Vet shortage leading to more shelter deaths
Anyone who’s tried to take their pet to the veterinarian recently is well aware of the shortage of licensed vets and the lengthy waits for appointments.
But that shortage of veterinary professionals is also causing a crisis at animal shelters across the state — leading to overcrowding, disease outbreaks, adoption delays, and fewer community events like low-cost spaying and neutering and vaccination clinics, according to a survey released Tuesday by the San Francisco SPCA.
It’s also leading to an increase in euthanizing shelter animals across California, the survey found.
More than a third of all shelters in the state report that the lack of veterinary professionals — veterinarians as well as veterinary nurses or technicians — is forcing shelters to “make euthanasia decisions on healthy adoptable animals,” said Dr. Jennifer Scarlett, CEO of the San Francisco SPCA. Statistics on the numbers of animals being put to death at shelters were not available.
The survey found that a lack of money was not the reason shelters have been unable to fill vacant veterinary jobs. Researchers surveyed 111 shelters around the state and found that more than half of the positions that were funded and budgeted were unfilled. The reason? A lack of qualified applicants.
Scarlett said the number of veterinarians quitting the profession — either due to retirement,
stress due to overwork or dissatisfaction with the job — has outpaced the number of graduates from the 32 veterinary schools in the nation. Since 1978, she said, just eight new veterinary schools have been opened while the nation’s population has increased by more than 100 million and pet ownership has increased.
“The profession has not kept up,” she said. “We’re really in a pickle.”
Kate Hurley, director of the Koret Shelter Medicine Program
at UC Davis, said shelters are having the same problem as private veterinary practices, which often have customers waiting weeks or even months for routine appointments that once took days.
The main impact on shelters, she and Scarlett said, is on the spaying and neutering surgeries, which are required in California before cats and dogs can be adopted from shelters. Without enough veterinarians to perform the surgery, the animals linger for longer and shelters
become overcrowded. That leads to outbreaks of diseases, fewer animals being taken into the shelters and more work — and stress — for the veterinary staffers.
In addition to slowing adoptions, the lack of veterinary workers means fewer community programs such as low-cost spaying and neutering and vaccination.
Michael Greenberg, a shelter vet in New Orleans and cofounder of the Veterinary Care Accessibility Project, who helped analyze the study’s results, described the insufficient supply of trained veterinarians as a disheartening problem.
“It’s a heartbreaking one,” he said. “If it was just money, we could say, ‘If we have a couple billion dollars plopped down on us, we can solve the problem.’ ”
Instead, the veterinary experts are looking at short-term solutions like encouraging people to help find lost pets’ owners in their neighborhood instead of immediately taking them to shelters, adopting pets if they can and volunteering at shelters to help with non-veterinary tasks.
Permitting telemedicine video appointments and re-creating training programs to help lure back retirees part time to help with spaying and neutering could also help, along with relaxing licensing requirements to permit out-of-state vets to come into California and run roving clinics.
Meanwhile, they also support legislation that would allow veterinary nurses or technicians to take on more responsibilities in shelters as well as creating new licensed positions that could perform many of the duties of veterinarians. Long term, they said, more veterinary schools need to be opened and more veterinarians trained.
“It’s terrible right now — and it’s going to get worse,” Scarlett said.