Vanessa Getty’s Road From Sacramento Rescue Runs to a Bay Area Mobile Clinic

Before there was a mobile clinic, there was a car.

In the early 2000s, Vanessa Getty was making regular drives to Sacramento, loading animals out of county shelters where kill rates ran as high as 90 percent and bringing them back to Bay Area rescue organizations where their chances of survival were meaningfully better. An exposé in the San Francisco Chronicle eventually brought public attention to conditions at those facilities—including evidence that animals labeled “unadoptable” were being quietly sold to research institutions—but press coverage could only move the needle once.

Getty was already thinking about what could move it permanently.

She landed on a foundational insight that would shape everything she built: the problem didn’t start in shelters. It started with litters that shouldn’t have been born. And those litters kept coming because the families who could have prevented them had no affordable access to the veterinary care that would have made the difference.

A spay or neuter surgery costs upward of $400 in the Bay Area. For residents of lower-income communities, that expense often doesn’t exist as a realistic option. The financial barrier was compounded by a geographic one: veterinary clinics are unevenly distributed, and in some neighborhoods, accessing care requires transportation many residents don’t have.

No program existed to address both constraints at once. Getty built one.

In 2005, she founded San Francisco Bay Humane Friends under the Peninsula Humane Society’s umbrella and raised funds to put a mobile veterinary clinic on the road. The van—whose license plate read “Fix Me”—drove into communities across the Bay Area, announced its schedule in advance, and provided surgeries and vaccinations at no charge to pet owners who showed up.

The impact showed up in shelter data. Pit bull surrender rates at San Francisco Animal Care and Control declined—a direct reflection of reduced litters in communities the mobile clinic served regularly.

As the years passed, Getty turned her attention further outfield. California’s Central Valley, she found, was home to some of the most isolated and under-resourced shelters in the state. Remote geography, limited funding, and a shortage of veterinary infrastructure created conditions that the Bay Area’s relatively robust system rarely had to contend with.

Working with the San Francisco SPCA, she has been facilitating transfers of Central Valley animals northward. A recent effort moved roughly 100 animals to the Bay Area, where adoption rates are substantially higher. The long-term goal is building reliable infrastructure—not moving animals one truckload at a time, but creating consistent pipelines between communities that need help and organizations equipped to provide it.

More than 9,500 free surgeries later, the mobile program Getty helped build is the only one of its kind in the Bay Area. The work continues.