There is a phrase Vanessa Getty has used to describe her approach to animal welfare: stopping the problems before they start.

It sounds simple. Applying it took twenty years.

Getty first encountered the Bay Area’s shelter crisis in the early 2000s, driving to Sacramento facilities where euthanasia rates exceeded 90 percent and animals with any behavioral quirk—a mother dog who growled when her puppies were handled in a stressful environment—were labeled unadoptable and removed from public adoption. Published coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle eventually drew attention to conditions at those facilities, including the channeling of supposedly unadoptable animals into research programs. The story mattered. But stories move on.

Getty had already identified the upstream intervention point: reproductive access.

The math was straightforward. Bay Area spay-neuter procedures cost $400 or more—a sum that was simply inaccessible to pet owners in lower-income neighborhoods. Without sterilization, litters multiplied. Litters that multiplied filled shelters. Shelters that filled became the crisis that everyone was scrambling to manage after the fact. The problem didn’t start at the shelter intake counter. It started at the point where a needed surgery became financially impossible.

The solution she designed addressed that gap directly. In 2005, Getty founded San Francisco Bay Humane Friends under the Peninsula Humane Society’s umbrella and raised funds to launch a mobile veterinary clinic—a vehicle that would drive into underserved communities, announce its arrival in advance, and provide surgeries and vaccinations at no cost.

No waiting lists. No administrative hurdles. No $400 barriers. The van arrived, and the people who needed it were already there.

Results emerged quickly. San Francisco Animal Care and Control began recording declines in pit bull surrender rates—a concrete measure of the mobile clinic’s effect on litter reduction in the communities it served. The van became a fixture, its schedule known and anticipated in neighborhoods that had previously had no affordable access to veterinary outreach.

That model—identifying the earliest point of intervention and placing resources there—defines how Getty has approached this work across two decades. It also informs her most recent focus: the Central Valley.

California’s rural interior shelters are, by any measure, working with far less than their Bay Area counterparts. Remote geography isolates them. Limited budgets prevent adequate staffing and veterinary care. Animals that could find homes in the Bay Area, where adoption infrastructure is considerably stronger, instead face bleak odds in under-resourced facilities.

Getty has been working with the San Francisco SPCA to create more reliable transfer pathways between Central Valley shelters and Bay Area organizations. Recent efforts have moved roughly 100 animals north. The long-term goal is something more systemic.

The mobile clinic has now performed more than 9,500 free surgeries. Each one represents not just an animal that won’t reproduce unintentionally, but a future litter that won’t arrive at a shelter nobody can afford to care for. That is what upstream intervention looks like, sustained over decades: a steadily compounding difference that rarely makes the front page but shapes every shelter report in the region.