Animal-Angels Foundation

09/01/2026

Alabama has been funding spay/neuter since 2009. Almost nobody in animal welfare here seems to know it.

There is a specialty license plate. It costs $50. Of that, $35.06 goes to paying veterinarians for spay/neuter surgeries on the pets of Medicaid families. Since 2009 that plate and a tax return check-off have put $2,495,848 into sterilization and paid for 42,677 surgeries.

So the question of whether this state believes prevention is worth public money is already answered. It answered yes in 2007, before most of the field was having the conversation.

Here is the part I did not expect.
Divide those surgeries by the seventeen years the program has run and you get about 2,510 a year. Alabama has 5,157,699 people. That is 0.49 surgeries per thousand residents per year.

The working benchmark from practitioners who have built these programs is that three to four per thousand still lets a pet population grow, five to six holds it flat, and seven to eight starts bringing it down. Field-derived guidance, not peer-reviewed research, and I present it that way.

Against that, the state program is running at about six percent of the dose.

That is not a criticism of the foundation administering it. They are doing what the revenue allows, and the revenue was capped by a decision made in 2007 that nobody has revisited.

Then there is the geography. The participating clinic list, updated in April, has 33 veterinary hospitals in the whole state, sitting in 19 counties. Alabama has 67. So 48 Alabama counties contain no clinic that participates in the state spay/neuter program. If you are on Medicaid in one of those counties, the help exists and you cannot reach it.

Five of the seven counties Animal-Angels Foundation serves have none.

The honest version of this argument is not that Alabama has done nothing. Alabama built the right thing and then never sized it. The debate is not whether to start funding prevention. It is why we stopped at six percent.

And one fix needs no legislature at all.

Enrollment is a form signed by the veterinarians in the practice, a W-9, and an address in Pike Road. The state pays $100 for a dog spay on top of what your client pays.
If you are a veterinarian in one of those 48 counties, that is a phone call.

New on The Shift to Prevention: https://conta.cc/3V7I6As

08/18/2026

Looking for a vet

Please take a look!

08/18/2026

"We've been doing spay/neuter for years and nothing has changed."

I hear that a lot, and I understand why. You buy the surgeries. You run the clinic days. You open the annual report and intake went up again.

Here is what is actually happening.
Spaying a cat in March does not prevent an intake this year. It prevents the litter that would have come in the fall, and the litters those kittens would have had next spring.

That absence does not reach a shelter's front desk until about year three. There is no line on any report for kittens that were never born, which means years one and two are supposed to look flat. That is also exactly when the funding usually gets cut.

There is a second piece. The number of surgeries has to match the size of the community. Roughly eight surgeries per 1,000 residents per year, held for five years, is what it takes to cut shelter intake close to in half. Most programs are running at two to four. That is not a failed program. That is a program that was never funded to win.

Blount County has about 60,000 people and took in around 2,270 animals last year. Eight per 1,000 means about 480 surgeries minimum. Every year. For five years.

Spay/neuter works. It just does not work on a one-year budget cycle, and we have been grading it like it should.

New article, link below.

https://conta.cc/3SeAnzK

08/11/2026

COUNT ME IN. Become a Founding Supporter 2026.

Something is happening in Blount County. Neighbors, businesses, town councils, and the Animal Adoption Center of Blount County are coming together to keep pets and families together, with vaccine, rabies, heartworm testing/prevention and spay/neuter clinics coming to the county. Now you can wear it.

Make a gift of $35 or more and we will send you the COUNT ME IN shirt, with Founding Supporter 2026 on the left sleeve. Every net dollar goes straight to the Blount County Pet Community Project. Pick your size, and choose whether to have it shipped or grab it at your local town hall.

Prefer to give without a shirt? Any amount helps, and it all goes to the same place.

Show your Blount County Pet Community Project Pride. You'll be part of the first county in Alabama to come together as a county to reduce shelter intakes and feral cat populations.

Together, we can make a difference.

Animal-Angels Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 41-3166394. Your contribution is tax-deductible to the extent it exceeds the fair market value of the shirt you receive (approximately $18).

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/count-me-in-founding-supporter-shirt

Founding Supporter 2026 only available through Dec 31, 2026.

08/11/2026

We filed the wrong problem under "animal welfare," and it has cost us for forty years.

The loose dog on the road. The kid nipped at the bus stop. The Nextdoor thread about the pack down by the creek. Everyone is upset, nobody knows who to call, and next week it is the same dogs.

That problem got filed under "animal welfare," which most people read as a cause for the animal lovers. That filing is exactly why nobody with a budget is fixing it.

This was never about loving animals. It is public health and public safety.

Think about why you do not lie awake worried about rabies. Because this country decided pets get vaccinated. That decision is the firewall between wildlife rabies and your family. The WHO still counts about 59,000 human rabies deaths a year worldwide, almost all from dog bites, almost all where routine dog vaccination was never built. We built it. But a firewall with holes is not a firewall, and in rural counties an hour from an affordable vet, the wall has holes.

Add the CDC's 4.5 million dog bites a year, about 800,000 needing medical care, children taking the worst of it. Add parvo running through unvaccinated dogs like fire through dry grass. Every one of these runs on the same engine: unaltered, unvaccinated animals and no affordable way to change that.

And you are already paying, on the back end where it costs most: roughly $900 per shelter intake, the ER visit, the animal control truck. The bill comes either way. The only choice is whether you pay a little at the front or a lot at the back, forever.

We do not call clean water a hobby for water lovers. Pet vaccination and spay/neuter access are infrastructure. They just got filed under feelings.

Full post: shift.animal-angelsfoundation.org

08/10/2026

Here is the hard part about getting help to the people who need it most. A lot of them will never see this post.

The neighbor down the road whose dog had another litter this spring. The older folks on
a fixed income who love their cat but cannot get her to a vet. The homebound, the ones
without internet, the families stretched too thin to go looking for help. Those are exactly
the people the Blount County Pet Community Project is here for, and they are the hardest ones for us to reach online.

So this is where you come in.

Share this page with your friends, sure. But more than that, tell somebody in person.
Check on the neighbor who never gets out. Mention it to the older couple at church. Tell
the family down the road that free spay/neuter, shots, and microchipping are coming to
Blount County, and nobody has to prove they deserve it.

And if you know someone who needs this and cannot get online, do not leave them out.

They can call us at (205) 754-7542, or you can pass their name along and we will reach
out ourselves.

This is how a county takes care of its own. Not through a screen. Through neighbors.
Share it. Say it out loud. Bring someone with you.

08/09/2026

For those in need immediately here's a great option for low cost spay/neuter now.

08/08/2026

Something is happening in Blount County that has never happened anywhere in Alabama.

Everybody here has seen it. A box at the end of a driveway. A skinny dog on the shoulder of a county road. A cat under the porch with her third litter of the year. None of it happens because people here do not care. It happens because out in a rural county, a spay or neuter costs more than a stretched family has, and the nearest clinic is a tank of gas and a day off work away.

The Blount County Pet Community Project is how the county fixes that itself. Free spay/neuter clinics that come to your town, with rabies shots, core vaccines, a microchip, and heartworm testing all in one stop. Plus the county's first community cat TNVR program. No cost. No income paperwork. No proving you deserve it.

This project belongs to Blount County. To the towns, the businesses, the churches, and the neighbors who put their names on it. When it works, the credit goes to the county.

Follow along and find out when the clinics are coming to your part of the county:

https://www.facebook.com/BlountCountyPets/

Want to help make it happen:

https://animal-angelsfoundation.org/BlountCountyProject.html

08/05/2026

It is the 5th. Here is your five dollars.

The $5 on the 5th Challenge is live. Five dollars a month, recurring, funding the Bridge. That is the program that steps in when a family hits the wall. Emergency vet care. Pet food when the budget breaks. Help with a housing deposit that would otherwise force a surrender.

Here is what your five actually does. Twenty Prevention Partners at $5 a month covers a month of emergency pet food for a family in crisis. Forty covers a vet visit that would have ended in a surrender. Two hundred covers a housing deposit and keeps an entire household together.

We do not compete with shelters. We reduce what lands on their doorstep. Every dollar of this goes upstream, before separation becomes the only option.

Become a Prevention Partner today. Five dollars, the 5th of every month, and you never think about it again.

https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/donation-form/dollar5-on-the-5th-challenge

08/04/2026

Tomorrow is the 5th.

Somewhere in Central Alabama tomorrow, a family is going to sit down at their kitchen table and do the math on a vet bill they cannot cover. That is where surrender starts. Not at the shelter door. At the table.

The $5 on the 5th Challenge is our answer. Five dollars a month, on the 5th of every month, straight into the Bridge. Food, gas, a vet visit, a deposit. Whatever it takes to keep a pet home.

Five dollars will not change your life. Pooled with everyone else's five, on the same day, every month, it changes theirs.

We go live tomorrow. Set a reminder.