Comentario sobre Levítico 22:24

ומעוך וכתות ונתוק וכרות are forbidden as sacrifices whether the mutilation be in the testicles or the membrum.

ומעוך וכתות, after the Torah spoke about the kind of physical blemishes which are of ritual consequence only in connection with sacrificial animals, and which must under no circumstances be caused to such an animal once it has been sanctified, the Torah turns to the kind of internal blemishes which one must not cause even to animals which have never been sanctified, are totally secular in their use.

ובארצכם לא תעשו, “and in your land you shall not do so.” Seeing the Torah had mentioned such defects as damage to the reproductive organs earlier in our verse, the Torah adds that it is forbidden to castrate animals in the land of Israel even if such animals were not intended as offerings. Even animals which are not fit for consumption by Jews must not be castrated. Contrary to the first impression that the word בארצכם, “in your land,” suggests that only in the land of Israel is it forbidden to castrate animals, this is misleading, and castrating G’d’s creatures is forbidden everywhere. The only reason the Torah wrote that word was to emphasize that even in our land where many of these animals cannot serve the general population as food seeing the animals in question are ritually impure, we must still not castrate such animals as a means of keeping down their numbers.
It is also possible that the use by the Torah of the word תעשו here points out that castrating an animal is equivalent to “undoing it;” G’d made it, we undo it but allow it to live at the same time preventing it from procreating. We find a similar use of the word לעשות in Kohelet 4,17 where Solomon speaks about כי אינם יודעים לעשות רע, “for they do not know that they are to destroy the evil and remove it.” At first glance we would have translated the verse as “they do not know how to do evil,” something that clearly does not fit the context of the verse.“ [Rashi does not have trouble with the ordinary meaning of the word לעשות in that verse. Ed.] Another verse in which the word עשה does not have the meaning which it usually has is Genesis 9,24 where the Torah speaks about אשר עשה לו בנו הקטן, normally translated as “which his younger son had done to him,” (Noach who had been naked in his tent). On the face of it, the son (Cham) had done nothing except tell his brothers that their father had uncovered himself while drunk. Nonetheless, our sages in Sanhedrin 70 use the word to mean that he had castrated his father. So we see that the word עשה, though normally meaning “did” in a constructive sense such as when G’d created the universe, may appear in exactly the opposite sense such as when depriving the animal of its regenerative potential by castrating it. This may also be the meaning of the word יעשנה in Proverbs 6,32, where Solomon writes משחית נפשו יעשנה, which at first glance looks as if he says that “he who destroys his life is really creating it.” Instead, the meaning is “if he wants to destroy himself let him do such a thing (commit adultery).” When someone destroys his soul, his life, he most certainly deprives (יעשנה) it of the opportunity to achieve its lofty aims..”