1 Name: Ann Adams
Address
District District 1
Phone
Email
Date You Wish to
Speak Before the
City Council
March 30, 2023
Topic/Subject When the new low cost Spay/Neuter program was announced it sounded like a wonderful “added” benefit that the city was rolling out to assist on fixing our over whelming pet issue in Fresno. I am sure you all agree we have an animal issue in Fresno.
Unfortunately what the city did not say in the announcement is that all community/feral cat program funding would be dissolved when this occurred, which is unacceptable given we have tens of thousands of homeless, unfixed cats on the streets every year.
Right after this came out Valley animal services and the SPCA stopped offering community cat services and deferred to Fresno Humane. As of today Hope animal services also discontinued all community cat services. This leaves no animal service in all of Fresno doing any spay/neuter services for community cats for the general public (as private vets will not treat or service community cats).
2 Fresno Humane says there is no date in sight when they will resume (if ever) to helping Community cats they told me to check back in May to see if there are any updates. This time of year is when cats reproduce, by May we could have thousands of more kittens born on the street if we can’t fix any cats for the next two‐three months that is if FH starts back up the program which is in question.
The timing of this could not be worse.
As of now only a two person non‐profit titled “Fresno TNR” is able to get any community cats fixed (through the SPCA and Valley Animal Services) which they were focusing on commercial areas while private citizens have been working on neighborhoods. These two people do this in their spare time not full time and the appointments they can get are very limited. Myself and about 40 other individuals across Fresno have been trapping and fixing community cats with our own money, we only ask that there be affordable vet services available to do the work which there was 4 and now there are none.
This closure of all four of the previous feral/community cat vet locations for spay and neutering is going to drastically set Fresno back on the progress we were making as civilians in controlling the cat populations. I believe the city took all the funding that was being sent to these four locations to offer community cat services and has marked these funds to only help people in poverty to fix their own personal pets. This alone will not work. We must continue the funding to curb the community cat population.
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