We are working as fast as we can to make a dent in the enormous surge in demand for spay and neuter services in SW Michigan. Executive Order 2020-32 (rescinded) shut down all non-essential veterinary care from March 31 to the end of May, which included spay and neuter surgeries.
Unfortunately, that order led to countless litters of unwanted puppies and kittens being born, and an unprecedented need for affordable spay and neuter. Every veterinary clinic in the state of Michigan is under the same pressure to catch up after being unable to do non-essential veterinary services, and that has led to most local vet clinics unable to accept new clients, or appointments being unavailable for 4-6 weeks out.
We are booked through September 10 for male cats, female cats and female dogs over 40 lbs. We do still have available openings for female dogs under 40 lbs, or male dogs of any size. We're only scheduling approx. 6 weeks out at a time. We cannot schedule you beyond September 10 at this time. To schedule, you will need to call. Our online registration remains unavailable at this time. We understand that you may not get through on the phones right away if all available staff is already on the phone, but we can only answer so many incoming calls at a time. We're working through them as efficiently as we can. Leaving a message about scheduling is not effective, as we are having a hard time keeping up on answering incoming calls, checking voicemails, and returning calls. We're prioritizing calls based on the nature of the request, and scheduling is not a top priority over another issue that needs an immediate response.
You can help us get to more phone calls by having all of your information ready when you call us. You will need:
Your calendar, to check your schedule against our available dates
A basic description of your pet including name, approx. age in years/months, approx. weight, color and breed.
to know the services you want done. You can find out what services can be added and get a quote for the cost of services with our Surgery Cost Calculator on our website.
Payment --> You can pay with a debit or credit card by phone. Please have your card with you and ready.
If you are calling to schedule on behalf of someone else, you will also need to know their phone number, email address and home address when calling.
We are limited by space at our current building, and we can only do a specific number of surgeries each day due to our capacity limitations. We will have more space when the Charles & Lynn Zhang Animal Care & Resource Center is complete, however, our move is also delayed due to COVID-19 limits on construction services this spring, and we're looking at moving closer to October/November.
While our service is open to the public, we strongly urge all those who can afford to go to a local vet to do so. Our primary focus has always been, and remains, to get to those pet owners that cannot afford spay or neuter at a vet clinic but still want to have the procedure done.
We hear you. We know you want to get your pet fixed, and we are doing the best we can to keep up during these difficult times.
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