Weslaco has a killing problem.
Unfortunately, the small city has the ugly distinction of being home to the highest-killing animal shelter in Texas, which is the highest-killing state in the nation.
For our beautiful and vibrant community, this awful reality is hard for some residents to accept, but the data do not lie and the numbers come directly from our local shelter: We kill the most healthy, adoptable pets by a long shot.
In fact, the Weslaco shelter kills 58% more pets than the next highest-killing shelter in Texas. The average “save” rate — the number of pets successfully adopted out — for shelters in Texas is more than 80%. Here in Weslaco? About 25%.
This means that 7 out of 10 pets that enter our shelter never make it out alive. A staggering 97% of cats and 65% of dogs are killed. The numbers are incredible.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Two other RGV community shelters killed a similar number of animals recently, but their city leaders committed to change and they are now among some of the best-performing shelters in Texas.
We can stop the killing in Weslaco, too. We have a blueprint for success.
Our city leaders must accept the free expertise and help that is being made available to our shelter by outside experts whose only mission is to transform killing shelters such as the one in Weslaco into models of life saving.
The reforms are simple and attainable without impacting the city’s budget.
First, we must slow the pipeline of animals entering the shelter. Weslaco can do this by taking a non-punitive approach to animal control, working with families and individuals to keep their pets with them, instead of a trip to the pound.
Next, we have to commit to programs focused on saving the lives of the pets that enter and not simply killing them to make space for more.
To this end, the Weslaco shelter must institute a robust adoption and foster program for pets and leverage rescue relationships to transfer pets that need temporary sheltering.
And most critically, since nearly every cat that enters the Weslaco shelter dies, we must implement an outdoor cat population management program to sterilize and vaccinate the cats in our community.
If rounding up cats and killing cats worked to reduce the population, Weslaco would not have a problem with stray or feral cats. The truth is that it doesn’t work and we need an effective, non-lethal plan to reduce the size of the cat colony in our community.
Weslaco kills more than 5,000 healthy, adoptable pets every year and the number continues to increase. That’s nearly 14 pets a day, 7 days a week, every week, non-stop, all year.
We can do better and the help is available. Other local communities have taken the offer to help. Why won’t Mayor David Suarez and our City Commission?
Weslaco, we can stop the killing. Saving lives and doing the right thing in this instance is actually easy, if only our leaders will do it.
Elizabeth Gomez lives in Weslaco.
