May 21, 2026
By Brianna Lovell Myers, Executive Director of United Spay Alliance
Janet Showley has spent nine years as the director of a small rural shelter in Indiana. She knows what it looks like when a community is doing everything right and still losing ground — too many animals, not enough funding, not enough support, and a waiting list for spay/neuter services that stretches weeks or months into the future.
Janet is part of the team at Pet Friendly Services of Indiana, United Spay Alliance’s Indiana State Leader, and she’s spent recent years visiting rural shelters across the state through spay/neuter assistance and support programs. Recently, she put it plainly in a post that resonated far beyond Indiana: “No matter where I go, I hear the same challenges.”
Her prescription for turning it around? Spay/neuter is number one.
Not because the other pieces don’t matter (she lists nine more, and they’re all important) but because prevention is what makes the rest of the work sustainable. Fewer unplanned litters means lower intake. Lower intake means more breathing room. More breathing room means the difference between an organization that is constantly reacting to a crisis and one that can actually build something durable.
That’s not a new argument. It’s the one we’ve been making for decades. But hearing it from someone who has lived the rural shelter reality, and seeing it resonate with practitioners, funders, and advocates across the country, is a reminder that the field knows what works. The challenge is keeping that knowledge at the center of how we talk, plan, and fund.
The Attention Problem
Here’s what makes rural communities especially hard: the work that matters most is largely invisible.
When a surgery happens — when a cat is spayed in a low-income neighborhood, when a rural shelter finds the funding and the veterinary capacity to finally chip away at its waitlist — there’s no dramatic rescue. No photos of frightened animals being pulled from a transport van. No moment of obvious crisis averted. Just one more animal who won’t contribute to the next generation of shelter intake.
It’s exactly the kind of win that’s easy to overlook, especially in a field that has spent years learning to tell emotionally compelling stories about the animals already in crisis. Those stories are true, and they matter. But they’ve also had a quiet consequence: the funding, the attention, and the narrative energy of animal welfare have gradually shifted downstream, toward rescue, transport, and adoption, while prevention has receded from center stage.
This is the concern driving United Spay Alliance’s Keeper of the Flame Task Force, a working group meeting monthly to address exactly this problem. The Task Force exists because prevention, and spay/neuter specifically, keeps losing ground in the broader conversation: among animal welfare organizations, among funders, and in the public imagination. Their work is to pull spay/neuter stories and successes forward, to build strategies and templates that advocates can use in their own communities, and to make sure that the solution with the strongest long-term track record doesn’t keep getting treated as optional.
It is not optional. It is foundational. And in rural communities, where the infrastructure is thinnest and the need is most acute, it is where the work should focus.
What’s Different About Rural
The barriers aren’t just financial, though those are real. In rural communities, the distance to a low-cost spay/neuter clinic can be prohibitive on its own; an hour or more each way, for a procedure that requires a follow-up, for a family without reliable transportation. Veterinary capacity, including private vet offices, is scarce. When spay/neuter services do exist, the waitlists can be months long — long enough for an unplanned litter to arrive and compound the problem before the appointment ever happens.
And rural shelters, as Janet describes, are often operating at the edge of what’s sustainable. Small staff, limited funding, and little margin for the kind of investment in prevention infrastructure that would reduce their workload over time.
This is why United Spay Alliance’s hands-on training program matters so much. When we equip a veterinarian with high-quality, high-efficiency spay/neuter skills, we’re not just adding one more practitioner to the pool. We’re adding hundreds (or more!) of surgeries to the capacity of a region that needs them.
In March, our training lab in Elkhart, Indiana turned six veterinarians into confident canine spay/neuter providers in a single day. Average confidence in canine spay rose from 2.6 to 4.1. Those veterinarians will be serving rural Indiana communities for years.
To date, United Spay Alliance has facilitated 24 training events in nine states, providing hands-on learning to 103 veterinarians who now have more skills, experience, and confidence to add to the spay/neuter capacity in their communities.
That’s what going upstream looks like in practice.
The Conversation Is Growing
Janet’s post sparked a broader response, like this one here, and not only from shelter workers. Others in veterinary medicine and animal welfare policy are starting to name the same pattern from different angles: that spay/neuter has been underfunded and underframed for too long, and that the field needs to reckon with what it would look like to treat prevention as infrastructure rather than as one program among many.
We don’t have all those conversations mapped out yet. But we’re paying attention, and we think the momentum is real.
Julie Jacobson Knows the Terrain
Nobody illustrates the rural access challenge, and the possibility of meeting it, better than Julie Jacobson.
Julie grew up in Minnesota, retired from the U.S. Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel in 2002, and got pulled into animal welfare the way a lot of us do: she adopted a dog. A pit mix named Kalamity Jane. And that was that.
For twenty years she ran a spay/neuter assistance program for her county in Tennessee, a county with no animal control, no shelter, and no veterinarian. Since 2010, she’s been building and networking across the state as Spay Tennessee. Like Janet, she’s a member of United Spay Alliance’s State Leader Network, and her work is a living example of what a determined State Leader can build over time in some of the hardest terrain in the country.
Julie speaks, as she puts it, “rural reality.” She knows what it takes to build a functional spay/neuter network from the ground up, in communities where the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet and the odds aren’t particularly favorable. The bottom line, spay/neuter is in fact, a public health and safety issue. And at our October 2025 virtual conference, she laid out exactly how Tennessee has done it, and how the lessons translate to other states.
We’re releasing that session now, because the conversation it starts is one the field needs to keep having.