AB2010: The approval of a bill that will expand spay/neuter access in California

It is official, AB2010 has passed! This is a game changer for animal welfare in California. 

AB2010 amended existing requirements to the California Veterinary Premise Permit, allowing for sterilization services to be provided in nearly any location. This removes barriers to transportation, allowing clinics to be set up in the neighborhoods of greatest need.

What this means is that high-quality, high-volume spay and neuter veterinary teams can utilize one room, such as a community center, for a clinic. As every town has a community center, this means that spay and neuter services can now be accessible to all communities in California.

We are incredibly grateful to Assemblywoman Soria for authoring the bill. We are deeply honored that the SF SPCA SDHS and the ASPCA all coauthored the bill with Animal Balance. This was AB’s first time co-authoring a bill. It has been an extraordinary, somewhat nail biting journey, culminating in a massive achievement. 

I think what really stopped me in my tracks, was when Assemblywoman Soria invited a number of the Mayors and City Managers from the small towns in the central valley to visit our clinic at Fresno Animal Center late last year. They toured the clinic and then, as we were watching the recovery team carefully help wake up the cats, one Mayor said to me, ‘We so need this, I already know which building I would give you, everyone knows where it is, there is plenty of  parking, we are just desperate for this kind of operation’. He continued to say, ‘ our animal control cannot take in animals, they don’t have space, they just get sent up here to Fresno every week. The animals just keep breeding, we don’t even have a vet in town, can you believe that!’.

No vet in town and an hour and a half to the nearest vet clinic, there is no long-term help unless we, or another M.A.S.H group deploys to their town. AB2010 means that as of January 1st, we are allowed to travel to the central valley and set up the M.A.S.H clinic in community centers, or another large room.

These are true grassroots events. The HQHVSN vets and techs fly in and those driving, transport the equipment, the community hosts us and the event. Perhaps the local TNR group helps in recovery, the local rescue group helps with registration and releases, someone else fires the barbeque up to prepare the veggie burgers for lunch. Another person picks up dirty laundry, washes it and drops it off, repeating for three days throughout the clinic. Perhaps local human nurses are volunteering to run the autoclaves and wash the surgical instruments. As you can see, M.A.S.H. brings the entire local animal welfare community together. 

Take the tiny town of Coalinga for example, they are 1.5 hours from the nearest vet and had never done a M.A.S.H clinic before. Now they are experts and their volunteers even join us in other parts of the state! 

That’s powerful stuff. The M.A.S.H events unify us. We can take that power and build on it. 

M.A.S.H empowers the veterinary community too in so many ways. Vets and techs team up to travel to different locations together. They may have not known one another a few months before, but now they M.A.S.H together and then they explore that location for a few days. In the clinic, they become more confident as they work in more and more locations, and with different colleagues. As M.A.S.H expands, so does the number of skilled HQHVSN professionals who want to get involved.

M.A.S.H is a very strong strategy to stop overpopulation. It is now supported in California because Assemblywoman Soria believed in our vision, then so did the California Veterinary Medical Board (CVMB) and California Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA) which takes animal welfare forward, into a new era, one where we focus our resources on prevention.

The No Kill Movement changed what we expect from shelters, now the No Birth Movement changes what we expect from ourselves. #nobirthmovement Please use the tag on your posts to show your support.

Thank you to Assemblywoman Soria for opening the door to M.A.S.H events in California by authoring AB2010. Your support is pivotal, as now HQHVSN groups can travel to those who need the services the most.

Can you help at a M.A.S.H event? Here is the clinic schedule https://animalbalance.org/clinic-dates/ and if you are not a vet or tech and see that we are coming to your town, perhaps you can help with the non-medical aspects.

Or, can you support you from your desk by making a monthly donation to keep the M.A.S.H engine going? 

https://animalbalance.org/donate/#form

Let’s M.A.S.H together and step into the new era of animal welfare, one that is based in prevention. It’s where the power is!

Thank you, come join us!

Emma