MENDOCINO CO., 10/21/26 — Mendocino County has had $408,000 to spay and neuter cats and dogs since last November. As of Tuesday, it had committed about $41,000 of it.
“The ongoing veterinary shortage continues to present challenges in expanding spay and neuter services and identifying opportunities to expend the funds as quickly as anticipated,” Amy Campbell, director of the county’s animal shelter in Ukiah, told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
The gift came from the Margery Pfund Living Trust, restricted to spay and neuter work. Campbell said $20,000 of it has gone, or is going, to three nonprofits that help low-income pet owners pay for surgeries: the Mendocino Spay-Neuter Assistance Program, or SNAP, plus Second Chance and the Eileen Hawthorne Fund, both in Fort Bragg. Another $21,000 went to the county’s third high-volume clinic run by the group Animal Balance, she said.
Mendocino has veterinarians. The state’s licensing file lists 36 vets with current licenses and Mendocino County addresses, more per resident than California as a whole. Half of them were first licensed in 1999 or earlier.
But the county is short on vets doing spay and neuter surgery for shelters and low-cost clinics. County records obtained through a public records request show no staff veterinarian position at the county shelter this spring, and one registered veterinary technician. The shelter’s own spay and neuter surgeries fell from 90 to 142 a month in early 2025 to 31 to 60 a month from February through May of this year.
A survey of 103 California shelters, led by the San Francisco SPCA and published in March, found that no rural shelter in the state directly employs a veterinarian, and that private practice outbids shelter jobs by $50,000 to $100,000 or more.
“We actually have open contracts and money set aside if we can find vets to fill these contracts,” Campbell said in May.
The coast loses its vet
On the coast, the shortage got worse on Oct. 2. That’s the day the Mendocino Coast Humane Society’s only veterinarian left.
The Humane Society’s clinic in Fort Bragg closed to the public. “We currently have no Veterinarian as of 10/2/2026,” its website says. There will be no public access to the clinic, it says, “till we find a full-time veterinarian.”
That one vet did about 1,500 spay and neuter surgeries last year, said Judy Martin, the Humane Society’s executive director. The organization’s tax filings for the last three years each report “over 1,600 low cost spay/neuters,” up from 543 in the year that ended in June 2019.
The vet also removed eyes, amputated legs and cut out masses for people who couldn’t afford a private practice or couldn’t get over the hill to one. And the clinic did public euthanasia five days a week, for about $50, for people with no vet or no money for one. “They’re all these old dying animals,” Martin said.
That service got popular enough that Martin moved her desk out of her office. The old office became a family room where, she said, “you can do it in there and be with your animal.” Since Oct. 2, the Humane Society hasn’t been able to offer that service.
“There’s this huge hole that we filled for the community and the whole county,” Martin said. “Because we’re doing all the spay and neuter for Willits, for Ukiah. I mean, we’re doing Manchester, Point Arena.”
How fast cats breed
In a 2019 study of free-roaming cat populations, published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, researchers built their model on a female breeding first at about 6 months old and having about 1.4 litters a year, averaging 3.5 kittens a litter. Most of those kittens die young. In a 2014 simulation study by many of the same researchers, published in PLOS ONE, unmanaged urban cat populations grew 18% to 20% a year, given enough resources, and an isolated rural one about 5.5%. Where new cats kept showing up, wandering in or dumped by people, holding the numbers down took sterilizing 30% of the unfixed cats every six months, without letup.
Neither study modeled what happens when a county’s spay and neuter capacity drops all at once. Martin calls what she’s seeing a pet-demic.
“It’s like a true pet-demic that we’re having, and they don’t take it seriously,” she said of the county. “They have a lack of spay and neuter. I mean, they expect all of us nonprofits to pick up the slack.”
“They say they also don’t have and can’t find a vet,” she said.
Martin is trying to find one herself. She said she pays about $700 a week for job ads on Indeed, and pays a recruiter on top of that. The posting offers $135,000 to $150,000 a year with relocation and housing help. The Community Foundation of Mendocino County has offered a $20,000 signing bonus for whoever takes the job, she said, and four people have offered up rentals.
The vet who left had been working at pre-pandemic wages, Martin said, and stayed “five years longer than she wanted to stay on the coast. So she was a trooper.”
In the meantime, a doctor out of UC Davis has a company that holds the shelter’s license as its vet of record, Martin said. That lets the Humane Society keep caring for and vaccinating its own animals. A retired coast veterinarian gives one day a week to fix the shelter’s animals before they’re adopted out. Village Veterinary in Mendocino has offered to take complex surgeries.
Money on the table
On Tuesday, Supervisor John Haschak asked Campbell whether the Coast Humane Society could get at least some of the Pfund money for its spay and neuter work.
“We’re open to any opportunity,” Campbell said. “The funds are there.”
She added that she knows the Humane Society “recently lost their vet,” and that she and Martin talk all the time. “She has my cell phone number, my email,” Campbell said. “They pull dogs from us occasionally.”
The county doesn’t have a contract with the Coast Humane Society. The City of Fort Bragg does, Martin said. The city pays a monthly stipend, and the Humane Society takes in strays from inside city limits and handles dog licenses.
“The county has not taken that step to do that with us, but they expect us to do the job,” Martin said. “So if there’s any animal from the coast, from Point Arena to Rockport to even Willits, they’ll tell people to call the Coast Humane Society.”
The county launched a mobile spay and neuter van in January 2025, with early stops in Willits and plans for Laytonville and Hopland, according to a county announcement. Martin said she hasn’t seen it on the coast.
On Tuesday, Campbell told the board the county is working on renting the van to a local veterinarian, who could take it around the county without being tied to shelter hours. The county is considering a discounted rent when it goes to places that need it most, she said, naming Covelo, coastal communities and county reservations. “We are still very early on in the process of this,” she said, “but I’m optimistic.”
In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill creating a shelter-veterinarian license and a license for retired vets who volunteer at shelters, and another that loosens surgery-room rules for high-volume spay and neuter events. Animal Balance, the group that runs Mendocino’s high-volume clinics, was one of that second bill’s sponsors.
The board accepted the morning’s reports unanimously.
Martin has already told the supervisors what she thinks happens next. She said it again Monday, in the room that is her office now.
“If we do not get a vet in here doing that high-volume spay and neuter,” she said, “by springtime, it’s going to be unbelievable. A horror movie.”
Meanwhile Dietrich’s old place in FB still has the sign hanging outside. It’d be great if they could just reopen.
The County is embarrassing and should have stepped up with a contract with both Humane Society locations in the County. The Coast is particularly bad where they expect people to pay licensing fees to them but them don’t provide any services. I am proud that the City of Fort Bragg contracts with the Humane Society and supports their important community services through a monthly stipend. The County should do the same rather than just hoarding funding to pay for their overhead that doesn’t really provide services to anyone on the Coast.