Tufts Clinic Spays 100 Cats in a Day

Monday, June 11, 2012

Ashley Klann, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

Tufts' veterinary school worked hard to help the community, spaying and neutering 100 cats in a single day. The group from the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine teamed up with volunteers, community members, and students to help solve a serious problem with their largest single-day event.

“Cats typically have three to five cats per litter, so the community cat population can grow exponentially,” said Dr. Emily McCobb DVM. “Spaying 100 cats in a single day will have a marked impact on the feral population in Greater Worcester.”

This one-day “Super Clinic” involved use of the Catmobile, the mobile, low-cost spay/neuter unit run by the Merrimack River Feline Rescue, which has been used throughout Worcester County.

Roughly half of the cats were rounded up from Worcester’s Main South neighborhood, targeted by the Spay Worcester project as an area with a particular abundance of unaltered stray cats.

The other two surgical sites were both on the Tufts campus, at the Luke and Lily Lerner Spay/Neuter Clinic and the on-campus wet lab. Fourth-year veterinary students performed the surgeries under the supervision of faculty veterinarians.

Led by McCobb, DVM, director of the school’s Shelter Medicine Program, six veterinarians, more than 30 students and community volunteers, including Elizabeth Evans and Nancy Meyer, participated in the effort, which included trapping stray cats over two days and spaying them on Sunday on the Cummings School’s Grafton campus.

The Shelter Medicine Program at Tufts oversees a number of similar efforts, but this Sunday’s clinic was the largest single-day event. Other activities include weekly high-quality, high-volume spay and neuter clinics for local shelters and an annual dental day for shelter dogs.

A task force of the Massachusetts Animal Coalition, Spay Worcester was formed to address the large problem of free-roaming unaltered cats in the city. The group is seeking to maximize the impact of spay/neuter efforts by targeting a specific area in Worcester’s underserved Main South area. Task force members include the Cummings School, the Worcester Animal Rescue League, Shrewsbury Animal Control Officer Leona Pease and Karen Powers of Worcester, who chairs the task force.