158. Spay, Neuter, Repeat: Solving San Antonio's Stray Problem

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Welcome to Big City, Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard. Our guests this morning are two people doing really important work in our city, working to make sure San Antonio's population of dogs and cats enjoy safe and healthy lives as pets. That's a big job in a city with a terrible stray animal population, a 20% euthanasia rate of animals picked up by the city's animal services department,, and too many owners who allow their pets to roam freely in inner-city neighborhoods and do not avail themselves of spay and neuter networks. Kathy Rosenthal is a syndicated writer of the My Pet World column. I was fortunate to meet Kathy in 2002 when I was executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News, and she began to write the Animal Matters column for the newspaper, which she still writes today, 23 years later. I was introduced to Kathy by our other guest, Vanessa Rishi-Saeed, who is the chairwoman of the San Antonio Spay/Neuter Network. We're here to talk about the opportunity for San Antonio pet owners to access the kind of affordable veterinary care that will prevent unwanted puppies and kittens added to the persistent stray animal population in the city. If Vanessa has the kind of success in her present work that she has had in her own long professional and athletic career, San Antonio will be the real winner. She is a former executive at Visit San Antonio, but more importantly, she's a 2010 inductee into the San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame. I think she was one of the youngest members in the hall when she was voted in 16 years ago. She led Churchill High School to its first ever state swimming championship, and she was a 4-time All-American at the University of Texas at Austin when the Longhorns won 4 straight NCAA team championships in the 1980s. Vanessa went on to become the U.S. national champion in modern pentathlon in 1993 and 1994, and that was back when the Olympic sports headquarters were located right here in San Antonio. You represented the USA at the World Championships in'91, '93, and '94, won the swimming event each year, and posted the fastest run-swim combinations in the world. And you were a two-time individual gold medalist at the Pan American Championships and the U.S. Olympic Festival. Wow, that's a lot. And you've both always been animal lovers, which is why you're here today. So welcome to Big City Small Town. Thank you.

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Thank you. Where do we start? Kathy, maybe we'll start with you. You're writing nationally, you're hearing from people all over the country. Tell us how San Antonio compares to other cities in the state and beyond in terms of our animal population, the animal welfare ecosystem that's been built in the city, and just where we're at today. Okay. Well, I mean, when I moved here in 2001, that's when I learned that we were euthanizing animals by gas chamber, right? And we weren't doing that on the East Coast. Coast. So that was my first introduction into San Antonio. I realized at that time we were very far behind. I went to work for the San Antonio Humane Society. The story broke about what the ACS was at that time euthanizing 50,000 animals a year. That was a series of stories in Express News at the time that shocked all of us, I think. It did. And the city just sort of erupted, right? People suddenly thought, we're not going to let this happen. Over the last 20 years, I've seen so many changes happen in San Antonio, and those Those changes are right along with a lot of the major cities in the US. In fact, something that a lot of people don't know, initially when that happened, the San Antonio Area Foundation stepped up and made a commitment for like the next 10 years to, um, put money into spay/neuter and to awareness, bilingual materials and all that. They got asked, and I went with them, to go to Dallas to help them introduce things like that. Texas, I think, was just a little further behind back then. Than a lot of other cities. Today, I say they're comparable. I would say they're slightly above average. There's always more that can be done. There is, I think the biggest challenge these days is that shelters 20, 30 years ago, they took animals in and they euthanized them and they didn't do much else. I think we learned from that story that, that when animals are picked up, there are other things that we can do. And over the years, we've done things like create partners, right, with rescue groups, do transports to get animals from Texas up to Connecticut where there's not an overpopulation. The biggest thing right now is access to care. Trying to help pet owners who might be in underserved areas of town in certain zip codes where there's a veterinary desert and there's absolutely no care that they could— affordable care or free care that they can access.

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So I think San Antonio has, the last 20 years, It's been a long haul watching the changes that have needed to happen, but I think they're right in there with other large groups. I think right now we're starting to focus on access to care. That's sort of new. A lot of communities have gotten to that part already, so we're just transitioning into that. With Spay/Neuter Network, the, the clinic here in town, access to care is something that's important to us in terms of helping people I think we're getting there, but there's— the challenge has changed. It's gone from housing animals to how to keep animals from entering the shelter in the first place. Well, before we talk about spay/neuter services with Vanessa, give me just a little bit more history, because shortly after that series ran and the city learned about this, Cheryl Scully became our city manager. She came from Phoenix, brought a lot of new ideas and practices with us. With her and, um, we became a quote, no-kill city, or at least we aspire to be a no-kill city. What exactly does that mean? And did we achieve it or not? That's a really good question because no-kill, a lot of people hear those words and think it means no euthanasia. And that is not what it means. It means that every animal that's healthy that can be treated will, you will do everything in your power to get that animal out of the shelter alive, whether it's, it's called live release. And whether it's through adoptions, foster care, putting animals on a transport to get 'em to another shelter, uh, somewhere else in the country.

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So that's, and 10, about 9 to 10% of the animals oftentimes can't be cared for. Maybe there's aggression and you have to make decisions. ACS has achieved no-kill, but which is considered 91%. I think right now they're in the mid to high 80s. It's an ongoing challenge. I mean, you can achieve no-kill and then slide back and then achieve no-kill and slide back. That is a constant pattern for all animal shelters across the country. No one just sort of achieves it and they're there. But in order to achieve it, you have to have a multiple approach to programs, you know, foster care. And I will say foster care, I think the awareness of that story breaking in 2005 was that so many people heard about what was happening and they stepped up. And through the years, the foster care system for San Antonio, for all the animal groups, has grown a lot. Um, access to transports, getting animals to other shelters or working with rescue partners who come pull. You know, San Antonio Pets Alive!, they go in and they'll pull animals right from the euthanasia list to make sure that those animals will get cared for. Um, but they can't pull animals that are deemed too dangerous or too sick. ACS introduced, they have a really nice veterinary medical program now. They do spay-neuters there on cats, community cats, dogs and cats, owned pets. But they also have vets on staff now that can treat animals that might not have been treated 20 years ago because our mindset 20 years ago was so different. Vanessa, as I said in my introduction, you have one of the most interesting resumes around the city. How did you get drawn to the Spay/Neuter Network and what work do they do? What, What are they doing? Well, if I go back further, I was, uh, worked with San Tony Humane. I was on the board of directors back in the early 2000s. Um, transitioned out of that and Kathy mentioned the, the fostering. I did that grassroots fostering for the last 7 to 8 years and I was part of that whole, uh, picking up the pets, going to ACS, helping evaluate them, bringing them home, um, Driving them up north. I even did a transport one time. It wasn't— it was not easy, but we did it. And my last foster dog, I was enjoying listening to Kathy talk about that. My last foster, when I finally said, okay, I'm going to take a break, now lives in Montreal, Canada, living the high life.

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She's been in commercials. Her mom is a marketing executive for a furniture company. So, you know, and she was dumped in a parking lot, but I, and I picked her up. You know, in a parking lot one day. So, um, now transition to Spay/Neuter Network opened the clinic coming up on 3 years now, 2023, in San Antonio.

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It's located by the zoo. Um, it's a, it's a, uh, city building, ACS building, and they were seeking, um, a contractor and Spay/Neuter Network bid on that. Uh, we got it, opened it up about 3 years ago.

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Kathy, You know, the board was looking for someone in San Antonio to serve. And Kathy said, I know someone, I know someone who's passionate and has done it all and recommended me. And that's how I got involved on the board of directors. And what exactly does the network do? When you say network, this is obviously part of at least a statewide or maybe national organization. We are not national. We are statewide. It was founded in 2004 up in North Texas in a rural area called Crandall, Texas.

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Kaufman County, and there was a need. There was a need. There were animals being dumped out there and there was no vet nearby.

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So our founder, Bonnie Hill, started this initiative in that, in that area. Soon with her success, Dallas, the city of Dallas said, hey, could you help us?

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And did a contract with the city of Dallas. We have a contract with the city of Fort Worth. And then this opportunity came. So we, we're We are hugely successful in what we do. We stay in our lane. We work on the spays and neuters, keep 'em low cost, reach out to those people that are underserved, that maybe don't have access to it in other ways. The City of San Antonio saw that success and decided that we were gonna be the right partner for them. So if, uh, a member of our audience is listening and, um, they find veterinary services more than they can afford, uh, are you the network that they should be coming to? And how, how does that work? I believe they, that we are. We, they can go online.

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To our website, which is spayneuternet.org, or we have a phone number that they can call if they're not comfortable booking online.

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And they— You can give that number. I'll have to find that number off the top of my head. I know it. Okay, Kathy.

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972-472-3500. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. And they can call there and make an appointment. Now, the other thing that we do in San Antonio, which I think is is a game changer for those folks that may not have had access. A lot of folks can't get to the clinic, right? They have 2 jobs, 3 jobs. They raise their grandchildren at home. They don't drive. So we have, we started a transport program and we have a vehicle that on every, any given day is in a different part of the city and people make their reservations and they show up to that meeting point.

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And bring their pets. We check them in right there on site. We have a driver, he checks them in, he or she checks them in, puts them on, drives them to our clinic, gets their surgery and all the other services they may want, microchip, vaccinations, and then take, take them all back to the drop-off point at the end of the day. We've had people that are like so

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00 in the morning. They can't go and stand in line. So that is one of the things I'm most proud of is because it's definitely helping helping people overcome barriers to access. And talk about affordability a little bit. And I say that as a, um, our family, um, I think collectively, uh, has about 5 rescue animals. And, um, we've been stunned in the last few years by the rising costs of veterinary services, particularly as private equity is purchasing multiple, uh, veterinary practices that were traditionally family-owned or locally owned. And the costs had just soared. But you guys advertise yourselves as affordable. So what does that mean for somebody that's showing up at that, at that vehicle in one of the inner city neighborhoods and getting their dog spayed or neutered? Well, that's a great question because we, with the contract with the city, there are 27 zip codes. If a resident lives in those zip codes, they qualify for free services. And so that transport's going into those zip codes also. And our services are for city residents, residents of San Antonio, 'cause it's taxpayer funded through the city ACS. So for those folks, you know, they can access free services. The city gives us, you know, X number of services to provide, and then we will find grants and other resources to help if those run out. And then beyond that, if someone is not in one of those qualified zip codes, our range of surgeries, I think they start at $60 for a case cat, and even then we're working with the Feral Cat Coalition to get those lower for the community cats. And then it goes up to as high as $150 is the most surgery costs, and that's for about a 100-pound animal. I was on your website and it looked to me like if you have a dog that's 60 pounds or less, and I think most dogs are probably 60 pounds or less, you can, you can have that dog spayed or neutered for $100 or less.

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So that's pretty affordable. I will say when that clinic was first opening, I called around all the vets to see what the cost was gonna be for a female dog.

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And I didn't get any rates under $700. And I was told it would be a year before they could get to them. Wow.

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So it's not just underserved communities. Yeah. Middle-class people are struggling to pay. My son up in Dallas was told $1,000 to get his female dog spayed. And I sent him over to Spay/Neuter Network in Dallas. How big of a challenge is it that the veterinary community is so small compared to the medical physician community? And there's not that many veterinary colleges, universities. I think we have A&M and maybe Texas Tech in our state and that's it. Exactly.

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So do you have veterinarians on your staff? We actually, we have, we do. We have veterinarians on our staff. We have a veterinarian on our board of directors as well.

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We do have full-time, a couple of full-time vets, and then we have contract vets. One of the challenges, and Kathy, jump in at any time on this, but a challenge, some of these veterinarian students are coming out of school without a lot of practice doing the surgeries. So now you have a graduate who maybe isn't confident in their skills, so they might have had 1 or 2 or 3. Examples of practicing surgery in their, in their education. One of the things we're doing up in North Texas, and it's open to anyone throughout the state, we have people coming from all over the state, but we have a mentorship program that one of our founding veterinarians provides. It's a 3-day program and they shadow her for 3 days and they learn the spays and neuters surgeries that we're doing, the high-quality, high-volume spays and neuters, which is a little different technique than than if you walked into your private vet and asked for, for a surgery, a spay and neuter. It's a little bit, 'cause it's higher quality, right? Higher volume. But that has been a huge benefit to these veterinarian students that are graduating and maybe not quite confident. But to your point, you're right. There are fewer veterinarians graduating. That is a challenge that we're experiencing. And there's more retiring. So 20 years ago, well, 30 years ago when I started in animal welfare, there were no spay/neuter clinics. Feral cat groups were in the shadows. There was none of these services existed. Spay/neuter started in the early 2000s and all those vets who've learned how to do high-volume spay/neuter, and when we say high-volume, 35 to 50 surgeries a day. So the goal is 8— That is what your clinic is doing, 35 to 50 a day per veterinarian? Yes. We have one veterinarian in that clinic. We have two surgical tables in that clinic. So the veterinarian goes back and forth between the two tables. That clinic has done over 22,000 surgeries since 2023, just that clinic. And over 10,000 of them have been free because of money we've gotten from grant funders, ACS, the city has given us money for free surgeries. But the challenge is there's a vet shortage. Vets are retiring. Vets are coming out, like Vanessa said, without any experience with surgery.

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So this mentorship program We're trying to make sure that down the line there's a funnel, right, that we have vets who are gonna be able to do this kind of surgery. It's very highly specialized. I wonder how you attract a veterinarian, uh, who might be able to charge, as you said, $700 to $1,000 per procedure in private practice. Mm-hmm. You're offering, uh, the veterinarian the opportunity to do high-volume work at$100 a crack. I, I think I can speak to my personal vet, you know, I asked him one time, do you have people that walk in that can't afford the surgery here? And he said, yes. So I handed him our rack cards and said, put 'em in your desk. You know, I don't expect you to have 'em out and about, but I think the— and this is a veterinarian that I know worked with rescues before, 'cause I had met him previously before he purchased a vet clinic. So, I do think there's some that have to know. And ultimately, I can say this with my own pets, and I just went through an emergency surgery with one of my dogs. You know, it's one thing to get those services at that, the spays and neuters and maybe your basic vaccinations, but you're gonna need another veterinarian at some point, right? So hopefully, what I'm hopeful is that these veterinarians do recognize that, that it's not really taking business away from them. And for some people, it's the best thing for them. Them. And, and like I said— I will give you an example. This clinic is not taking business away from vets, right? The people who come to the clinic and the vet, Dr.

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Stickney, who was a vet here in San Antonio that worked for us, the first time we had a vaccine clinic, I told him, I said, he was gonna walk the line and talk to people. And I said, these people that are in line, 90% have never seen a vet before.

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He's like, seriously? I go, yeah, seriously. I mean, you're not dealing with the average pet owner. I rescued a cat, I think it's been a year and a half, off the Highway 16, right? She was in the middle of the road. I got her. I went to my vet and I spent money and got her spayed because I can afford to do that. I didn't bring her down to San Antonio Spay/Neuter Clinic. To me, that clinic is for underserved communities. That's where the outreach that is done through Spay/Neuter Network is in zip codes that need it. Like Vanessa said, anybody can use it, but probably 90%, 95% of the clients are people who need it. So our underserved communities, those 27 zip codes that you mentioned, are also where we have the most strays that are roaming. And— Exactly. What I would argue is a cultural or an education issue with people, some of whom don't believe in spaying or neutering animals. And I'd like you to talk a little bit about that and And tell people why it's important that we do that. And second of all, how are we at the end of the pipeline? I think the city and all this ecosystem of nonprofits are doing great work, but are we changing the culture at all to where we're producing less stray dogs and cats, or does that population in fact continue to grow as the city grows? A little bit of both. So, Spay/Neuter Network has done over 22,000 surgeries in 3 years. That's a lot of surgeries, right? But there's still so many more that need to be spayed and neutered. And you're right about the cultural thing, but it's usually in underserved communities. I have had the privilege of going door to door in San Antonio in some of these communities, knocking on doors, talking to people, seeing what kind of resources that they need. These people have such big hearts. They're oftentimes rescuing animals right off the street. They're, they're just taking a dog in that they've been feeding or a cat, and then they suddenly discover, I wanna do the right thing. And I think animal groups have done a really good job at telling people you need to get 'em vaccinated, you need to get 'em fixed. Are there people who are unaware of it? Believe it or not, in this, even in this media age, right, of social media and podcasts and things, there are still people we will meet who didn't know that they could get services for free or don't know the benefits of spay/neuter. Fun fact, A male dog can smell a female dog in heat in up to 3 miles away, you know, if the wind is good and it's open terrain. So your male— Ah, males. So if your male dog gets out, they are going to find a female dog in heat in the backyard somewhere. So, you know, trying to get male dogs fixed, trying to get female dogs fixed, it's going to be always a challenge. I think of Spay/Neuter Network and other clinics like that in San Antonio as upstream. We're trying to prevent these births so that there's not so many animals needing care and going into the shelter system. And I think that animal shelters, municipal shelters in general across the country, have figured out that it's much cheaper to help people keep their pets than to put the, the pet in the system. So if a pet needs, if someone's struggling and they need free spay/neuter or vaccinations, we can help. If someone needs pet food, There's groups around, ACS, the San Antonio Food Bank, Daisy Cares. They help get pet food. So I think the transition that we're seeing right now in San Antonio is that groups are starting to realize this and making sure that if we can help people keep their pets, get them fixed, we will start to see a difference. There's a lot of partner organizations in your world that you guys deal with outside for The rest of us, it's somewhat of a confusing ecosystem. The Humane Society of San Antonio, the Humane Society of Bexar County, the Footbridge Foundation, Pets Alive.

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You just mentioned an animal food bank, Daisy something.

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Daisy Cares. That I didn't know about. How do people avail themselves of these services, whether they're looking to get their own rescue animal serviced or whether they're looking to adopt, or, you know, I'd like to hear more about fostering, Vanessa, and what does that realize? Are you, is that like fostering a young boy or girl? You bring them into your family for a set period of time until a permanent home is found?

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Yeah. For fostering, first of all, there's lots of organizations that need fosters. And some of them are even, even animal care services will have fosters. And San Antonio Humane Society, Footbridge, you mentioned a few. And I would say if someone was interested, in that they find a, probably a rescue or a shelter that they like. And it can vary. It could be, hey, we have, a rescue could say, we have puppies, we need someone to foster 2 puppies at a time until we can get 'em fixed. And then they're moving to the Northeast somewhere. We have a partner up in the Northeast that will place them or adopt them out, something like that. Sometimes it's a little more of an unknown. You, you find a dog on the street, you know you can't keep keep it. You look for a rescue that might be willing to help support marketing-wise promoting that puppy. And then you hope and wait for someone to say, "Hey, that's the dog for me." I got lucky.

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The Boots that I found by the Cavender Boot Store, you know, the girl just saw her photo because the rescue was promoting her on their website and she said, "That's the dog I want." And I had a cat, so I could say this dog gets along great with cats. I had pictures of her lying around with my cat. The adopter had a cat. That was a comfort point for her. And so, back to your original question, I think there's lots of ways someone can foster.

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And sometimes you can say, you know what, I can do a very short term.

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You know, I can take it for a week or 3 days just to get it off the street while you look for someone who's a more permanent foster. And the rescues are really very appreciative of that. You know, that can make— there's cold snaps. They had a lot of that going on.

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Like, can you, can you help get this dog off the street just to get through this cold snap? And I will find another foster to take over. And so you can kind of set your parameters, right? And people like to do different things. They like to foster till they're gone. They like to just do short-term. And I think there's some— there's opportunity for anyone who wants to help, for sure. I will add in about cats. We are heading into cat season. And what does that mean? It's, it's, we call it kitten season in the animal world. And it's between, uh, well, in San Antonio, it's kind of between February and October.

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Um, but we start to see births. That's quite a bit of the year. Well, it is because up north they don't have the same problem, but we have warm, warm weather here. Cats reproduce based on sunlight, warm weather. And so one cat can have 3 or 4 litters between February and October.

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Really? And so animal shelters are inundated with premature kittens. People will say, "I found these kittens." It could be their litter. We don't know, right? But, "I found these kittens. They're a week old." And so we— they need volunteers to help bottle feed those babies. And those babies have to be bottle fed every 2 hours. So there are, yeah, there's a legion of people who really commit to doing that. A lot of animals— people who work in animal shelters do it because not everybody wants to get up every 2 hours and feed several kittens.

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But there will be— we call it kitten season, and come May and June and July, there'll be more kittens that need homes than any other time of the year. I don't want the two of you to have to delve into political issues, but you have been around in this space for a substantially long period of time. As you said, Kathy, from the time when people realized we were killing 50,000 animals a a year until now. Not that long ago, we had a leadership change in the city's animal care services department, and the city council voted one of the most substantial budget increases in a single department that I had seen in quite some time. So I assume now a year or so later from that point, 2 years, that we're seeing the results of that investment. Do you guys see that? Improving as a city in how we are addressing our stray animal population problem? I think so. ACS has had a lot of changes with directors over the last, what, 10, 15 years, maybe 20 years.

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11, 12 different people have, I think, have served in that role. And you can't get any continuity going. You can't get programs going if leadership's always changing. Current leadership. He came from Oklahoma. One of the challenges, he says, with San Antonio is that they take in twice as many of the animals, or the same number of animals, but have half the space as the shelter in Oklahoma. So I'm glad to see that the city is making this commitment. There used to be, back when that story broke, there were about 15 animal control officers at any time in the city. They now have 65, and that's been a recent investment in the last 2 years. As money has become available, they're hiring more animal control officers, not to do more citations, to actually scan animals out in the field, see if there's a microchip, get 'em back home. Um, Spay/Neuter Network put in, I think, 13,000 or 14,000 microchips in the last few years. So that's one way we can help keep animals off the street.

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If they pick an— if ACS picks an animal up on the street, is it automatic that they're going to spay or neuter that animal?

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My understanding is that first they'll, you know, scan it, try to get it back home. They will talk to them about getting it spayed and neutered.

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If they take it in, yes, I believe that if they take it in, they spay and neuter before they give the animal back. I don't want to speak on their behalf, but that's my understanding is that they try to do that. Yes. Well, Vanessa, you and I are both former runners and cyclists, and so anyone that's done either of those either of those things with any, you know, familiarity with the city, the inner city has been approached by aggressive stray animals. Do you think we're doing enough on that front? And I ask because we know we've seen people actually maimed and killed in our city in the last few years, which helped generate some of these changes in public pressure on animal care services. But that's a very serious issue for seniors and children and people that live near an animal that's consistently out out of its, you know, home and maybe, you know, a pit bull or some other aggressive-style animal. Is that as big a problem now as it was, or are we addressing that finally? Well, I can— what I know is in 2019, the city commissioned a survey to see what that roaming pet population looked like. And they said on any given day, it was high as high as 35,000 roaming dogs in the city.

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That seems astronomical. I don't know for sure. I know Dallas had done some studies and theirs was significantly lower and they really tackled it. And then as Kathy said, you tackle something and then it kind of comes back a little bit. So it's kind of ebb and flow. So, and the other interesting point of that study was that majority of those were owned pets. So you're right, it's the people that think that it's okay to let those pets roam. But if they're roaming and they're intact, as Kathy points out, that male's going on and looking, looking for some females in the process. So, um, I am less familiar with how they might be tackling that at this point. I think what we are doing is focusing on the messaging and the spay and neuter, um, and, and doing that very well and having that opportunity to educate people that are coming to the clinic. So every touchpoint we have, we have a community outreach coordinator who is out in the community talking to people and trying to educate them not only on the pros and cons, but pet safety. And then Kathy has made some recent headway in education. I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit.

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Okay. Yeah. So humane education's sort of the next step, right? Spay/Neuter Network, when they first started in 2023, they had a plan and the first year was just to get settled in. In, let people know we were here spaying and neutering. The next year was to get the transport vehicle. Um, just want to give a shout out to Petco Love and San Antonio Area Foundation, 'cause they stepped up and helped us get that vehicle. Um, and then the next step was education. And we launched this humane education program in Fort Worth and have already reached over 36,000 kids. And we thought it's time to bring it to San Antonio. And this year I've been on the phone trying to talk to school districts to see if we can bring the program. I talked to San Antonio Independent School District and they saw the program and they're like, we want this in all our schools. We can't teach in all the schools because it costs money.

00:33:34.819 --> 00:35:25.298
We have to pay educators, you know, to go in and teach all day. But we are definitely going to get to 5,000 kids just this spring. So we're making some headway. The idea, the idea behind humane education is not just to educate children, it's to make sure that that information goes home to the parents. So everything we teach is in a booklet and it goes, it's bilingual and it goes home with the kids. They get the flyer that talks about the free surgery. So we hope that they'll take it home to their parents and get that, that stuff done. But in terms of, you were talking about safety of animals on the street. So you mentioned Dallas. They had the exact same thing. A woman got mauled and was killed. This was, um, probably 8 or 9 years ago now. Um, the foundations in the community stepped up and did a survey to see where these animals were. And really for the last probably 5 to 7 years, those foundations still give a great deal of money just for spay/neuter. It's not easy finding money for spay/neuter. Um, a lot of national groups used to give spay/neuter money. Money. Now they, they want you to do access to care, which is great. Everybody's moving in that direction, but we still need spay/neuter money. So when we are looking at kids and trying to help them, we teach them about basic pet care. I'll ask kids to raise their hands and say, has any dog, any of you had a dog or cat, have puppies or kittens? Almost every kid's raising their hand, right? There's more dogs than cats. It's kind of an informal survey that we do. So we teach basic pet care. We talk about pet behavior. We show them videos, uh, how to behave around animals because, and this probably won't come as a surprise to you, but the most dog bites that happen are to children between the ages of 5 to 12.

00:35:25.298 --> 00:35:29.099
And that's because we really don't teach kids how to behave around animals.

00:35:29.099 --> 00:35:46.090
We teach them how to line up to go to the cafeteria. We teach them how to be quiet in the library, but around animals, we let them scream and run around. They're more likely to get, get bitten. And we did some surveys up in Fort Worth and we found out from kids that we asked them, I said, have you ever been bitten by a dog?

00:35:46.090 --> 00:36:27.659
And almost everybody said yes. Now we know that's not true. These are little kids. They're assuming that a snap is a bite. So that tells me that these kids are probably not behaving properly around animals and dogs are giving them a warning. They're snapping at them. So we decided this program was very important to start teaching kids kids so that they'll take that information back to their families. The third component we teach is dog safety, how to be a tree and how to be a rock. So the how to be a tree, why be a tree? If you, and you can do this with your own dogs, if you are completely still and you just stand there and you don't engage your dog, they will go away.

00:36:27.659 --> 00:37:00.079
Dogs go where the party is. They wanna follow feet, right? They wanna be where all the action is. So we explain to kids that if you're quiet, it, a dog will go away. This is not foolproof, obviously, right? I mean, there's still a risk a child could encounter a dog that they could be bitten by. But some of the stray dogs on the street are dogs that have lived with families. And we're hoping that those dogs will leave these kids alone. If they're knocked down, we teach them how to be a rock to protect their face and their vital organs by tucking and being a rock.

00:37:00.079 --> 00:37:59.000
And we're hoping just to reach kids with this information and take it back because parents, I mean, I taught my child how to behave around animals, but I also have taught all the neighborhood kids how to behave around my pets too, right? And I've never— this is the other thing— I never left my dog with my son and his friends if they were 12 and under. Kathy, what about the caveman rule that I was taught by a neighbor when I was young, which is reach down like you're picking up a rock and an aggressive dog will run away? And I've actually always found that works. It works with adults. Children have a hard time because of their size, right? Being intimidating. Obviously, if I had a dog coming towards me, um, and I have been attacked by a dog, two dogs. I was walking my dog in a neighborhood. The people opened their door and let their two dogs out. Um, I was pulled to the ground and I became a rock for that short period of time. And my dog fought off these other two dogs and my dog did get injured.

00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:20.880
But yes, as an adult, male voices, right? We can intimidate a dog and try to control that. But little kids, you know, we tell them to get to safety. And if that's not possible, we tell them that's important to know how to behave around them to make them go away. Well, you mentioned that spay/neuter networks need money. Vanessa, is that true? Could you use some donations?

00:38:20.880 --> 00:39:49.840
Absolutely. Absolutely. We, we have a nice, robust individual giving opportunity, and I would be remiss to not say this is Spay/Neuter Awareness Month, February. Who knew? Who knew? And next week is International World Spay Day on the 24th. So right now we are doing a campaign where someone can go in and donate, and that money will go towards more offering more surgeries and more services to San Antonio residents. People can actually donate from all over the state, but we have that going on. We have had some success, as Cathy pointed out. The foundations have been very good to us, both in San Antonio, the ones that we mentioned, and in North Texas. And, but we're always looking for those monthly donors, someone that really just want, they wanna help. And, and, you know, sometimes, sometimes, you know, we, we say, well, we don't have a cute little puppy and you show everyone puppies and everyone wants to donate to that puppy or that poor dog that is missing all its hair because, but what we're doing is long, the long game, right? So everything we can do to help others access this care is going to result in fewer unwanted pets in the community.

00:39:50.320 --> 00:39:53.280
And we believe in that wholeheartedly.

00:39:54.159 --> 00:39:58.000
So we're always, like I said, we're always looking for more donors.

00:39:58.800 --> 00:40:45.409
We are looking for volunteers at our events when we do— we do vaccine clinics with ACS and on our own. So we have lots of opportunity for people who want to get involved and get down to that grassroots and and fixing the problem at the grassroots level. So people can go to your San Antonio Spay/Neuter Network website and hit that donate button. And I looked at it and you can do as little as $25, I think, and every donation is, is welcome. Yeah, spayneuternet.org. And right now our campaign is at the very top of that page to celebrate spay/neuter awareness month. So. Great. Kathy, can people that don't subscribe to the newspaper read your column either on mysanantonio.com, which is the free website?

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Animal Matters. When does it come out? I believe so. It comes out online on Thursdays and then in the paper on Saturdays. And then my syndicated column is run all over the country, and I'm really not sure. I think they put it online, and I think it's in newspapers. Well, congratulations on that. Thank you. And thank you for coming on, Kathy Rosenthal and Vanessa Richie-Saied, the chairwoman of the San Antonio Spay/Neuter Network. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Big City Small Town. Please share this episode with friends and colleagues, and if you haven't already, sign up for Monday Musings, my weekly newsletter. Just go to bigcitysmalltown.com and add your email. Big City Small Town is brought to you by Western Urban, building a city our children want to call home, and by Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. Thanks to Corey Ames of Ensemble Texas for the production of this show. We will see you next week.