Be Kind To Animals: Spay Or Neuter Your Pet

"We in this country and actually in this world, have a pet overpopulation problem," said Dr. Andrew Kaplan, a veterinarian on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.

 "The biggest killer of dogs and cats in this country is homelessness," he said.

 "For decades we've been addressing this problem by adopting out as many animals as we can then killing the rest, and for decades we've been failing," according to Kaplan.

 What Kaplan and others have done is form a non-profit organization that provides a free, spay/neuter service to low-income pet owners.  They call it TOBY, named after a dog that helped inspire the effort.

 Kaplan said low-income communities seemed to be the biggest source of homeless pets.
 "These communities are either not able to afford spay and neuter sterilization surgery or because of their ethnicity, it might not be second nature to them to consider doing it.

 "With the studies that have been done," he continued, "it shows that most of the animals that come from shelters, come from low-income communities.  So we are driving mobile, surgical vans directly into these low-income communities and provideng the spaying and neutering for free."

"This model," said Kaplan, "is proving successful in other cities. There's no reason it can't be successful in New York City.

"We know through a study that was done by animalfriendlynyc that in order for us to accomplish reducing the shelter populations, so these animals aren't killed, we have to spay and neuter 50,000 pets owned by low income pet owners every year for ten years.

"Right now, through the ASPCA and us, we're doing about 25,000, so we're about 25,000 short." The TOBY project aims to mobilize or set in motion 5 mobile surgical vans. Right now we have one, so we're always looking for fundraising, so we can launch more. Our goal is to have one in each borough. To bridge the gap between the 25,000 we're doing now and 50,000 we need to do in order to eliminate the shelter killing, merely because these animals have no homes.

"The means by which this country has been addressing pet overpopulation for decades has been failing, that's why we're doing what we're doing," said Kaplan.

To find out how you can help go to www.tobyproject.org and www.animalfriendlynyc.com.