Animal welfare advocates will plead with Texas lawmakers to help cities control stray pet population

TX – Subscribe to The Y’all — a weekly dispatch about the people, places and policies defining Texas, produced by Texas Tribune journalists living in communities across the state.

Editor’s note: This article contains references to animal cruelty.

McALLEN — The phone calls at Yaqui Animal Rescue were non-stop. On the other end of the phone were requests to help with abandoned puppies or pick up stray dogs roaming the streets. The Rio Grande Valley ranch used to temporarily house and care for animals was getting hourly requests by email and social media, too.

The pleas even reached the personal Instagram account of Rebecca Chavez, Yaqui’s development director. She estimates she’s tagged daily in at least five social media posts about dogs that are dumped in the middle of nowhere.

It became too much. In early September, the rescue’s staff announced on social media that the rescue would be — for the first time in 11 years — closed for intake until further notice.

“We don't have enough staff to take on the demand,” Chavez said. “Mentally and emotionally, it's taking a toll on us.”

The decision was made in an effort to get a handle on the “crisis-level overcrowding” of more than 250 animals at the rescue, they wrote in the social media post.

Animal shelters across Texas are — and have been — overcrowded, say advocates, who are urging the public to help by fostering or adopting these animals.

The more pressing challenge is convincing pet owners to spay and neuter their pets, animal welfare advocates said.

Chavez said that local governments could be doing more to invest in low-cost spay and neuter services, especially in places like the Valley, home to many low-income communities.

To that end, Chavez and other animal advocates across the state will take the issue to Austin when lawmakers reconvene for the next legislative session in 2025.

The Texas Humane Legislation Network, a network of leaders of animal rights groups across the state, are eyeing changes to current state regulations that would allow cities to regulate the sale of puppies and make it easier for shelters and nonprofits to access money to help cover the costs of spay and neuter services, hoping to slow the growing number of stray animals in the state.

“The No. 1 issue in Texas is clearly shelter overpopulation and, quite frankly, overpopulation of dogs throughout our state," said Shelby Bobosky, executive director of the humane legislation network. "It doesn't matter if you're in an urban or rural area, it's just happening everywhere.”

Financial assistance

When Bonnie Hill and her husband moved out of Dallas onto a Kaufman County ranch in the early 2000s, the couple was surprised to learn their new home was not completely vacated.

The previous owner had left behind a golden retriever with eight puppies that the Hills were not prepared to care for. They immediately contacted the previous owner who, conveniently, had just moved down the street.

But unable or unwilling to take on the responsibility of the dogs, the previous owner took the pups and shot them.

"I was just shocked," Hill said about finding out what had happened to the dogs. "I was, of course, hysterical."

That was just how they handled things there, the owner had told her. There were no shelters or veterinarians, so that was their only option.

That norm was unacceptable to Hill.

She contacted the SPCA of Texas, an animal welfare agency in North Texas, with the intent to start her own shelter, but was convinced that focusing on providing low-cost spay and neuter services was more vital to their cause of minimizing the stray animal population.

The couple opened a clinic in Kaufman County in 2004 and, soon after, officials from other counties began asking for help with their own animal population. She added a transport program that would pick up animals from those areas and bring them to their clinic for surgeries.

Today, the organization — the Spay Neuter Network — has four clinics across the state along with a mobile clinic. They also mobilize five vehicles every day that travel to low-income areas as part of their transport program. The goal is to make a dent in Texas’ ballooning stray animal population.

While there is no official count of the stray animal population for Texas, an estimated 568,325 cats and dogs entered shelters in 2023, according to Best Friends Animal Society, an animal welfare nonprofit based in Utah. The group also estimates that 82,681 cats and dogs were killed in Texas that year, more than in any other state.

First: Christopher Seigler, a lead vet technician, preps a family cat before surgery at the Spay Neuter Network clinic in Crandall. Next: A veterinarian sutures up a puppy after a neutering procedure. Last: A veterinarian administers a sterilization tattoo on a stray kitten after being spayed. A sterilization tattoo is a permanent identification mark that indicates a pet has been spayed or neutered. Credit: Desiree Rios for The Texas Tribune

The Spay Neuter Network does more than 30,000 surgeries every year, according to Hill, and reported $2.8 million in service expenses for 2022.

However, the cost they charged for the surgery did not cover the cost of performing it, so organizations like the Spay Neuter Network rely on grants to make the service more accessible. Grants and contributions made up 23% of their total revenue.

Years ago, the Spay Neuter Network used to apply for money through the Animal Friendly Program, a state grant offered by the Texas Department of State Health Services that is paid for by the sale of specialty license plates. The money raised is then made available to organizations through a competitive application process.

At one point, the network received nearly $500,000 through the program, but over the years, the reimbursement process became more difficult for them. Instead of covering the $50 flat rate their clinics charged per surgery, the state wanted them to calculate the exact cost per surgery, down to how many staff members worked on it and the exact time it took to perform each one.

"It was just really hard," Hill said. "We all just said that it just doesn't work for us. We can't do it. There's easier money to be found elsewhere."

The Animal Friendly Program has awarded more than $6 million for low-cost spay and neuter services since 2002. Grants are awarded every two years and in recent years, annual total funding available has ranged from $160,000 to $200,000, according to a department spokesperson.

How much is given to each applicant is at the discretion of the department and ranges from $6,000 to $30,000 per contractor annually. If funding allows, contracts are renewed for an additional one-year term.

The health department awarded more than $165,000 in grants to 11 different organizations in Texas for 2023.

In Canton, Kathy Stonaker, an ambassador for the humane legislation network, wants more organizations to access those funds. She runs a Facebook page called Van Zandt County Pet Project that shares information about dogs needing to be adopted and encourages the public to spay and neuter their pets.

She hoped to educate nearby shelters and rescues on how to navigate the application process for the Animal Friendly program but was not able to get through it.

"It's about the worst thing I've ever seen," Stonaker said.

The process requires applicants to complete forms, questionnaires, exhibits, and provide requested information outlined by the agency. It is a process that is standard for all of the health department’s grant applications.

Stonaker argues the process is too difficult for small shelters.

"A shelter or a rescue would have to pay for the help to get this,” she said.

Ending puppy sales

The humane legislation network also wants to win back some control to local governments that was lost in 2023 through House Bill 2127, or the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act.

The law, known by its opponents as the “Death Star” bill, prevents cities and counties from passing local ordinances that go further than what’s allowed under state law. State Republican lawmakers approved the legislation after many of the state’s largest cities, often run by Democrats, approved local policies they deemed too progressive and a threat to the state’s pro-friendly business climate.

One of the less discussed provisions bars cities from adopting ordinances that would ban or restrict the retail sale of animals.

Since the passage of the law, 10 puppy stores have sprung up throughout the state, bringing the total number of stores close to 40. Animal welfare advocates believe these private puppy stores make the situation worse because the dogs sold there are brought in from other states and are not spayed or neutered.

The humane legislation network aims to require that pet stores only sell healthy animals from shelters and rescues.

A handful of cities in Texas, including Dallas and Houston, adopted similar "humane pet store" ordinances in 2022 that were grandfathered into the bill.

"We truly need a statewide law to help these communities keep the puppy mill pipeline out of Texas," Bobosky said. "It's just adding to the crisis."

Heeding the call

Chavez, the Rio Grande Valley animal advocate, thinks her neighbors must believe she has magical powers for how often they call upon her to attend to abandoned or distressed animals.

Sure, she has dropped everything to drive 30 minutes to the middle of nowhere to find an injured animal. And yes, she has sheltered animals in her own garage at her own expense.

She’s not special, she said, just willing to be inconvenienced. Yet, the emotional toll is getting worse.

She got into this line of work to save animals but when the rescue can’t do that due to a lack of space or resources, the assumption that the animals will eventually die without their help begins to wear on the staff.

For their own mental health and to ease the strain on their resources, Chavez said they needed to temporarily close intakes. The move, she said, would allow them to focus on the animals they currently have in their care and try to find them permanent homes to create more space.

While the rescue does what it can to better handle the situation, Chavez wants county and city officials to invest into mobile low-cost spay and neuter clinics.

“They're reproducing at a rate that we cannot keep up with,” Chavez said. “I don’t even want to say we’re stretched too thin, because stretching too thin means that we're able to handle it and we’re not. We can’t do it.”

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

Disclosure: Facebook has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.