Strut Your Mutt is Coming!
Mark you calendar for Saturday, August 22 for Stockton Animal Shelter Friends’ tenth annual Strut Your Mutt Pet Fair benefiting local shelter animals at Victory Park in Stockton. City Community Services will also be opening up the Victory Park pool for "Dog Day Afternoon" doggie swimming where you and your dog can swim together.
This is the big fundraiser for animals that have run out of chances and are at the municipal shelter. You can help them find homes by getting pledges for your "Strut." Prizes will be awarded to those raising the most pledges as follows:
Adults
- 1st Place: One night at Harrahs Lake Tahoe with show tickets
- 2nd Place: Napa Wine Train trip for two
Kids
- 1st Place: Two tickets to the San Diego Zoo
- 2nd Place: $75 Target Gift Card
Use the Strut Your Mutt registration and pledge form to gather your pledges.
All pledges of $100 and over will be entered in a drawing for other fabulous prizes! Each hundred dollars in pledges earns one ticket for the drawing.
Registration begins at 9:00 a.m. for the strut and the swim. There will also be contests, swimming races, raffle prizes, exhibitions, a snack bar and vendor booths for a full day of Fido Fun!
For more information about the Strut Your Mutt Pet Fair, call SASF at 937-7096 or 639-2633. Stockton Animal Shelter Friends is a non-profit, all-volunteer organization with the mission of improving the welfare of companion animals in our community and reducing pet overpopulation.
Register early and get started on your pledges! Call Sue at 639-2633 to receive pledge forms or download one here:
Strut Your Mutt registration and pledge form (3 MB Adobe PDF file)
Our Spring Newsletter is Here
The Spring 2009 edition of our newsletter, The Animal Advocate, is now available for your reading pleasure! (Adobe PDF, requires Adobe Reader to view.)
First Spay/Neuter Day
by Deputy Chief Tammie Murrell of the Stockton Police Department
On Sunday, December 7, 2008, the Pet Overpopulation Task Force made significant progress toward reducing the euthanasia rates of healthy animals in the City of Stockton. With funding raised through Stockton Animal Shelter Friends, a portion of the existing City of Stockton Animal Shelter at 1575 S. Lincoln St. was converted into a surgical suite.
Fifteen volunteers including two veterinarians donated their time and services to work on spaying and neutering free roaming cats and shelter cats and dogs. Three of these volunteers, Dr. Lowell Novy, Registered Veterinary Technician (RVT) Diane Bentz and Technician Chris Bowman, came all the way from Simi Valley, CA to assist us with our first clinic! Dr. Novy and Diane Bentz founded Valley Veterinary Clinic Charitable Non-Profit Corporation, a group dedicated to ending euthanasia of healthy animals through population control by making affordable, high volume spay/neuter services available. This is the model that the Stockton program is attempting to emulate.
The photo at left is Diane and Chris prepping our first customer, a free roaming cat trapped and delivered to us by a compassionate citizen who has agreed to see to it that he has adequate food and shelter in the future. We named him Uno, and felt he was a good first patient for us because he epitomizes the philosophy of the Trap/Neuter/Return (TNR) program that we are implementing. Diane and Chris taught our volunteers the tricks of high volume surgery preparation.
Dr. Novy and Pet Overpopulation Task Force member Dr. Julie Damron (at the sink) scrubbing before surgery. Dr. Novy spayed 19 cats and two dogs; Dr. Damron spayed two cats and neutered 17 cats in less than five hours!
This is Uno after his surgery. You can see that we removed the tip of his right ear so that he can be easily identified as a sterilized cat. We also gave the cats and dogs rabies vaccinations, checked them for injuries, fleas, and ear mites.
Once we got going, we tried to keep two cats on the prep tables and two cats on the surgery tables at all times.
We named this cat Jet because she is very fast and escaped her cage. She is one of eight cats caught by a citizen in the Louis Park area. This citizen has been managing the colony at Louis Park for some time with her own money. Our plan is to help her and other feral cat colony managers in the future with very low cost surgeries.
This is our operating room; small, but it gets the job done.
Here are three of our volunteers who worked the recovery room. Cheri, holding up the tubing, just finished training to become an RVT. She vaccinated the cats and removed the endotracheal tubes after surgery. Because we had a number of cats recovering at any given time, we needed other volunteers to heat up and change warming pads and keep eyes on the cats to make certain they were not in distress. Once the cats started waking up, they were placed back in their cages or carriers. The cat in the cage is feral, and because he does not like human contact, we put him back in his trap to wake up. Once he was fully awake, we called his caregiver so he could be released back to his colony.
Here are eleven of our fifteen volunteers after we completed the inaugural spay/neuter day. Final statistics are:
- 15 Volunteers, including 2 veterinarians, and 9 with veterinary technician training
- 40 sterilizations; 21 cat spays, 2 dog spays and 17 cat neuters
- 21 cats are now sterilized, vaccinated and microchipped. They are waiting for new homes and can be adopted at the Shelter for $61 (normal adoption fees are $128.75 for a female and $113.75 for a male)
Our first spay/neuter day was very successful. You can help ensure that we have many more sucessful spay/neuter days by making a donation to:
Stockton Animal Shelter Friends
Spay/Neuter Clinic Fund
PO Box 1863
Stockton, CA 95201
You can also donate via PayPal using the PayPal button on the right. Please specify that you want the donation to go to the spay/neuter clinic. Remember, you don’t need a PayPal account in order to donate online.