Low-cost spay/neuter clinic opens Feb. 20

From a press release:

Adopt a Cat is holding a Grand Opening Celebration for their new clinic Spay/Houston after many struggles and road blocks to opening. This is a high quality, low cost spay/neuter clinic for cats, dogs, and rabbits in the Greenspoint area. The clinic is located at 412F North Sam Houston Parkway East (on Beltway 8 between Hardy Toll Road and I-45). This grand opening will be held on Saturday February 20th. Stop by from 3:00-6:00pm and take a tour and participate in our raffle. From 6:00pm to 9:00pm, we are celebrating with food, drinks and entertainment for “Mardi Paws”! Come in your masks, Mardi Gras attire and 'Laissez les bon temps rouler'-Let the good times roll!

This spay/neuter clinic will be performing in excess of 20,000 sterilizations per year in order to help reduce the number of unwanted animals eventually ending up our community shelters. The clinic offers a variety of discounted services over and above the spay/neuter services including vaccines, heartworm testing, micro chipping, heartworm prevention, flea prevention, and worming. Spay/Houston also believes in community education and outreach and will continue to focus on spay/neuter education in the community.

The scarce resources available for low cost spay/neuter do not correlate to the number of residents in North Harris and Montgomery counties. Spay/Houston’s service area is home to 579,633 residents. Of these residents 100,294 or 17.3% fall below the poverty level. That number is almost 5% over the national average of 12.4%. We have estimated the number of animals in the primary and outreach service areas based on the 2007 US Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook republished at www.avma.org [1]. The estimated number of animals within our service areas is 612,788. These staggering statistics and many more, show why the community needs Spay/Houston and needs to know of its available services.

This clinic is modeled after a clinic in North Carolina which dropped the euthanasia rate in local shelters 70%. There are no income requirements to use this clinic. The clinic needs to reach capacity so that they can eventually expand to 7 days a week. “We want to be performing 80 surgeries per day by May 2010. We would absolutely love to fill the clinic 7 days a week,” says Executive Director Deana L. Sellens.

It is also critical that the clinic work with rescue groups to ensure its success. For this reason, we have budgeted reduced rates for rescue group program animals. We will also be relying on rescue groups to help coordinate outreach transportation pick-ups and drop-offs. Adopt A Cat is already networking with groups to begin building these key relationships. Eventually Adopt A Cat would like to issue vouchers to participating rescue groups which can be passed out to customers and then invoiced to the rescue groups as the vouchers are redeemed.

Visit www.spayhouston.org [2] for more information or contact Deana Sellens at 713-822-4368 or dsellens@spayhouston.org [3]. Spay/Houston is an arm of the Adopt A Cat Shelter/Sanctuary for cats. They are a 501c3 not for profit charity. Follow them on Twitter https://twitter.com/SpayHouston [4] and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/Houston-TX/SpayHouston/230345580371 [5].