Free spaying and neutering — for both house cats and cats brought in off the street — could soon return to Pittsburgh.
City Council gave preliminary approval on Wednesday to a bill allocating $210,000 over three years to work with the Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh, a partnership that would facilitate free spaying and neutering services for Pittsburgh residents.
“It's a small price to pay for something that's been a real problem in my district,” said city councilor Anthony Coghill on Wednesday. “We have so many feral cats in my district. I didn't even realize this until I'd taken office.”
Pittsburgh’s original animal-fixing program started in 2012. It offered vouchers — up to five per resident — to cover the cost of spaying and neutering at either HARP or Animal Friends. But the initiative was suspended earlier this year, after the city’s Bureau of Animal Care and Control said it found “individuals using the city addresses of friends and family members to bring in animals from outside city limits to take advantage of the service.”
A pared-back version of the program was restarted this past spring. Since then, the city has been offering limited vouchers to spay and neuter cats found in the wild, but not to pet owners. But the new approach aggravated some animal advocates, who said the policy should be more expansive and include people who lived outside the city but rescued cats inside it.
The new proposal increases the number of vouchers for registered trappers of “community cats,” a term used to describe feral and street cats, to 30 per year. It allows pet owners to spay and neuter their own pets, but at a lower level than in previous years: Households are limited to two vouchers per year, and no more than five in a five-year period.
Most of the program only covers cats. According to Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt, the program does support some dog spaying and neutering — but only for households that fall below certain income levels.
“With the current budget for the program, we have to be cognizant of how many animals we can realistically do in a year and prioritize cats, because of the nature of how they breed and that they're more commonly outside, whether they're owned or not owned,” he said. “Most dogs don't roam quite as much.”
According to Schmidt, the new version of the program will also require people to affirm they are a city resident to apply, and that the animal they are bringing in is their animal. The pets will also be microchipped, which allows them to be identified, if they are not already chipped.
Animal control officers may conduct random follow-up visits at an owner’s home to make sure the pet lives there. If someone is caught falsifying their information, the city can pursue reimbursement, plus a penalty of up to 20% for administrative costs.
Charles Showers, manager of personnel and finance for the Department of Public Safety, said the program could be subject to further changes.
“We’re essentially re-piloting the program, so there are going to be some things we try for a year, and see if maybe the limits could be adjusted later on,” he said. “We just ask that everybody be patient.”
Coghill said he was pleased to see measures that would ensure only Pittsburgh residents can utilize the program.
“This is a city project. This is city funding. We want it to go to the taxpayers in the city of Pittsburgh,” he said. “I just hope we can control people outside the city taking advantage of our taxpayer dollars.”
‘A smile and a frown at the same time’
While there is no reliable census of cats, many local rescuers say that outdoor cat numbers have jumped since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. A group of local cat caretakers have met with several council members and spoken at a council meeting to call attention to the issue.
Those advocates say the city’s new approach delivers some changes that they’d hoped for, but not all.
“Unfortunately, some of what's proposed in this is going to add on additional barriers and layers that make it less efficient than it had been, which wasn't even that efficient to begin with,” said Lawrenceville-based animal advocate Carol Whaley. “So it's sort of a smile and a frown at the same time.”
Whaley said it was a “great start” to see the limit on vouchers increased from 5 to 30 cats for trappers. But she and others were disappointed that the program would not be available to cat rescuers who live over the city line.
“That's unfortunate, because it certainly is going to slow down some of the work of keeping those populations in check,” Whaley noted.
Schmidt said at the meeting Wednesday that the city wants to prioritize cat trappers who are working in their neighborhoods.
“If in the future the budget allows, or we’re seeing that there’s not that many trappers in the city, then perhaps this can be another conversation … about changing some of the policies,” he said. “We want the program to be successful — we don’t want to have to increase the budget for the program at this time.”
Whaley also was concerned that income limitations could be an additional hurdle for pet owners.
“Many people don't have the time or the resources to go through that process of qualification,” she said. “We were truly requesting changes that we thought were going to make the program more efficient and more effective, and those don't seem to be the things that they're bringing forth.”
‘We look at quality of life’
The new program would also work solely with HARP, the only shelter to apply to be part of it. But not all cat caretakers and trappers like working with HARP.
Cat rescuer Jess Berad, who takes care of cats in the South Side Slopes, said she has avoided HARP because the shelter requires people to sign a waiver giving it control over medical decisions for cats brought in to be fixed. If a cat has an additional medical condition, the shelter may euthanize that cat even if it could be treated elsewhere, she said.
“That's going to be hard for me to get over,” she said. “Do I want to take the risk of bringing this animal that I just pulled in off the streets…, knowing that they may euthanize it if it has some medical condition that can be treatable?”
Berad says that if such misgivings prompt other rescuers to pay for services elsewhere, it may suppress use of the spay-and-neuter program.
“The city might be like, ‘This is great, we have less cats around because people aren't using the voucher program,’ when in reality, the people that should be using the voucher program just don't want to work with HARP,” she said.
HARP Executive Director Ariella Samson confirmed that the shelter requires a waiver specifically for community cats, which are to be returned to the wild after being fixed. Samson noted that cats with serious injuries are often unlikely to survive on their own.
“Each animal is considered for whether they are a candidate to go back outside,” Samson said. “We look at the prognosis, we look at quality of life, we look at the likelihood of recovery with the ability for them to be placed back into the community,.
“None of these decisions are ever made lightly,” she added. “But they are made when we feel that an animal is suffering or an animal will continue to suffer if put back outdoors.”
HARP has seen an influx of pets coming in as strays and through Animal Control, Samson said, even as there has been a decrease in adoptions. That’s consistent with national trends, and impacts from the coronavirus pandemic are still continuing, because more and more litters were born as spay-and-neuter programs were scaled back or shut down.
Samson expects the shelter will be able to keep up with being the only provider for the free spay and neuter program.
“We have a large focus on high quality, high volume spay-neuter,” she said. “We have some new relief vets and some new vets in training on those practices that will be able to do higher numbers in a day than were previously being done.”
