SAN ANTONIO – Laura Linam has lived in San Antonio for more than 20 years. And she said issues with stray animals and pets not being spayed/neutered have always been around.
“San Antonio is not a good place for animals,” Linam said. “There’s so much neglect.”
Linam is just one of dozens of animal advocates calling for changes in 2024.
After a year of more severe dog attacks and a heightened stray animal population across the city, animal advocates like Linam said they want to see more from Animal Care Services.
This last year was “emotional and devastating because a lot of dogs lost their lives,” Linam said. “I want us to get in the front lines to curtail all this overpopulation.”
With the start of the new year, the city has now opened the application for ACS director position nationally. The current director, Shannon Sims, is retiring in the summer of 2024. The job description on the city’s application page emphasizes a need to improve current procedures and develop a strategy that fits San Antonio.
KSAT 12 reached out to ACS in an email this week and has yet to hear back. In an interview recapping 2023 a few weeks ago, Sims said education and enforcement are a top priority for the department.
“If I can have every single animal owner in San Antonio do one thing it’s keep your animal on your property,” Sims said.
For Vanessa Acosta, a San Antonio resident and neighborhood liaison for ACS, a new director for ACS will enforce laws and hold people accountable.
“This has been a hard year, but it’s time for an intervention,” Acosta said. “We need someone that’s ready to take on this crisis.”
Acosta works with a group of other community members in their free time to help care for and spay/neuter animals across the city. Kirstin Nickell is one of those people. She said she wants the new director to have compassion.
“The city of San Antonio has a culture of not spaying and neutering, which has created an incident of just a mass amount of dogs running loose,” Nickell said. “We need somebody that has done a city before as big as San Antonio, if not larger, and has cleaned that city up. And now we need that person to come in and clean our city up. They have the solutions. We need them.”
As of Saturday night, the position has yet to be filled. To read more about the application, click here.
In the Know My Neighborhood series on Dignowity Hill, KSAT 12 looked into a pilot program focused on building more touchpoints with the community for spay/neuter opportunities. If you want to submit your neighborhood for an episode, click here.