EP35: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Spay with Karen Slomba

Episode 35: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Spay

Karen Slomba went “from football to felines.” She left a career promoting concerts and producing sports TV, started volunteering at an animal shelter, and was soon running it. Watching so many kittens arrive with nowhere to go convinced her that prevention was the only real answer. In 2020, when the pandemic cut spay/neuter to a trickle, she and fellow Florida shelter leaders started sending vet teams to each other’s shelters. That grew into Slomba Shelter Solutions, which now brings weekend pop-up surgery teams to shelters and clinics in most states.

Karen and host Brianna Lovell Myers talk frankly about veterinary recruitment. Vets hold the cards now, and a job description isn’t an ad, so shelters have to market themselves the way adopters meet a FeLV-positive cat: let them fall in love first. They also cover the new wet lab partnership between Slomba and United Spay Alliance. It uses “high quality, high efficiency” framing to bring in private practice vets, so that communities can clear their own backlogs for good.

Karen closes with advice for anyone who wants to work in animal welfare but doesn’t think they’re qualified: don’t talk yourself out of it.

In this episode you will hear:

Why “turning off the faucet” beats mopping up the floor
How a pandemic workaround became a national spay/neuter relief service
What vet recruitment really takes now, from salary to four-day weeks
Why your job description isn’t your recruitment ad
How “high efficiency” framing brings private practice vets on board
The math on doing five or six surgeries an hour without losing money
New national funding for spay/neuter from the ASPCA, Bissell, and the Duffield Foundation
Karen’s advice for career changers with a heart for animals

Resources from this episode:

Slomba Shelter Solutions
Slomba Shelter Solutions on Facebook
United Spay Alliance HQHVSN Wet Labs
United Spay Alliance State Leader Network
Trap Dat Cat
Haven on Earth Animal League
2026 ASPCA Grants for Shelters and Spay/Neuter Clinics