Blame COVID? Spay, neuter services hard to find, afford in Pierce County | Opinion
In March 2020, governments in the US started weighing a charged question: What’s “essential?” While massive cultural rifts opened up over this national debate, one type of service restricted as non-essential might have escaped your notice.
That was spay and neuter surgeries for domesticated animals like cats and dogs.
The procedures were temporarily suspended in most of the country’s roughly 3,000 spay and neuter clinics. Veterinarians predicted a pet baby boom prompted by around 3 million missed surgeries. They were correct.
We’re still dealing with the consequences now in the Puget Sound region. Animal shelters are at capacity. Even sadder, local animal welfare groups report a surge in stray and abandoned pets. All the while, spay and neuter services are still very challenging to get.
“It’s like this convergence of bad things,” said Kimberley Williams, executive director of South County Cats in King County.
Williams’ organization coordinates with other local services to provide spay neuter services at a clinic in Renton. She said she also gets messages from people in Pierce County looking for spay and neuter procedures for their pets.
She lives in Eatonville and has worked as a volunteer getting trap-neuter-release services for feral and community cats living nearby. She said the situation in Pierce County is worse than what she’s seeing further north.
More pets mean more abandonments
It’s easy to attribute abandoned pets to, politely speaking, jerks. You can peruse many online comments telling people who abandon animals exactly where they can expect to go in the afterlife. I grant there are some vile animal-harming people in the world who wouldn’t think twice about casting off a creature that depends on people for a decent life.
There are also desperate people who either don’t know about or don’t have any better options. The News Tribune featured some of those situations in a story about reports of more abandoned pets.
The Humane Society for Tacoma and Pierce County recently raised its fees from $70 to up to $400 for surrendering pets to its shelter. There’s also a waiting list. Some worry this has led more people to abandon pets outside rather than give them to organizations equipped to care for them.
Sad as it is, some people will always abandon pets, and higher fees won’t help the situation. But the sheer volume of animals in existence laid the groundwork for our current problems.
Compounding the issue, spay and neuter surgeries took a long time to bounce back to numbers of pre-pandemic surgeries, if they did at all. Research published in Frontiers in Veterinary Service showed that the number of surgeries performed was still smaller in early 2023 than there had been in 2019.
That’s partly due to clinics closing or shifting focus to other kinds of animal healthcare, the study found. Veterinary services have also become much more expensive in general, with NPR reporting in October that these costs had grown nearly twice as fast as inflation since 2020.
According to CareCredit, a company that finances vet services, spaying and neutering a dog in Washington costs around $500 on average. For cats in Washington, the average spay surgery is $335, and about $230 for neutering. Voucher programs for low-income pet owners are not meeting demand.
And while the number of surgeries stayed low, the number of animals with the ability to procreate increased.
The challenge of getting spay and neuter services
That’s a long way of saying there are way too many cats and dogs for our current systems to handle. In fact, overburdened services are the reason why the Humane Society says it raised its rates for surrendering animals. It’s a chain reaction that clearly hasn’t stopped yet.
Williams doesn’t judge people who aren’t getting their animals fixed, and has no doubt they love their pets. The way she describes it, getting surgery appointments sounds like scoring tickets to a Taylor Swift concert in 2022.
People have to know who offers the surgeries, when they open up bookings and then wait for the appointment, if they’re lucky enough to get one. Low-income households can use vouchers to get their pets surgeries with some service providers, but not all. And they’re hard to get. Applications for vouchers with the Humane Society of Tacoma and Pierce County are closed as of Jan. 5, and won’t reopen until April 1.
The result is only natural, Williams pointed out.
Animals are animals, she said. “They get out, and if you don’t have them fixed, they’re going to go do their thing.”
The only way out of this situation is a return to campaigning for widespread spaying and neutering. Animal welfare agencies are working valiantly to make this happen, but they need more resources. The outgoing voicemail at Northwest Spay and Neuter in Tacoma puts it clearly.
“Currently, there are more paws in need than hands to provide,” the message says. “All veterinary service providers are experiencing higher than normal demand. We apologize if we are not able to provide services in a timely manner.”
