ODESSA, Texas — It is well known that the amount of stray animals are an issue in West Texas, and as work continues to try and improve it, two groups held a community event Friday night to focus on Odessa.
Best Friends Animal Society and representatives from Fix West Texas discussed with Odessans potential solutions to the problem.
Members of the community came together to collaborate and share ideas.
Odessa Animal Services had to euthanize 62% of their intakes in 2023. However, only 1.1% of euthanizations were due to space, with injury and illness amounting to 43% of them.
Saving those lives is a challenge that Odessans are up for.
“We feel like Odessa is really in a crisis situation," said Kaitlyn Simmons, director of Grassroots Advocacy for Best Friends Animal Society.
Odessans are trying to change that reality.
“The amount of animals that are being killed in Odessa has increased since 2020, and we just really want to be here to help and support the animal shelter because we know nobody really likes killing -- we know certainly the shelter staff don’t and we know the people in the community want to see different," Simmons said.
Odessa Mayor Javier Joven said several reasons have resulted in Odessa Animal Services having to euthanize.
“You’re having owners that are basically asking for a euthanization due to illness, or basically socioeconomics – we can’t provide the medication or surgery from injury and things of that nature," Mayor Joven said.
Mayor Joven highlighted what animal services is doing to address the issue.
“They want to have an effect, and so they are working on trying to come up with events throughout the year and try to be consistent and have some continuity throughout the year where they’re providing some type of service when it comes to spay and neutering, and so these things are ongoing," Mayor Joven said.
Conversations Friday leaned into how the community can help the city in their efforts.
“We’d really like to work with the shelter," Simmons said. "We’d really like to talk to the city council about maybe what’s going on at the animal shelter and how we could help really increase their life saving. So, we would see it as a collaborative effort. We’ve offered resources, we want to offer support to them, and so we’d really like to work with them to figure out what that could look like and how we could create that change.”
Simmons believes collaboration will help Odessa save lives.
“I think overall we’re seeing the cat deaths in particular are very high," Simmons said. "They’re also, the numbers in general are pretty high for the State of Texas for other shelters, so we feel like if we work together, we can come up with solutions that other shelters and counties and other communities have implemented that we know work.”
Simmons mentioned that trap-neuter-vaccinate-return, or TNVR, is a strategy that has been implemented in other communities for cats, and that community cat programming is a strategy that could be implemented in Odessa. She added that conversations Friday showed that Odessans care and that they want to figure out how to create change and save animals.