She's never unsupervised in the garden. Not since my first pup (a boy) went out and ate a load of plums that had fallen off the tree and had explosive diarrhea for days haha. I'm always out there with them if they're playing in the garden. Which is why they don't often play out there - if I'm gonna spend half an hour watching them, I might as well walk them.

I think the current advice is something to do with letting them mature, but they do recognise that it takes them out of advance training for 2 weeks. They've recently told us that they're looking in to all the research about spaying because they would prefer to do it when they're with puppy walkers and take 2 weeks out of that training (as with the boys who are castrated at 8 months) than out of their second stage of training. Basically, until they've looked at the evidence and made their mind up about their policy, just gotta keep going with the old one which is to spay after first season.