Animal Care Services Director Jonathan Gary said Tuesday that of the roughly 7,700 pets brought into city clinics for free veterinary and wellness services this year, only about a third were sterilized.
The wellness clinics are something the city has been ramping up for several years now to help pet owners access free vaccines and microchips.
While their patients aren’t necessarily a representative sample group, ACS has been using them to collect data that now offers some of the best tools the city has for assessing its owned animal population, as well as the community’s sentiments about pet care.
“The services include the microchips, vaccines for both dogs and cats, and we’re seeing about 33% of the animals that come to those wellness clinics are sterilized,” Gary told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday. “We want to see that number much higher, … but that has given us somewhat of an idea that about a third of the pets are sterilized in our community.”
A 2019 study estimated that about 35,000 dogs were living unrestrained on San Antonio’s streets.
Since then San Antonio has been spending big to expand its free spay/neuter services to help cut down on the number of stray and roaming animals, including opening new community clinics on the East Side and West Side earlier this year.
Like the city’s other partner clinics, however, appointments are already booked out for months, Gary said, meaning there’s still more demand for services than the city is able to provide.
In the 2025 fiscal year that ended in September, ACS reported 39,400 spay/neuter surgeries performed either on site at the city’s shelter, in its community clinics or by partner organizations the city pays to provide services to the public.
That’s about a 17% increase from the previous fiscal year, but Gary said they’re still limited by a national vet shortage, making it tough to ramp up much further.
The new community clinics are only open Tuesday through Thursday at this point. They’re on track to perform as many surgeries as expected, but ACS wanted them to have weekend openings, and haven’t been able to staff them yet.
“We believe we’re going to easily hit our goal, 41,459 [total surgeries for fiscal year 2026], as long as we can keep veterinarians,” Gary said Tuesday. “Veterinarians are always going to be the biggest struggle.”
The city expects to partner with Bissell Pet Foundation on another spay/neuter initiative in the coming year, and will also break ground on a new animal hospital at its Westside shelter that was part of the city’s 2022 bond program.
The toughest job in San Antonio?
Gary’s presentation to the Public Safety Committee was part of a broader update on how the Animal Care Services department is using its substantial budget increases the council approved in recent years.
City leaders’ focus on the department ramped up after 81-year-old Ramon Najera was mauled to death by two dogs in early 2023, but the department struggled to scale up quickly with the additional funds and spent more than six months without a director at the end of 2024.
Gary, who came from a municipal shelter in Oklahoma City, started in the role at the beginning of 2025.
He told the council Tuesday that nearly all of the open staff positions have now been filled, the department is responding to most calls for services from the public, and they’re making progress on the number of pet adoptions facilitated from their shelter.
With more staff has come more animal intakes, however, and the percent of healthy animals making it out of the shelter alive was about 86.3% in fiscal year 2025 — less than the 90% required for a shelter to meet “no kill” status.
Gary said San Antonio now has the highest intake numbers of any single facility in the entire country, taking in 2,000 more animals than the previous year.
Yet so far, the live release rate for this fiscal year is at about 88%, thanks to more adoption events, an updated website and special program to help market large dogs, which have the hardest time finding homes.
On a national level, Gary said that animal rescue leaders agree that few cities have taken on as many life-saving initiatives as San Antonio, from the spay/neuter programs to efforts aimed at preventing animals from being surrendered and its adoption partnerships.
Now at about the one-year mark, Gary said that’s what attracted him to the challenging job in the first place — one that the city hard a hard time filling, and that his predecessor predicted no one could succeed at.
“Being in this business as long as I have, and having been able to be fortunate enough to travel all over the country … that’s what got me here, that’s made me want to come to San Antonio,” he said. “We are doing more than anywhere else in the country.”