WBZ Cares: Animal Rescue League's 'Spay Waggin' Goes Where Services Are Needed
BOSTON (CBS) - Each month, WBZ Cares highlights a worthy non-profit organization, and tells the story of what that organization does for the community. This month's organization, The Animal Rescue League of Boston, has been working tirelessly for more than a century to rescue and care for animals in need, and now boasts three shelter locations.
Besides rescuing and caring for these animals, this welfare organization also takes their mission on the road by providing community outreach to pet owners and communities in need through their mobile vet clinic.
Inside a truck that hard to miss, plastered with larger than life images of dogs and cats, the rescue league's mobile surgery unit called "The Spay Waggin," offers low-cost spay and neuter surgeries.
Mainly serving the communities of the South Shore, South Coast and Cape Cod, it performs nearly 30-40 surgeries daily according to veterinarian Kyle Quigley. In 2016, nearly 4,500 surgeries were performed.
Quigley said that the mobile unit also provides pet owners who are struggling financially with additional vet care for their dogs and cats.
"We offer them exams, vaccines, sometimes flee treatment, parasite treatments, testing's for viral diseases and heart worm disease," he said.
Quigley says the Spay Waggin' helps the Animal Rescue League of Boston serve out its core mission: "To keep animals safe and healthy in their homes and habitat."
In addition to the mobile surgery unit, The Animal Rescue League recently opened the Community Surgical Clinic at its Dedham, MA campus. The clinic offers low cost veterinary services to small animal shelters in Massachusetts that don't have a lot of resources.
"Providing spay and neuter services to local shelter and rescue groups as well as animal control officers. So for the animals in their care we will provide spay and neuter at a reduced cost, as well as some other surgeries," said Cheryl Traversi, Associate Director of Community Services.
She says this clinic is a way for the Animal Rescue League to give back to the community.
"We're actually an animal welfare organization," she said. "So this is a way for us to serve our community. A lot of the groups that we work with are smaller and so their access to low cost surgery is very important. For them to be able to run their program and have the most animals go through their systems."
For more information about The Animal Rescue League of Boston, visit. www.arlboston.org or the WBZ Cares section on the CBSBoston.com website during the month of March.