City council talks about banning unnecessary vet procedures
EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — At the city council meeting held on Wednesday, Jan. 17, city representatives discussed agenda item 16, a ban on elective surgeries for pets. The final result was to amend for a later date, so more research can be done and collected.
City Representative Chris Canales proposed the agenda item as he feels the elective surgeries are invasive, cruel and inhumane.
Throughout the discussion, several city representatives had questions and agreed that the surgeries are cruel to domestic pets.
Although when it came down to a vote, City Representative Art Fierro, made a motion to delete the item as he felt that research needs to be done to determine what’s best for the community.
“Because I think there needs to be more work done on our side, meaning the city side. And by doing this, I believe that what we’re doing is we’re opening doors to encourage or to give the only one resource to people who need to do it or are going to do this to pets; instead of doing it in their backyards or go outside the city limits if they can’t go to a veterinarian or professional,” Fierro said.
The motion to delete, failed.
The end result was that the city council moved to approve a second amend:
Directing the city manager and city attorney to return to council with recommendations and to form a plan for public outreach and engagement to move forward with the Title 7 ban on surgical procedures on domestic animals with no medical necessity including aesthetic procedures such as cosmetic caudectomy (commonly known as “tail docking”) and cosmetic otoplasty (commonly known as “ear cropping”) as well as other elective functional alterations for owner convenience such as onychectomy (also known as partial digital amputation or commonly “declawing”) and ventriculocordectomy (also known as devocalization or commonly “debarking” or “demeowing.”)
Further directing that this amendment shall be constructed so as not to ban procedures such as spay/neuter or minor ear clipping related to a sanctioned Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) program.
Local vet, Nancy Harvey at the Country Club animal clinic, told KTSM the procedures talked about in city council are more “old school.”
“That’s why I kind of hate to make it where it’s actually illegal to crop an ear or a tail discard blank. I think it’s best left to the discretion of the veterinarian because I will tell you, just like… I don’t know if they are still here, but I just saw a dog that had a tumor on its ear and at one point, in order to get rid of the tumor we were talking about cropping the ear; but it wasn’t for cosmetic reasons,” Dr. Harvey said.
Dr. Harvey said that at the end of the day, if she had to break that law to save an animal’s life, she would.
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