A group of young Mexican citizens with big hearts and sincere concern for animal welfare jumped on the bandwagon for last weekend’s Operación Amor spay and neuter clinic, providing transportation and on-site supervision for dozens of dogs and cats that otherwise would have missed out on the cost-free surgeries.
Rescate y Protección Animal Chapala is a loose-knit coalition of individual activists that was set up four months ago. Since then the group has attracted a huge following on Facebook, through which members promote the adoption of abandoned dogs and cats temporarily sheltered in their homes. In many cases the animals quickly have found new homes, sometimes within a matter of hours.
Rescate y Protección Animal Chapala also works closely with Chapala’s municipal ecology office in the rescue of stray and abused animals. Volunteers rallied for Operación Amor to assist pet owners who lacked the means to get their animals to the clinic, held March 11 through 13 on the campus of Chapala’s Secundaria Tecnica 83. They watched over each of their four-legged charges from admission through post-operative attention, before carrying them home again.
A total of 198 surgical procedures were performed during the three-day campaign. Since the program’s inception four years ago, more than 2,000 animals have been spayed and neutered in 13 clinic campaigns and the weekly surgeries performed free of charge by local vets.
The free clinics scheduled three times a year are run with seamless precision by a team of skilled vets and an enormous support crew that pitches in to register the animals, fill out medical records, weigh and prep each cat and dog, assist the surgeons, watch over and groom the patients in the recovery areas, ink them with tattoos indicating that sterilization has been performed and hand out post-operative care instructions to owners.
Operación Amor has also been successful in reaching out to Chapala area low- and middle-income families to raise public awareness on the benefits of pet sterilization, destigmatize negative concepts and reduce the number of strays wandering local streets.
According to the organization’s math, the sterilization a single pair of can prevent the birth of 11,000 unwanted offspring over the span of five years.
Follow Operación Amor on Facebook to keep track of its activities. Request more information or sign on as a financial supporter by contacting Cameron Peters at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..