How Vanessa Getty’s Mobile Clinic Changed Animal Welfare in the Bay Area

Pet overpopulation is a problem that shelters cannot solve by intake alone. Vanessa Getty set out to address it at the source nearly two decades ago, and a recent San Francisco Examiner profile details how that effort grew into one of the region’s longest-running animal welfare programs.

In 2005, Getty founded San Francisco Bay Humane Friends under the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA umbrella. The group launched the Bay Area’s first mobile spay-and-neuter clinic, a vehicle that provided free surgeries and vaccinations in underserved communities. For many pet owners, the cost of an individual procedure, often more than $400, had been a major barrier.

The results were measurable. After the clinic began operating, San Francisco saw a decline in pit bull surrender rates to Animal Care and Control. Nearly 20 years later, the program has performed more than 9,500 free surgeries, averaging between 400 and 600 each year.

That same year, Getty joined the board of the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA, an open-admission shelter that operates under a county contract and cannot turn animals away. The role gave her a direct view of the pressures facing shelters that must accept every animal brought to their doors.

To keep the clinic funded, she created the PURR Sale in 2008, a luxury resale event whose proceeds go entirely to the spay-neuter program. The first sale raised about $150,000 in roughly an hour.

Her work has since expanded beyond the Bay Area. Through transfer partnerships with Bay Area organizations, the San Francisco philanthropist has helped address shelter overcrowding in California’s Central Valley, recently moving roughly 100 animals north. She is also developing a large-animal sanctuary in Half Moon Bay with the Peninsula Humane Society for animals that need specialized care.

Her concern for animals reaches overseas as well. For more than a decade, she has served on the board of Orangutan Foundation International, an uncompensated role supporting field research in Central Kalimantan founded by primatologist Biruté Mary Galdikas. Across all of it, Vanessa Getty’s approach has remained the same: find the gap, fund the fix, and keep showing up.