Slow road to a quick fix

It’s a truism in the world of animal rescue: Whenever talk turns to the homeless pet crisis and why people do not sterilize their animals, eyes roll. Smirks appear. It’s macho culture. It’s ranching culture. It’s ignorance and poverty and the misguided idea that you can make a quick buck selling puppies—attitudes that are impossibly difficult to turn around.

In fact, experts who have started successful spay/neuter programs around the country say that none of this really matters much. Make the operation accessible and available, and people will line up for it.

“Every place thinks their state is the worst, and has the most backward people,” says Jessica Johnson, legislative director for Animal Protection New Mexico, who worked on spay/neuter policy for the ASPCA. Peter Marsh, a national authority on the topic, agrees.

“That’s been true from one part of the country to another,” he says of lawmakers’ belief that a certain population in their state is too ignorant to take advantage of low-cost surgeries. “You could make it free and they still wouldn’t do it,” he quoted legislators in his home state of New Hampshire, where his group Solutions to Overpopulation of Pets spearheaded a publicly funded spay/ neuter program that slashed euthanasia rates by 75 percent in six years.

In state after state, Marsh says—and he has consulted to a lot of them over the last 20 years—the simple key to ending pet overpopulation and the 2.7 million animals killed each year because of it is to provide sterilization surgeries to low-income households. You don’t need to do more than point out why it makes sense. Make it affordable and accessible, and they will come, he says.

Research on attitudes toward spay/ neuter bear him out. A 2007 study from Louisiana and Mississippi—states with poverty rates comparable to New Mexico—found that the No. 1 reason people did not sterilize their pets is they just hadn’t gotten around to it. With dogs, many owners believe animals are happier and healthier if they are allowed to breed at least once, which alone helps account for the overpopulation crisis, since 80 percent of litters, according to Marsh, are born to a female that is later spayed.

New Mexico, which puts some 65,000 unwanted pets to death every year, also has shown no lack of demand for spay/ neuter services when they are offered. “The problem is accessibility,” says Elisabeth Jennings, executive director of Animal Protection New Mexico (APNM), which has been a strong advocate for spay/neuter legislation in the state. “Some counties don’t even have a vet who can do it.”

Recently the Santa Fe Humane Society started offering its mobile spay/neuter clinic for hire again to communities outside the county. Once word got out, the clinic got very busy, says Solange Del Arco, the shelter’s director of public clinics. Rescue groups or municipal governments usually underwrite some or all of the cost, and there is often a waiting list by the time the van arrives. In Portales, pet owners fund the service themselves, Del Arco said. The county has only three licensed veterinarians across its 2,455 square miles.

And Roosevelt County is hardly the most remote corner of the state. Guadalupe, Mora, Harding, and DeBaca counties have no licensed veterinarians or spay/neuter programs, leaving residents with little choice but to drive hundreds of miles to get the service. Cibola, Catron, Sierra, and Hidalgo counties each have a publicly funded spay/neuter program, but only one or two licensed vets in the whole county.

Shelters in these communities, not coincidentally, tend to have sky-high euthanasia rates. Portales tops the list, killing 85 percent of animals that come into its shelter. The connection between high euthanasia rates, shelters crowded with unwanted pets, and low rates of sterilization in the community are well established, but surprisingly disconnected in the public mind.

The Humane Society’s Gulf Coast Pet Research Project—the one that surveyed Louisiana and Mississippi pet owners after Hurricane Katrina—found that more than half of dog owners who had not sterilized their pet either wanted to keep their options open, hadn’t bothered yet, or didn’t see any need. The main reason people had sterilized their pet was to prevent more litters. Their motivations, in other words, were purely personal.

To convince these pet owners otherwise, the most effective messages pointed out the connection between high euthanasia rates and their own animal: “Your pet’s puppies and kittens could end up euthanized or suffering in the streets,” or “What happened to your dog’s puppies? Roughly 73,000 homeless pets are euthanized in Mississippi each year due to overpopulation.” Messages about the behavioral or health benefits of spay/ neuter, by contrast, had little impact. People get it, in other words—you just have to reach them.

Marsh has come up with a formula for using spay/neuter to basically end the pet overpopulation crisis, which involves offering a certain number of surgeries per Medicaid-receiving household per population. The key, he says, is to make the program accessible, affordable, and adequately funded for at least five years. “There are tools to do the job now, unlike 20 years ago,” he told us. “It takes funding, that’s all.”

Funding, of course, means politics, which is where much of the challenge lies for what is otherwise a quick fix. Programs have to be publicly funded, Marsh says, because communities usually cannot run successful programs on donations alone.

“Government has to be involved,” agrees Laura Bonar, program director at APNM—not least because it sends the message that managing pet overpopulation is a service the public demands. Only when lawmakers see that, she says, will they find a way to fund it on an annual basis, like other basic public services.

Indeed, the struggle at the Roundhouse is not over whether spay/neuter works or is needed, legislators say, but over competing priorities. Rep. Carl Trujillo (D-Santa Fe) this year successfully sponsored a bill, signed into law by Gov. Susana Martinez, that creates a new check-off box on state income tax returns that could raise anywhere from $30,000 to $200,000 a year for spay/neuter services, based on results from comparable tax refund boxes here and elsewhere.

The bill got widespread bipartisan support, in part because spay/neuter can potentially save communities millions of dollars spent each year to house, care for, adopt out, or euthanize unwanted pets. That’s why spay/neuter has gradually made progress on claiming some of the 8 percent of the state budget that remains, according to Trujillo, after education, health and human services, and public safety are accounted for.

The history of legislative support for spay/neuter goes back to only 2006, when $400,000 was budgeted for programs that helped sterilize 2,239 pets. Three years later, lawmakers increased the share of a special license plate that goes to the spay/neuter fund. To date, $30,000 raised from sales of that plate has been given to public spay/neuter programs around the state.

The license plate is only now beginning to be widely promoted, after the Legislature last year made the crucial move of allowing the state Animal Sheltering Board to disburse money without legislative approval, freeing it to hand out $70,000 of its budget to spay/neuter programs in 16 high-need communities in June. It was an empowering moment for the all-volunteer board, which has had a frustrating history of being tasked with identifying problems and solutions, only to see its hands tied on solving them.

The board was established by the Legislature in 2007. Its first task was to license euthanasia technicians; then it established minimum (non-mandatory) standards for animal shelters. Its third mission was to investigate the feasibility of a statewide spay/neuter program.

A study was commissioned at a cost of $10,000, says board chair Rena Distasio. Author Helga Schimkat surveyed spay/ neuter programs around the country, with input from Peter Marsh and his organization. Published in 2012, the study found that public animal shelters in New Mexico spend $27 million a year—$225 per animal—not including what is spent by private rescue groups.

Applying Marsh’s funding formula, the study estimated the cost of running a spay/ neuter program for low-income households in New Mexico at around $1 million a year. Even the worst-case estimate of $2.4 million is dwarfed by the $12 million already being spent to shelter animals that end up being euthanized, although that cost would not entirely disappear.

Marsh offers a comparison with Jacksonville, Fla., population 900,000 (largely Hispanic and African American), which had a euthanasia rate comparable to New Mexico’s. A government-funded spay/neuter voucher program launched in 2002 reversed the upward trend in shelter admissions within three months—a decline that continued to correlate directly with the number of animals sterilized by the program.

“Now Jacksonville is no-kill,” Marsh said, “with a 90 percent live-release rate for the last year and a half.” The cost of the program to the city of Jacksonville was $250,000 a year. But it is not even, or only, the potential cost savings that brought support for Trujillo’s spay/neuter bill from House Republicans this year, in a session marked by partisan gridlock. Rep. Gay Kernan (R-Hobbs), who helped fund a multimillion-dollar animal shelter in Hobbs—a town long synonymous with high kill rates—spoke in favor of the tax check-off box this year because her community supports it.

While she still has “hard questions” about the funding of spay/neuter, Kernan says, “it was something that we felt we needed to do, something our county commissioners wanted to do. People have to represent their constituents.” Other Republicans, including Sens. Steven Neville of Aztec and Carroll Leavell of Jal, also supported spay/neuter appropriations this session because of the challenges faced by shelters in their communities.

Nationwide, as cities and towns find the financial resources, the public increasingly demands improvements in animal welfare, though the change may seem frustratingly slow to advocates.

“It’s about changes in attitudes toward animals in general, which is generational,” says Jennings of APNM. Not long ago, people did not question the public cost of euthanasia, since animals were just gassed, drowned, or shot. But now that the public demands humane treatment, advocates have to drive home the point that it costs money, says the APNM’s Bonar.

“The beauty of a spay/neuter program is that it attacks both the lives lost and the cost,” says Marsh, a tireless evangelist for his approach. “Go back 20 years, and people said euthanasia was unfortunate but unavoidable. We know now that’s not true.

“It can be done from one end of the country to another, and it will be done in New Mexico too,” he said of eliminating the routine killing of unwanted pets. “Get organized, work hard enough, and it will happen.”

Photos taken at a mobile spay/neuter clinic visit to Vaughn, courtesy of Santa Fe Animal Shelter.