Shelter Owner Redemptions: Most Unaltered

Over 61% of dogs released to owners from the San Angelo Animal Shelter in fiscal year 2023 were not spayed/neutered.  This occurred in the midst of a focused effort to cite pet owners for failure to spay/neuter their pet after an Animal Shelter stay.   Here's the data for FY 2023:

Of 583 dogs stays, 358 left the shelter unaltered.  That's 61.4%

It's not clear how many of these owners received citations for failure to spay/neuter.  That responsibility shifted from a special effort by the City Attorney's office to Animal Services.

Shelter Chief Morgan Chegwidden promised to provide this information to City Council in a November 2023 memo.  I'd hoped to get that one page memo via a public information request.  Instead I received a 79 page document.  Had staff provided volumes of raw data to Council they likely would have gotten an earful.

Releasing unaltered dogs from the shelter is not a new practice. The numbers are below: 

FY ended 2022 - 674 unaltered dogs

FY ended 2021 - 708 

FY ended 2019 - 730 

Eight month period in 2017 - 500

Director of Neighborhood and Family Services Bob Salas warned of the consequences of failure to spay/neuter pets.  

Council gave Salas the mandatory spay/neuter ordinance tool in 2015.

An overcrowded and disgusting shelter in September 2022 was blamed on "puppies."  That prompted the focused citation effort for unaltered animals with a shelter stay.  The "after the fact" effort has been slow going.   Staff informed Council:

June 2023:  Owners claimed 956 cats and dogs in FY22, 282 of which were already spayed/neutered. 44 pet owners have since provided proof of spay/neuter. 24 provided proof of an exemption, such as moved outside city limits, pet is medically fragile, pet has died, etc. This leaves 606 pets still reporting as unaltered. We’ve cited or filed a complaint with municipal court for almost 400 animals and are moving through the remaining backlog.

Our community has experienced a purposeful combination of strategies that increased the number of loose dogs. 

1.  Releasing unaltered shelter dogs under return to owner, a longstanding practice.

2.  Failure to enforce mandatory/spay neuter ordinance as promised by Shelter Chief James Flores when Council passed the requirement in 2015.  A focused effort by the City Attorney's office had over 600 unaltered animals outstanding from FY 2022.

3.  Adoption of Pets Alive programming which does not include spay/neuter in their performance measures.  Pets Alive programming is specified under "scope of services" in the latest RFP for Adoption Services.  The shelter first implemented managed intake for owned pets, then added "found" pets.  Owner surrenders fell from the thousands to less than one hundred under managed intake.

4.  Completely stopping loose animal intake when the dog census hits 180.  This hard maximum capacity has been used as a reason for Animal Control officers to not respond to a caught stray dog call.  When Council endorsed this strategy the shelter was mostly occupied by large, long stay dogs that are more difficult to adopt.

5.  Ignoring area dog breeders.  Puppies contributed to horrific conditions at the Animal Shelter in September 2022.  Recent pictures on the city's Facebook page show puppy after puppy.  

City Council took no action on the loose dog crisis in February after discussing the problem in January.  "Let them roam unaltered" remains firmly in place.

Credit:  The image of the local unaltered dog is from San Angelo Live's story on dogs in the homeless camp.  I cropped the image to highlight the dog.