By Joe ANuta
Bob Barker would be proud.
An animal clinic opened the first phase of its citywide headquarters for spay and neuter operations in Atlas Terminals in Glendale Friday in order to combat the rising pet population in the city.
“We have a pet overpopulation crisis in New York,” said Aimee Christian, vice president of Spay and Neuter Operations for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “Our goal is to reduce, and ultimately end, overpopulation.”
The ASPCA rented two brick buildings in the small industrial area near the Cooper Avenue and 80th Street.
The first building is the garage for the society’s six mobile surgery units, where spay and neuter operations are performed around the city. Each of the box trucks that will call the garage home is 37-feet long and houses a mini-hospital.
Until last week, these roving medical teams were stored at various places around the city, but Christian said they needed a garage to call their own.
“This is our home base,” she said.
The other building at Atlas Terminals is for the ASPCA’s first permanent spay and neuter facility in the city, which should be open in early April.
Christian said the permanent facility will act as a complement to the mobile units, and in some cases will allow the animals to stay longer and have a more complete recovery.
But since pet owners outside of the neighborhood might want to use the facility, the ASPCA plans to buy vehicles to transport pets from around the city to the Glendale location.
“One of the big roadblocks of having a stationary facility is getting people to you,” Christian said.
Each year Christian said that about 40,000 animals find their way into the city’s shelter system, where many have to be killed.
“That’s a pretty bad reason to be euthanized,” she said.
But the organization has tried to curb that number through spay and neuter surgeries, where dogs and cats are made incapable of reproducing. In 2009 and 2010, veterinarians performed more than 30,000 spay and neuter surgeries per year.
The operations were all done in five of the mobile surgery units, since has a sixth is used for training.
The trucks have monthly schedules of their whereabouts and offer a portion of their surgeries for free to low-income pet owners who want to spay and neuter their dogs, Christian said.
Once the truck arrives at its location, ASPCA workers corral about 40 pets, give them physical examinations, perform the minutes-long surgery and then allow the animals to recuperate for at least an hour, Christan said.
“It’s very routine,” she said. “Our doctors are the best at what they do.”
Aside from curbing the population of unwanted pets, the surgery would also stop undesirable behaviors and association with the mating process, like aggressiveness and marking territory — which is often shared with owners — with urine.
“It keeps animals in the homes and out of the shelters,” Christian said.
Reach reporter Joe Anuta by e-mail at januta@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4566.
