Florida Veterinary Hospital’s annual spay day
43 Animals were sterilised thanks to kind-hearted volunteers.
On Saturday, May 6, Florida Veterinary Hospital had its annual Spay Day where numerous residents brought their pets to be sterilised.
The initiative aimed to help families, who can not afford to take their animals to the vet, sterilise their animals at no cost. The funding for the event comes from donations and fundraising initiatives and all the people who helped out were volunteers.
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The initiative started with Karen Loots from Pets & Animals in Need (Pain) who approached the hospital in 2018, with the idea to start an initiative to help the underprivileged communities in the area. She planned to book as many unsterilised pets as they could from the communities and chose a day when they can collect all the animals and take them to the hospital where they performed the surgeries at no cost to the families.
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“Florida Vet Hospital has been around since 1972 and has looked after many generations of family pets. However, we are surrounded by many underprivileged communities that cannot afford basic health care for themselves let alone for their pets – and as a practice, we decided to ‘adopt’ two organisations that work in these poor communities but do not receive any government funding. We work closely with Cora Bailey from Community Led Animal Welfare (CLAW) and Karen Loots from Pain,” explained Tracy Topper.
The first spay day took place in 2018, in 2020 and 2021 it was however cancelled due to Covid and in 2022 they had trouble with funding, but now they are up and running again and looking forward to hosting many more spay days.
“We are very happy to be able to host our first spay day in 3 years. The more animals that are sterilised the fewer unwanted litters of puppies and kittens there will be,” said Tracy.
On Saturday they were able to sterilise 43 animals. 18 students from Onderstepoort came to support the initiative, four doctors, two nurses, and other staff from Florida Vet as well as two outside vets.
“This is our way of giving back to communities less fortunate than ours,” concluded Tracy.
