When La Jolla resident Candy Schuman founded the Spay and Neuter Action Project (SNAP) with several friends in 1991, it was from frustration with the never-ending flood of abandoned and unwanted animals cycling through the county’s three animal shelters.
She took on the mission of reducing pet overpopulation by making low-cost spaying and neutering services available to the community, regardless of ability to pay. Over the years she’s seen marked reductions in homeless animals.
“When I first started volunteering about 16 years ago, about 77 percent of all dogs and 82 percent of all cats entering the three county shelters were euthanized,” Schuman said. “Now, the ‘save rate’ is about 70 percent overall.”
Nationally, the “save rate” at public shelters is less than 50 percent, said Dawn Danielson, director of the county’s Department of Animal Services (DAS).
One key reason for the county’s success in cutting the number of animals euthanized is increased emphasis on spaying and neutering, or “fixing,” and the new cooperation among animal rescue and welfare organizations, Schuman said. She credited Danielson and animal services leaders at other county shelters with fostering that cooperation. San Diego is emerging as a national leader in the changing attitudes toward animal adoption and overpopulation, she added.
Schuman, SNAP’s volunteer executive director, organized the mostly volunteer nonprofit around three core principles: providing education to the community, especially through elementary school workshops, about the benefits of spaying and neutering animals and responsible pet parenthood; delivering convenient subsidized, low-cost services to low-income families; and involving local residents, particularly children, in delivering services to their neighbors.
“It’s not nuclear science. There is a solution. You just have to make information and services available,” Schuman said.
SNAP first started attacking pet overpopulation by offering people rebates for fixing their animals.
“We could see a big reduction at animal control,” she said. “It went from about 50,000 intakes a year to about 35,000. Then it plateaued. We decided we needed to do some outreach and research.”
SNAP’s board zeroed in on a mobile veterinary clinic that visits low-income neighborhoods to perform high-volume spay and neuter services in one day.
Board members raised more than $150,000 through private donations and grants before commissioning their bus, a state-of- the-art mobile veterinary clinic. They named it the Neuter Scooter and decorated it with paintings of real-life rescued animals. It’s unique in San Diego County.
SNAP started slowly at first, operating the bus two weekends a month with a single veterinarian, former La Jollan Dr. Kelli Barnett. Now, seven vets operate the Scooter four days a week.
Since acquiring the Neuter Scooter in August of 2003, SNAP has “fixed” more than 5,000 animals, mostly pets of low-income City Heights and Chula Vista families who otherwise could not afford veterinary services. SNAP also works with other organizations, including the Feral Cat Coalition, to fix nonsocial cats and adopt their kittens.
Thanks to the generosity of a Southern California couple who does animal rescue work in Los Angeles and Tijuana, SNAP is about to gain a second mobile clinic.
The new bus will arrive just in time for “kitten season,” which runs from April through September and overwhelms the county’s three public animal shelters with newborns. Numbers of kittens are on the rise, Danielson explained.
“The communities have got the word regarding spaying and neutering their dogs,” she said. “The dog numbers are steadily going down. What we’re seeing now is that our cat numbers are going up.
“During kitten season we’re getting about 33 kittens a day, 11 per shelter, seven days a week. That adds up to over 6,000 kittens, most under eight weeks [of age]. A lot of them have to be bottle-fed. We rely on foster homes and pet placement partners, which help raise them and bottle-feed them until eight weeks of age. There just aren’t enough resources to bottle-feed all those kittens.”
If foster homes aren’t available, underage kittens have to be euthanized.
“People just have to spay and neuter and do it early,” Danielson said. “You can spay and neuter as early as eight weeks. Most people don’t realize how young cats can come into heat, as early as four months.”
An unspayed cat can reproduce four times a year, resulting in as many as 420,000 cats over six years.
“One thing that’s important: we cannot adopt our way out of the situation. The only way to turn back the tide is to have people spay and neuter,” she said.
SNAP relies on generous donors to maintain its programs.
Schuman is grateful for the early grant the group received from La Jolla’s Price Charities, which enabled SNAP to start its City Heights clinics and provide subsidized rates of $5 to $15 to fix cats, dogs and rabbits. SNAP now also offers these services in Chula Vista. Both communities were chosen because they are high service areas for DAS yet offer few low-cost options for many working poor residents.
“We would like to do a clinic in OB or PB, but we need sponsorship to underwrite part of the costs,” Schuman said. “Price Charities believed in our mission and goal and that we’d accomplish it right off the bat.”
With the $40,000 grant, “we did about three times as many clinics and educational programs as we said we’d do. We really appreciate their faith in us,” she added.
To learn more about SNAP’s educational and spay and neuter programs, visit the Web site www.snap-sandiego.org, or call (619) 525-3047.