Episode 3: Transcript
The Real Price of Pet Ownership
Montage:
Think about feeding 29 cats every morning. I couldn’t afford to do that.
$200, $250 you spend on food. Then all of a sudden you gotta learn to cut their nails. You gotta give ‘em a bath. You gotta do this, you gotta do that. It gets to be a lot of money.
When my old men cat started getting sick and one got very sick very fast, I had to do an emergency situation and I ended up just sort of going onto Facebook and my friends and going, please send me money, and people did. And it was a few thousand I think, because he was quite sick and he was in there a few days.
It’s extremely expensive cat food. And I use my food stamps. I buy tuna fish ‘cause they love it. So sometimes my whole food stamps go on tuna fish.
I was just laughing at the guy at BJ’s ‘cause I just saw him two weeks ago. I just spent $400. I said, that’s $800 in one month!
Will Zweigart: We live in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Add that to the rising cost of pet care. We’re now living in a city where the average household can afford zero pets.
Virginia Marshall: We shouldn’t be okay with that idea that only the very wealthy can afford a dog or a cat. It’s an equity issue, and when people are being forced to surrender their pets or go into debt to keep a member of the family alive, that becomes a mental health issue and a financial emergency.
Will Zweigart: So we have to ask: who deserves to know the love and joy and companionship of a pet? And what is the real cost of keeping pets out of reach for so many? I’m Will Zweigart, Executive Director of Flatbush Cats.
Virginia Marshall: And I’m Virginia Marshall, Audio Producer. You’re listening to Underfoot, a podcast about the hidden cat crisis in New York City and how we can solve it.
Miss Pam: Prince. Prince. Prince. Oh, hi Mr. Hello.
Virginia Marshall: This is Miss Pam. She lives in Flatbush, and for the past 10 years or so, she’s been feeding cat colonies in her neighborhood.
Miss Pam: If I go two blocks over, or two blocks that way, I always see them so I always carry my wagon and carry food for them. I just wanna always make sure they’re never hungry.
Virginia Marshall: Miss Pam has a big heart. Such a big heart that she sometimes uses her own food stamps on tuna fish for the cats.
Miss Pam: With the food stamps, it’s like $200. So sometimes I spend 150.
Sarah: You have $200…
Miss Pam: In food stamps.
Sarah: A month?
Miss Pam: Yeah. In food stamps.
Sarah: And you often…
Miss Pam: Spend $150.
Sarah: ...towards tuna.
Miss Pam: I don’t know why it was more important than my food. It’s just an innate thing that you know inside that you gotta take care of the animals.
Virginia Marshall: But food is just the first expense that comes with cat care. There are shots and vaccinations, flea treatment, and deworming, spay and neuter surgeries. And Miss Pam was all in, for all of it. She used to take the neighborhood cats to a vet clinic on Flatbush Avenue.
Miss Pam: But I spent so much money there, it just messed up my credit. And I did it for the cats and I’m not sad that I did it because they got the care that they needed. But just to go in and look at the damn vet it’s like $200, and that’s not even for the other things. I knew I couldn’t afford it, but I guess I’m selfish and I just wanted to say, take care of this damn cat whatever you do, I don’t care what it costs, I’ll pay later.
Sarah: I think that’s the opposite of selfish.
Miss Pam: But I couldn’t continue it ‘cause I just messed up my credit.
Virginia Marshall: So Miss Pam started bringing cats to the Humane Society in Manhattan. This was much more affordable, especially back then.
Miss Pam: It probably cost us something like $30. This is like 10 years ago, right?
Virginia Marshall: At that price point, Miss Pam could afford to bring in a lot of cats. And often.
Miss Pam: Like, twice a week I was doing it. I had my wagon that I get food in, and I used to put like three little carriers in the wagon and my mother says, are you crazy? We’re gonna go down the stairs in a subway like that? You could get hurt. The cats could get hurt.
I’m like, Mom, it’s okay. I do it all the time. But sometimes I needed her help and she thought I was nuts, but it was so cheap back then. When we’re done, the cats are much better, and they get their shots. I did that for like, years.
Virginia Marshall: But in the past few years, vet care and pet food has gotten so expensive that Miss Pam wasn’t sure how she could continue caring for the cats and that’s when she heard about Flatbush Cats and in particular, Ryan Tarpey, the community program manager.
Miss Pam: But now, thank goodness, I get food from Ryan, food from here, food from there. I could call Ryan, I have no cat food I’m on zero, and in a minute, I have cat food. So, I could go to bed at night since I don’t have to worry because eventually I know the cats are gonna be all right.
Virginia Marshall: Miss Pam is grateful for the help from Flatbush Cats because it allows her to continue the work that she loves. Now, with reliable pet food and access to a network of volunteers, who can help her find free or low cost veterinary care, she can see the impact in her neighborhood.
Miss Pam: So it’s a big difference, and you could see it when you walk down that block. There’s not a hundred cats looking for food, some pregnant, some are not. You wake up in the morning and you’re so much happier. You feel so much better, but you knew you helped.
Virginia Marshall: Ryan always helped Miss Pam when she was in need, so when he showed up one afternoon with a big bag of cat food, Miss Pam was relieved.
Miss Pam: Oh my God. Ryan, I got cat food. Where the hell is Ryan? That’s for me? What did I tell you? I tell you he always comes to the fricking rescue, man. I’m telling you. Thank you, Ryan. I didn’t see that.
Virginia Marshall: Miss Pam is such a great speaker and one of the volunteers really carrying the system, and she mentioned the cost of pet food there and the vet bills and how she sometimes uses her EBT money on food for the cats. So I wanna break down that statistic that you gave in the beginning, will. What do we mean when we say the average New Yorker can’t afford to own a pet?
Will Zweigart: Yeah, we’ve looked at a bunch of different third party data, but it all comes down to the broader affordability crisis. More than half of New Yorkers can no longer afford a basic vet visit, and that is largely because we don’t have any more discretionary money to spend. We’re spending all of our money on rent and housing and things like that.
Cost of basic supplies, like pet food, have also gone up like everything else, and we know that two thirds of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Pet ownership has always been described from the IRS’s standpoint, from a financial standpoint, as a discretionary expense. So when New Yorkers and Americans can’t afford the basics, they can’t afford the extras.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, and another thing I heard in Miss Pam’s story there, is that vet appointments, for her, used to be affordable. She said she used to take kittens that she was trapping to be spayed or neutered in Manhattan for $30 a pop. That was 15 years ago. So Will, what is it now?
Will Zweigart: So we’ve called around and we’ve done some benchmarking. And we found, in New York City right now in 2025, that many veterinary clinics are charging around a thousand dollars or more just for a cat spay, and cost can go up from there.
And so we’ve reached this point. I think it’s a critical point. We need to look around and say, we’ve known for a while that most Americans can no longer afford a house, and now they can’t afford to have kids. And now they can’t afford to have pets. Like, this is really starting to hit home that what we would consider to be some of the most enjoyable parts of life are now out of reach for so many.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, and I wanna just speak to maybe some of our listeners here who are thinking, okay, out of pocket vet care is really expensive. There has to be some affordable way to take care of my pet in New York City, right? This is New York City.
But it turns out, there actually aren’t a lot of options as you were saying earlier. And one of the stories that really speaks to that is from Patrice and Marsha, who are two colony caretakers who’ve experienced really firsthand how hard it is to find affordable vet care in New York City.
Patrice: I call it a Catbnb, one on the top, one on the bottom. And then, you see there’s that little camp tent there.
Virginia Marshall: Patrice lives in Brooklyn in a family home with her two siblings. Over the past few years, their front yard has become a cat sanctuary - with cat shelters stacked one on top of the other, feeding stations, toys, and a small jungle of carefully planted shrubbery, which shields the whole operation from the street.
Patrice: Part of it is all to protect them and protect myself because really most people, they’re like, get the hell outta here. You know, I was that way as well. I mean, I did not connect to kittens until I lost my dog, my first doggie, during COVID.
Virginia Marshall: The Catbnb started back in 2021 when, after the death of their beloved dog, Patrice and her sister Marsha decided they wanted to bring a new pet into the family.
Patrice: My doggie is buried under this tree. My first one, Larissa. So I said, Larissa, who should we get? And then my brother said, did you hear a kitten crying?
They were never on my radar. So I was just like, no, and then I saw this tiny little orange thing right back here, and I was just like, oh my God, it’s a little kitten. From then on, that’s when we started putting out food.
Virginia Marshall: After a while, Patrice and Marsha decided to get a ring camera so they could see how many cats were eating the food.
Patrice: Every time we saw a kitten come over there, we were like, somebody’s inside the shelter! We were so excited.
Virginia Marshall: Through their ring camera, the sisters realized an injured kitten had taken refuge in one of the shelters.
Patrice: We could see it come out to get food, and then limp back in. It stopped being as mobile. It stopped moving around. And my sister Marsha, she’s like, Patrice, something is wrong. It’s not breathing right. She said, we have to take it to the emergency room.
And we took it, it was still COVID and they just kept saying, who’s gonna pay, who’s gonna pay, who’s gonna pay? And we were like, don’t you take care of animals? We rescued this little one and we think something’s wrong.
Who’s gonna pay? Who’s gonna pay? That’s how most people approach it. I get it. So we were like, okay, we’ll pay. It’s not our cat. We just rescued it. Anyway, left it overnight: $1,500 bill. The kitten had double pneumonia and a broken femur, and we just thought, we can’t afford this. We paid for a thing, we don’t even know. $1,500.
So we took an Uber to Long Island and we just said, we don’t have any money.
Virginia Marshall: Patrice and Marsha had to go outside the city to get veterinary care. They eventually managed to find a clinic that would cover the bill. It was a miracle, patrice said.
Patrice: They said, the bill is zero and this is now your cat.
Virginia Marshall: The little kitten has become part of the family living with the sisters in their home.
Patrice: We call him Bentley because it’s like such a sophisticated name, ‘cause his fur mink is black and brown and white combination and slightly gray. He is gorgeous.
Virginia Marshall: The experience of saving Bentley made Patrice and Marsha into cat people. They’re more committed than ever to taking care of the cats in their backyard, even though it can sometimes feel overwhelming. But, like the other community members we’ve heard from so far, they are in for the long haul.
So Patrice’s story is really a good example of the shock of that high vet bill, especially when you’re trying to be helpful and it’s not even your cat.
Will Zweigart: Yeah. That is by far the biggest misconception and what I want everyone to understand very clearly, is that you cannot just pick up a sick cat and bring it somewhere.
You cannot just bring it to the shelter or an animal hospital and they’ll take care of it for free, and everybody is happy and the animal finds a home. That resource is not available to New Yorkers and it’s not available to rescuers. There are so many people with this surprise story of shock. I was trying to be a good Samaritan. I was trying to bring this cat somewhere to get help.
I love, I think it was Patrice’s line that was like, don’t you guys help animals?
Aren’t we supposed to bring injured animals to an animal hospital? Yeah, not in America. It’s more about who’s gonna pay for it. So you have to often absorb a five or $10,000 emergency bill. Which is untenable financially for rescuers.
Virginia Marshall: And Will, why is pet care so expensive?
Will Zweigart: One of the main reasons is corporate greed. There has been over the last 20 years, a lot of consolidation in veterinary practices, and this has been led by private equity and venture capital backed firms.
Private equity is essentially a predatory model, and they are capitalizing, literally, on the love that you have for your pet. So they do research, and they found years ago that Americans would rather give up on other extras in life. They’d rather skip eating out, skip going to the movies in order to pay for their pet.
And they said, wow, so that means we can make more money.
Virginia Marshall: Wow.
Will Zweigart: And so we’ve seen, for example right now, over 75% of all specialty veterinary practices in the US are owned by private equity.
Virginia Marshall: Wow.
Will Zweigart: So whenever you have to bring your pet to an ER, which is already a nightmare experience and you already know it’s gonna be expensive, it is now several times more expensive than you would’ve thought it would be, because that ER is likely owned by a private equity firm. And they’re taking over basically almost every aspect of the American economy. I think a lot of people refer to it as a vulture capitalism model.
Private equity firms are taking over funeral homes. They’re taking over your local plumber business, your locksmith. So what does an ER for your pet, what does that have in common with a funeral home or a locksmith?
Virginia Marshall: You need it, right? You just absolutely need it.
Will Zweigart: Vulnerability.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah.
Will Zweigart: You are not in a position to price shop. If you think your dog might have eaten your hat or ingested some kind of object, or all of a sudden you’re really concerned about them, and this is a medical emergency, you are not in a position to shop around. And so they are taking advantage of the love that you have for your pet to increase their profits.
And whenever we talk about veterinary practices, I need to get this disclaimer out there. This is not a criticism of the individuals who work at corporate owned veterinary practices because I’ve met them and they all love pets and they all want to help people, and they’re all just trying to get by like everyone else.
We should be kind to individuals. We should be ruthless to the systems that are taking advantage of the love that we have for our pets, and literally making pets unaffordable and making pet ownership no longer possible for so many families.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, and my understanding too is that you might not even know that your vet is owned by private equity. It’s not like it’s gonna be on the sign or anything like that. So it might be that your local vet actually is, but you wouldn’t know it.
Will Zweigart: Yeah, I’m thinking of several vets right in the middle of Brooklyn that have very local sounding names, but if you look very carefully, maybe you have to do some creative Googling, you have to look at some fine print. Those very local sounding practices are actually owned by private equity, and they are shedding clients and staff because they are cutting costs to the bone. They will do anything to cut corners and maximize profit. They will encourage vets to do things that are unethical that vets are not okay with, like upselling and recommending expensive lab work and diagnostics when it’s not actually necessary.
And this is causing a cycle where vets get stressed out because they went to school and took on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt because they want to help people and they want to help their pets. They are not okay with sitting down with a crying distraught cat mom at the end of a 10 or 12 hour shift and walking them through a $12,000 bill to deal with an obstruction. That is creating moral distress for veterinarians. They are leaving the field because they do not want to be a part of this, and that is then further exacerbating the issue, driving up costs even further as there are fewer vets to provide care for our pets.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, and so when we talk about solving this issue by going upstream, taking care of other things, we’re talking about taking care of people too, right? We’re talking about the people at those vet clinics, as you’re saying. So, if we care about them too, we have to look for something better.
So I wanna really dig into it, Will, and what happens actually when a person can’t afford pet care? What are the things that a person is having to decide or do?
Will Zweigart: Yeah, and I really appreciate our listeners for joining us on this journey ‘cause we’re gonna go to some difficult places, but I think empathy is really important for problem solving.
So, to answer your question, a lot of people are suffering in silence. They are feeling guilt and shame and heartbreak that their pet needs care that they can’t provide. And sometimes we’ve been able to track down or connect folks who had to give up a pet locally. Maybe they thought they were doing the best thing by the pet, by putting it outside. We were able to connect with them later, and we just hear these stories of heartbreak over and over again.
And so I can tell you, having done this work, most of them love their pets and they’re being unfairly judged and blamed without context. And when we’re looking at this citywide, it’s important people understand how few options they have. I think people believe that there’s a safety net until you actually try to use it.
This is the case for us with medicine for ourselves as well, right? And so, it’s astounding how low the capacity actually is. Animal shelters in New York City, the municipal shelters, have total capacity for around a thousand animals at any given time. And I’m not suggesting that we build more shelters. I’m suggesting that we get serious about preventing overpopulation and preventing so many kittens from being born each year.
And so that’s why a lot of our upstream work is beyond the shelter, it’s beyond the rescue level, it’s beyond adoptions. It’s providing affordable veterinary care, which is often one of the biggest reasons why people surrender.
Virginia Marshall: So it might be that a person is maybe taking their pet to a shelter to see if there’s any room. Or they could end up on the street, right, the cats that they’re having to say goodbye to for one reason or another.
Will Zweigart: Yeah. And I know, again, our instinct is to judge.
Virginia Marshall: Right.
Will Zweigart: I get it. I understand it. I’m challenging all of us to put that aside because it’s not helpful and it’s often not accurate. Because when we talked to some of these folks, they believed that by putting a pet outside, that they were saving its life. Because they said, well, I can’t provide for it. You know, I have to move, I’m dealing with domestic violence or dealing with all kinds of issues that we can’t even begin to imagine.
And they thought, well, if I brought it to the shelter, they would put it down and this is my baby. It breaks my heart, but I’m doing what I think gives them the best chance of landing somewhere else. And so yeah, it can be really difficult to be in that situation.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. And sort of an element of hope here is that Flatbush Cats and Flatbush Vets, they’re trying to tackle the problem by giving folks affordable vet care. So tell me a little bit more about how Flatbush Cats led to Flatbush Vet and how it’s set up.
Will Zweigart: Yeah, so we knew from years of doing rescue and Trap Neuter Return work that more cats were gonna keep showing up. We started talking to neighbors and very quickly learned that they need resources that we can’t provide.
Keep in mind, I was talking about how challenging it is even for a TNR volunteer, who is basically fixing other cats on their own free time. Not even my cat, is what I always say. I’m just trying to help here. It’s a feral cat. They don’t even want to be cuddled. I’m literally just trying to prevent overpopulation. If TNR volunteers can’t get enough spots, and our pet owners can’t get affordable spots at a spay neuter clinic, then we realized even if that wasn’t what we were doing before, it is what the mission requires.
And I always, from a nonprofit standpoint, I think nonprofits should challenge themselves to take an honest look in the mirror every couple years and say, are we doing the highest leverage activities to solve this problem? What kind of impact do we want to have? And I believe that the best way, the highest leverage way, we can prevent cats from suffering outside and to prevent some of these unfortunate surrenders. Because a lot of times when people are surrendering pets, some of the pets were born inside their house. Now they have six, when they had two. And so they just don’t have the room for it.
And we realized the best thing we could do was to create a nonprofit low cost community clinic right in this neighborhood so that folks could access affordable spay neuter, affordable wellness care, which is things like vaccines, microchips, fleet tick, and then we could layer on additional services. So, although our services are accessible from a price point, we’re able to offer further discounts if people have financial barriers. We even have no cost clinic days where people can come and just get the care that they need, the wellness visits, just the resources and no judgment.
And that has been a game changer for our neighbors and our community members. And already, just within our first two years, we were able to do over 10,000 affordable spay/neuter surgeries.
Virginia Marshall: Wow.
Will Zweigart: So, you can do the cat math there that is preventing tens of thousands of pets that would’ve maybe hit shelters.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, and that no cost clinic day. It’s really a wonderful thing to witness. And I want our listeners actually to hear a couple of the stories from a clinic day back in August when our field reporter, Sarah Gabrieli, talked to a few pet owners as they left Flatbush Vet.
Andrea: My name is Andrea. I’m from East Flatbush. I have Cocoa, Romano and Asiago.
Sarah: And are they on your back?
Andrea: They are on my back right now.
Virginia Marshall: Andrea was visiting Flatbush vet to get routine vet care for her three dogs, but those aren’t the only animals in her life. She also rescues cats in her neighborhood.
Andrea: People knew me to the point where my mail lady, every time she saw a cat on the street, she would call me and say, there’s a stray cat on the street. And then I would take them in and I would take care of them and some of them I would keep, and some of them I would give away. So I’ve been doing this for like, years.
It’s just been cats throughout my whole life. Cats, and cats, and I love ‘em. I love ‘em. I have a turtle at home as well. Hey, Strawberry!
Sarah: Hey, Strawberry if you’re listening!
Virginia Marshall: For someone who’s taking on the work of caring for street cats, in addition to her own pets, veterinary costs and the cost of pet food has always been a concern for Andrea.
Andrea: Everybody is, you know, low cost, but low cost is still high, especially for this economy. It’s a lot because they’re on the street and they come with all these issues and different things. I was just so worried about making sure that they got to the vet and they got some care.
Virginia Marshall: So Andrea’s daughter started looking around for other options.
Andrea: She was just researching places that we could get low cost vet care, and she came up with this. So we’ve been waiting excitedly for the last month to get them here and I’m so grateful for this. I really am.
What was really nice, the fact that you guys have the pantry. When I was growing up, I never heard of a pet pantry. I was just like, whoa. I was so happy. I was so happy when she found this.
Virginia Marshall: Another pet owner at that free clinic day was another woman, also named Andrea, who was there with her little dog Grace. Grace came into her life under somewhat emotional circumstances.
Andrea W: I’m a breast cancer survivor, so I treated myself to a pet. This is my baby here.
Virginia Marshall: Andrea was also an empty nester and so she formed a really close connection with Grace. She makes sure Grace is well taken care of both inside and out. Grace has this cute little tuft of pink hair on the top of her head and the tip of her tail.
Andrea W: So I take it to the groomer ‘cause she has this walk and I think it’s so elegant. So I said, let me just do, for the summer, let me just do the top knot. ‘Cause I love the top knot look, and the tail, the matching tail.
And people stop, people in their cars will stop and be like, oh my God, she’s so adorable. She gets a lot of compliments, right? And I usually have her dressed up ‘cause I go on Temu and buy little outfits for her to wear.
Virginia Marshall: When it came to finding high quality, affordable veterinary care for Grace though, Andrea was at a loss. Grace developed an ear infection and Andrea tried taking her to the A-S-P-C-A.
Andrea W: And A-S-P-C-A was just like, oh, we don’t do that. We just do vaccinations. So I was like, well, I need somebody that’s beyond vaccinations, you know?
Virginia Marshall: And that’s when Andrea found Flatbush Vet. Now, she can get Grace the care that she needs. Because when it comes to her baby, Andrea says, she’ll do anything to keep her healthy.
Andrea W: Well, I’ll work five jobs if I have to to make sure she’s okay. I don’t really think of her as a bill.
Virginia Marshall: You can really hear the love that Andrea has for her dog. She doesn’t think of Grace as a bill, as she says, but still vet care is expensive, and it’s so wonderful that Flatbush Vet has these free clinic days and low cost pet care more generally. That’s really the beauty of the nonprofit model. But I’m wondering actually, Will, other than being a nonprofit vet clinic, what other ways is Flatbush Vet different from a regular veterinarian?
Will Zweigart: We are a limited service model. There’s a term in the sector called high quality, high volume, spay neuter. So we are a high volume clinic, which means we have a limited menu. We do a couple things really well, really efficiently. So it’s different from, if you went to a general practice, you might have more time with the vet, you might have more diagnostic work and things like that. You might be able to do chronic care, and of course at a higher price point. But we keep a limited menu based on the things that people need the most. And that’s how we can do like 50 surgeries in a day. You know how insane that is? Like 50 animals coming in in the morning and all leaving that same day with their cones.
Day in, day out, we’re able to do that many surgeries because our team is set up like a Formula One pit crew, and for 10 hours they are just like efficiently running through exams and surgery. And also, it’s been interesting because I’ve seen how the quality of these surgeries is actually higher, which is not something I would’ve expected, because they’re really freaking good at it. They do hundreds of these surgeries every single month, and because it’s a quicker procedure, the animals are under anesthesia for less time which reduces chances of complications.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I wanna turn it over to Maxwell Branch, the Director of Community Programs at Flatbush Cats, who we actually heard a bit from in our last episode. When I talked with him, he said he sees a huge demand for affordable spay/neuter services.
Max: We have been pretty much fully booked since we opened for spay/neuter. So at our last clinic, of the unfixed cats that attended, 60% of them booked follow up spay neuter appointments just on the way out, which tells me that the persistent myth that people don’t want to get their animals fixed is false.
Virginia Marshall: Max said that when provided with information and affordable care, pet owners often choose to get their pets spayed or neutered.
Max: I will fully admit that until I stepped into a shelter space for the first time, I had no idea that an unneutered male cat smelled in the way that they smell, which is quite terrible. I had no idea ‘cause I grew up around fixed animals and mostly dogs, so I didn’t realize that was a thing. And we run into people every day who also don’t know it’s a thing, and they’re like, why is my cat doing this to me? Why does my apartment smell the way that it does? Why is it peeing all over the walls? And that’s lack of access to information. It’s not willful ignorance.
Same thing with female cats when they go into heat, they will yell and try to go outside. A lot of times they’ll dig through screens and folks don’t realize that’s something that goes away if they get spayed. Folks also aren’t aware that by neutering or spaying your pet, specifically early, you can prevent many types of cancer. Spaying totally removes the possibility of pyometra, which is a life-threatening uterine infection. I’ve called emergency vets to ask about a pyometra for folks who walked in and had an emergency, and they’ve quoted me $10,000.
Virginia Marshall: Max routinely surveys pet owners who come to the free clinic days to see what other aspects of pet care are making pet ownership so unaffordable in New York.
Max: A majority of folks who come to our clinics say that there was a time in the past two years when they wanted care for their animal, but they couldn’t get it.
That’s 60% of folks, and I think that’s a really meaningful statistic. Because, again, one thing that everybody we meet, whether it’s on the street when we’re going door to door or at the vet or at any of our events, one thing that everyone has in common is that pets are family and they want to provide them the best quality care.
And the fact that the majority of people that we’re interacting with in this way feel like they weren’t able to do that is heartbreaking. And it’s also a fixable problem. I do ask people, when they weren’t able to get vet care, what did they do instead? Folks say stuff like, I cared for the sick cat until his death, or I sold personal items so that I had money for them, or I had to give him away for a time period, or my dog passed away due to lack of help and I regret it every day.
Virginia Marshall: Wow. Just hearing from these pet owners who have come to Flatbush Vet, it really makes it clear that affordable vet care is something that is badly needed in Flatbush and the rest of the city, right? So I’m wondering, Will, are there other examples of this kind of nonprofit veterinary clinic happening in New York City elsewhere, or even in other states that you know of?
Will Zweigart: It’s important to note that A-S-P-C-A, we mentioned earlier, does run several clinics in New York City. But because the problem is so massive, they estimate that we need around 190 to 200-thousand affordable spay/neuter surgeries per year to get ahead of this issue. And they can provide, you know, 10, 20 plus thousand surgeries a year.
That’s an example of a clinic that we looked at, but they’re a very large organization, so they’re able to provide those services for free. We are not able to do that. And in our research we found that a more sustainable model, a scalable model, would actually just be making those services affordable rather than free.
So we can do a lot more, and we survey our clients, we ask them. This is what it typically costs at a regular practice, what do you think is an affordable price for a spay/neuter surgery? And we’re able to meet clients where they’re at. We also found that they want to have the dignity of being able to provide for their pet.
One of my favorite things about Flatbush Vet is that it looks and feels like a regular vet clinic. It’s a nice facility. You get to spend time with the vet, you get to ask questions, you get the care you need. Our staff is incredible, and we wanted you to have that dignified experience of being able to see a vet.
So, there are a couple different models around the country. We kind of pulled together a hybrid of different best practices. Now what we need to do is bring this model across New York City. We need dozens of affordable, local community clinics like Flatbush Vet, so that we can get ahead of this issue.
Virginia Marshall: So now I’m wondering, okay, end of episode three. Have we now come to the solution of the cat problem? If we had more affordable vet care, then there would be no more cats on the street.
Will Zweigart: I will say that I think providing affordable veterinary care is the highest leverage action that we can take. That’s where we’re putting our chips.
That’s where, as an organization, we are growing, we’re investing. We just hired our fourth veterinarian, thanks to our supporters who are making this model possible. When you have a problem this big, you need to find a couple areas where a little bit of investment can have a huge return. And for us, that is increasing access to veterinary care.
So you’re gonna see us continue to invest with our supporters, and ultimately with the city’s support, scaling access to veterinary care, so we have dozens of clinics like this across New York City. And we will see the results that we wanna see there in terms of less pressure on shelters.
In the meantime, though, this system is crushing the individuals, the rescuers, all the folks who are trying to help the cats who are outside right now who need help right now. They are in fight or flight every day. They’re in quicksand every day. We see these cats in front of us and we feel compelled to help. And so it’s really important that we keep in mind their struggles, the price that they are paying personally, mentally, psychologically, financially. And we need to be providing better support for them through a collective care model, because we cannot do this alone.
Virginia Marshall: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s gonna be our next episode, actually. We’re gonna take a closer look at the people who are really carrying that weight. The volunteer cat rescuers
Will Zweigart: Underfoot is brought to you by Flatbush Cats and is made possible by our generous donors and supporters who want to get to the root of this problem. If that sounds like you, subscribe to our newsletter and become a supporter. You can learn more at flatbushcats.org
Virginia Marshall: And we’d love to hear from you, our listeners. Have a story to share, or a question about the issues we’re exploring on this podcast? Whether you’re a rescuer, a listener, or someone who just started noticing the cats underfoot, your voice helps share this conversation and may even be featured in a future episode. Visit flatbushcats.org/underfoot to send us a note or leave a voice message.
Underfoot is hosted by Will Zweigart and me, Virginia Marshall. Our field reporter is Sarah Gabrielli. Additional reporting by Priscilla Alabi. Episodes were recorded at Good Studio in Brooklyn and mixed and mastered by Will Whatley.
Podcast Art was created by Lazy Chief, and the series was executive produced by None other. Cat sounds in this episode were performed by Patchwork and Nom de Plume.