Surgery Suite

The Greene County Humane Society, Inc. in Linton, Indiana has achieved a major milestone on Wednesday by having their first on-site spay and neuter surgeries in their newly installed surgical suite.

Early in 2020, during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Spay and Neuter surgeries began to be very limited. There were times when it would be 2 or more months to get an animal scheduled for a surgery. The Greene County Humane Society makes it their goal to only adopt our spayed or neutered animals as spending too long in the shelter can be detrimental to an animal’s mental health.

It was because of this that the Board of Directors chose to invest in installing a surgical suite on-site to allow veterinarians to come and complete the surgeries. The goal was to get animals prepared for adoption much more quickly and reduce the staff needed to transport animals to other facilities for the surgeries.

The surgical suite was installed completely with volunteer labor by Board of Directors members, a couple volunteers and a dedicated employee. It took a few months to get the supplies due to backorders from the pandemic as well as time to do the physical construction but it has finally come together and is being used.

Dr. Alissa Hayes and her veterinary assistant, Ashley Seymour, from Hayes Veterinary Services completed the first surgeries. Dr. Hayes has been coming to the shelter weekly since summer to complete other vetting services and plans to conduct surgeries weekly for the shelter going forward. The goal of the shelter is to have most animals available for adoption within 7 days of their intake.

The shelter leadership also hopes to use this to expand capacity for their Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) program to help control the feral cat overpopulation issues within Greene County. They also would like to be able to offer low-cost spay and neuter surgeries on site in the coming months.

The Greene County Humane Society has spent the past year expanding the organization and working to be able to better care for the animals of Greene County. One major change is to their euthanasia processes where they only use euthanasia for suffering or dangerous animals. Since March of 2020, only 5 animals were euthanized, every other animal coming into the shelter was either placed in a home or transferred to another facility who could better care for them.