, not super well attested.

Rav Avi: A relatively quiet guy.

Rav Eitan: Yes, but he's out there.

I know you're familiar with the seven Noahide laws, these basic codes of civilization that everyone's supposed to abide by. Well, he thought there were eight.

Rav Avi: Yeah, wow.

Rav Eitan: And number eight

Rav Avi: was don't neuter your pet.

That's right. Ooh, this is, this is big, guys.

Rav Eitan: That's one piece of data, all right, which is maybe gentiles actually are covered by this law, right, if you follow Rabbi Hidka.

Rav Avi: This is a good time to take a quick break.

We'll be right back with more Responsa Radio, but before that, I wanted to let you know about an upcoming program at Hadar that you might love, especially if you listen to podcasts on Halakha. Of course, I'm talking about Hadar's Halakha intensive on May 17th through 20th, 2026, at Yeshivat Hadar in New York City. The Halakha intensive is a week of incredible high-level learning of Jewish law designed for learners with experience studying Halakhic texts. This year, we're learning about Yom Tov Sheni, the second day of festivals celebrated outside the land of Israel.

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Rav Eitan: But here's another one that's really interesting and it sort of is fundamentally a story.

So I mentioned Shabbat before. Though there are ways in which non-Jews are deployed to get around more marginal Shabbat restrictions, the basic rule that everyone agrees is, if you have a core violation of Shabbat, you cannot ask a non-Jew to do that for. You can't say, I would love to sit down and weave myself a sweater today. Oh, here's my non-Jewish friend, can you just weave me a sweater today and thereby get around it? Everyone agrees you cannot do that in the rabbinic system.

Okay? But the question that comes up in the Talmud is, but maybe that's unique to Shabbat. What if other prohibitions in the world you are allowed to ask a non-Jew to get around them? So one of the questions that they ask for instance is you say to your Gentile friend, can you muzzle my ox and then have it work the field for me which you're not allowed to do when an ox is working the field or bull is working the field—we'll get to the ox in a minute—you're supposed to allow them to eat, right? It's cruel to the animals. So can you say to someone, oh god, it's such a pain in the neck to muzzle the animal. I can't do it.

Can you do it for me? But the other way they try to resolve this is the following story. There are Jews who have bulls and there are Gentile clearly friends of theirs who quote unquote steal these bulls, castrate them and then return them.

Rav Avi: This is sort of like selling your chametz.

Rav Eitan: Yes, but there's no sale, right?

Rav Avi: Because it wasn't yours and you didn't ask them to do it.

Rav Eitan: They sneak off with it, they clearly know you want to do it but there's not a sale in this case. They just take it, do the thing, give it back. Who knows what the wink wink, quid pro quo, who knows what that is? But Shmuel's father gets wind of this in this story and says these now oxen must be sold and the Jews cannot keep them. It's like a punishment, it's like a fine.

Rav Avi: So he's like this workaround is not okay.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, this makes it very clear according to him you definitely can't ask the non-Jew to do it even with a wink wink he did it for you. But then Rav Pappa comes along and says no no you can't prove anything from that story.

That story just assumes a holding like Rabbi Hidka. It assumes that Gentiles are forbidden to castrate their own animals and therefore Shmuel's father disapproved of this because these Jews were essentially enabling the Gentiles to sin.

Rav Avi: So he thought of that in the Noahide law category, like they also aren't allowed to do it and you can't have them, that would be like I let them steal for me, I didn't murder you, I hired a hitman, be like that's not okay.

Rav Eitan: Exactly, exact exact correspondence.

And Rav Pappa then the implication is yeah that story's in that frame of reference, we don't have that frame of reference, we don't hold like Rabbi Hidka, we assume Gentiles are allowed to do this and therefore if you were in our frame of reference maybe you could ask them. Rav Pappa just in classic form is saying you thought you could answer your question, I'm telling you you didn't resolve it, it's left open. The problem is the Talmud doesn't end there, that's not the end of the story, Rav Pappa seems to deflect it but then a whole bunch of other Amoraim in that story, Talmudic sages, seem like they take it for granted that you cannot ask the Gentile to do it or that if it happens you gotta return the animal. So the question is what happens with that end of story? Like what's the conclusion of that Talmudic passage? And here there's pretty much a split that comes out as follows: one medieval sage, the Raavad, says this is an unresolved Talmudic passage, we don't know the answer, didn't give us a clear answer and since the only level of prohibition we could be talking about here is rabbinic, meaning when you have a biblical prohibition it's forbidden for you to do it, to ask a Gentile to do it would be a rabbinic safeguard, he says so when you have an unresolved passage around a rabbinic question you're lenient and so the Raavad basically thinks you can ask a Gentile to neuter your pets for you.

Pretty much every other reader of the sugya. Yeah, the Rambam, the Rosh, tons of other people, they assume no, what do you mean? The end of the sugya ended with all these other sages who thought it was forbidden. It's forbidden. You have no, you have no movement there.

So the consensus definitely is strongly on the side of you can't just say, well, I'm going to find a non-Jewish vet and go ahead and solve this problem. And because that is the case, generally, yeah, the sort of simple black and white ruling that you would get to from analyzing this is, well, maybe the Ra'avad would say you could ask a non-Jew to do this, but everyone else lines up on the other side and you can't do it yourself. So therefore you really can't neuter pets. Even before modern population control questions, sometimes this feels important.

As we see, the people agreeing to have their oxen, their bulls stolen to be returned as oxen, there have been incentives to make this happen along the way.

Rav Avi: And I'm so curious like, what in, in general is the practice in Israel today for pets? I mean, I don't know if pets are as common in Israel in general as they are here, but there certainly are people who have pets and keep animals. Is there like a commonly accepted practice one way or another?

Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I don't know the answer in terms of actual statistics on what people do, but I can give us a little bit of a sense of at least what some contemporary poskim like Rav Eliezer Melamed and other people will say about this.
There's a couple angles here that people try to push on. Remember we talked briefly with the rooster about direct or indirect action, right?

Rav Avi: I tried to block that out, but now you're bringing it up again.

Rav Eitan: Sorry, sorry to be unpleasant. You know, the indirect action idea we said basically dies, that is to say, it's Rav Ashi says, no, no, no, that's not what he meant, it was just depressing the rooster.

But the Rama in the Shulchan Aruch does just sort of say when he codifies that case, he says you're allowed to remove the comb of the rooster even though it will be sterilized by this. That's the way he says it. Not even though it won't feel, you know, it'll be depressed, because you're not taking direct action against the sex organs. That sounds like it keeps alive some degree of indirect involvement.

Now, later people sort of check him against the Gemara and they're like, how could that be? That doesn't make any sense.

Rav Avi: It also really pulls you away from the outcome-based. It's like, this isn't a law about the outcome. This is a law about this organ.

Rav Eitan: That's right, that's right, which Rabbi Yochanan, the plain sense of Rabbi Yochanan was that. So you do have people like Rav Unterman suggested, could you get around this problem by, let's say, cutting off the blood supply to the area of the sex organ rather than castrating? Could you do something to some other part of the body that will result in this? But that is still distancing you, exactly as you said. It's like focused on the part of the body as opposed to the outcome. That is out there.

It doesn't necessarily get picked up as the main solution. The main thing that people explore as the solution is the use of the gentile as a workaround. And here's where it comes up. Even if you read the Talmudic passage as saying, well, you can't just ask the gentile to sterilize your animal, yeah, but what if I sell the gentile my animal such that it's his animal? The first place this actually comes up is a little more passively, the Ritzba, who's one of the authors of the Tosafot.

He says, first of all, we hold that gentiles are allowed to neuter their animals. We don't follow Rabbi Hidka. They're not covered by this. So then it's perfectly fine to have a partnership with a gentile where you both own a bull.

Because actually, a lot of times people didn't need to own their own bull. And then the gentile will be like, hey, I'm neutering this bull. It's going to be a lot better for my work. And you can say, great, no objection here.

The Beit Yosef, when he hears this, says, I don't understand. Wasn't there an entire Talmudic passage that said when they quote-unquote steal your animal and you get it back and you get the benefit, you have to sell it? So isn't this basically the same thing where he's doing something but you're getting the benefit? And his answer is no. No, you know what’s different here than the Talmudic case? He actually owns it. When you say, hey, can you do this for me, it’s a full-on subterfuge.

Yeah. When you actually sell something or someone else has a stake, well, then it’s kind of their thing, right?

Rav Avi: So now we really are in chametz selling territory.

Rav Eitan: Now we are. Exactly right. Now we’re really, we’re really there. And later authorities basically they jump on that and they build on the sale mode and they say any sale is good enough, even though that original case is a genuine partnership, it’s not a fiction, right? They’re like, this sale is also fine, but they recommend one other thing. They say it’s even better if you build in an extra step where the Gentile you sell it to is not the one who’s actually doing the neutering. There is a principle called amirah l’amirah, telling a non-Jew to tell another non-Jew to do something.

Rav Avi: Is even less bad?

Rav Eitan: It’s even less bad.

Rav Avi: That’s interesting.

Rav Eitan: And the notion of lifnei iver, even if you were to follow Rabbi Hidka’s view where we say that they shouldn’t be neutering their own animals and you shouldn’t enable that, there’s a general principle that we don’t worry about lifnei d’lifnei, a two-step process of being an accomplice.

Rav Avi: You think it’s like about deniability?

Rav Eitan: That I think is a great question.
This is always I think with cases like this. Do we just think there’s sort of game-playing and we’re getting around the law and we don’t really care about it? Or the way I prefer to view it is, in a way this is the Ravad’s position that we heard earlier, which is no, you’re allowed to ask them to do that, sort of sneaking in the back door. Which is to say formally we said we don’t follow the Ravad. In reality it seems like as long as you structure the deal right, we are allowing you to do that.

Rav Avi: It sounds silly or semantic, but also I could see it feeling like there would be a difference between I sold my pet to the vet who did the procedure and I sold my pet to my friend, my friend took the pet to the vet, got the procedure done, brought it back, I bought the pet back from my friend. Like that does feel a little bit different. I’m curious, I always bring up, I know I have, I don’t want to retread too much, but I know every time we have a case of halakhah on this show where we’re talking about non-Jews where I want to ask the question of like, you know, oh, is this bad because we’re like quote-unquote using non-Jews in order to make our religion function? And I know there are people who have an instinct which is like, well, we shouldn’t build a religion wherein we need to rely on other people to do things because that’s using them in a derogatory way versus like, yeah, we should have a religion that requires us to be in close community with non-Jews. Like you can’t function if you totally shut yourself off, and a rule like this pushes you in the direct, it pushes you into community.

Like you can’t sell it to your non-Jewish business partner if you don’t have a non-Jewish business partner, so you need a non-Jewish business partner. It like pushes you out into the world. I’m curious if any of the poskim that, you know, say anything about how this plays out on that.

Rav Eitan: Barukh she-kivanta to the main person that I know who has said that is my teacher Rav David Bigman who says what if, you know, the laws around Shabbat show that we Jews need non-Jews in order to observe Shabbat, right? Funny thing for someone who’s a Zionist living in Israel really committed to like majority Jewish society there, which he is, but he was also committed to the idea that there’s not necessarily some ideal society that doesn’t have non-Jews, right? That maybe there’s some partnership.

Rav Avi: And that we’re supposed to be in community with them in some way.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Now we do still come back to your question earlier of but is this mitzvah really important or isn’t it for setting the tone of society or defining it? And I do think like at the end of the day if you’re going to use any of these workarounds, you are sort of committing to the notion that well, I don’t think the sterilization thing is that bad as an outcome, right? But here’s where I want to add one last piece. So that piece that we just alighted on, that’s the standard way people will guide you when there is a great need to do this.

The Arukh HaShulchan, like one of the great poskim, he just says, yep, you sell it to a non-Jew, the non-Jew does the sterilization, ideally there’s one step removed. How does that play out? Yes, you gave us one example. Sell the pet to the scheduling assistant in the office, and then that person gives it to the vet who does it. And then you pay for the service essentially by buying it back.

What I want to add is this, I think this probably captures a little more how people are thinking about this, which is if tza'ar ba'alei chayim is on the table, okay? If pain for an animal is on the table, well in general we allow you to ask non-Jews to do things that are forbidden even in the context of Shabbat because of tza'ar ba'alei chayim. That is to say if an animal is suffering in order to help the animal suffer less, even if you can't necessarily violate Shabbat, like we only violate Shabbat to preserve human life, but you are allowed to ask someone who's not Jewish to violate Shabbat for an animal. If that's the case, then there's already basically a sort of higher, you've got a much lower bar and a higher sense of purpose when there's a claim that the animal's going to suffer if you don't take this step. Now here I think the argument, I'm a little bit torn about it because I don't want to lose the sort of, there's a claim about the inviolability of the animal's body here that I really don't want to trample on.

But the claim made, as you say, by animal lovers and animal welfare organizations is: the animal population will suffer if you do not step in and spay and neuter. And certainly at the general level like we need a social policy. At that point, I don't think it's such an over-the-top stretch to say, well, to imagine that the way you negotiate that is to say, look, there are actually two competing values here. One is God created the world with reproducing animals, that is an incredible gift, it's actually a way in which the entire animal kingdom in a certain way participates in an ongoing way in creation.

There are blessings in the opening chapters of Bereshit that we do not want to marginalize or minimize. And what that means is we don't neuter and spay animals. And we play that out by the Jew's direct involvement. But we are also looking at the larger picture, we're seeing suffering that results from overpopulation and all of this, and we actually do believe the good outcome would be if these animals were sterilized.

And that's where our non-Jewish partners in the world, right to use your language from before, play a really important role in that balance of maintaining creation. And then maybe this is less a workaround and more a sense of a partnership of, yeah, the way Jews are meant to navigate this is the same way, right, Kohanim don't go to a funeral of relatives that are not close to them even as everyone else in the community of course does. And there's this sort of balance of we need some people guarding the sort of culture of life piece, we need some people attending to the dignity of the dead. That may be a way of understanding some of these poskim.

The non-Jewish vet in this case or sterilizer or the people who are on the staff of the government working on this, they're playing an important function, but Jews are also playing an important function going all the way back to that verse in Vayikra that actually interfering in this way with the vitality, the life-producing capacity of animals is something we really try to honor and not trample on.

Rav Avi: I think it's helpful to pull back and ask some of those bigger-picture questions of what does a law like this say about our understanding not just of halakhah or of Jews, but actually about creation, about the world, about how we're meant to interact with animals, with non-Jews. There are so many different things that we can learn about a possible worldview that we can extrapolate from such a particular law that could sound very narrow. I just sort of want to end by saying I feel like I've tried to bring some levity to this episode, but I do want to end actually by sort of maybe leaning into the gravity of it also and just acknowledge that for people who are pet owners.

For people who do have animals in your lives that you're very close to, this question could feel actually very heavy and very significant and I just sort of want to acknowledge that. The question of how you're taking care of your animals and who's doing that care and the idea of like, you know, oh, sell your pet could sound to some people like, you know, just sell your child to a friend and buy your child back. So I just want to sort of end with this note of saying this is again, there is halakha for trivial questions and there is halakha for serious questions and we're not afraid to tackle the questions in either direction. So thank you.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, thanks as always for talking it through.

Rav Avi: Have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show? Email us at [email protected]. Responsa Radio is a project of the Hadar Institute. Thanks to Chana Kupetz and Jeremy Tabick for producing this podcast and to David Khabinsky for recording and editing this episode.

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