Bryan,
I will send you the whole thing, and I would rather you have it than have me summarize it. It is written to be copied.
On why people wait for a clinic instead of calling a vet, I want to be straight with you: I do not have survey data on that yet. What I have is the shape of the signups, and it points somewhere specific. Most of the people on our list are not choosing a pop-up over a veterinarian. For a large share of them there was never a veterinarian in the picture at all. Pets for Life found that about 70 percent of pets in the communities they worked had never seen a vet in their lives. Not lapsed, not overdue. Never.
That changes what your clinic is being compared against. You were weighing a vaccine clinic against proper established care and finding it wanting, which is a fair thing for a medical director to do. But for the family standing in that line, the alternative was usually nothing. So the honest comparison is not clinic versus veterinarian. It is clinic versus a dog who is never seen by anyone, ever, for anything.
That said, I do not think your discomfort is misplaced. I think you named the actual failure and then blamed the wrong part of it. The problem is not that you gave the shots. The problem is that you found something, you knew what it needed, and there was nowhere to send it. A finding with no route is a dead end, and doing that a hundred times in a day would eat at anybody. That is a system failure sitting on your shoulders, and it should not be yours to carry.
So we built the clinic as a front door rather than the whole house. Three things, concretely.
We ask every family at intake whether that pet has ever seen a veterinarian, and we record it on the animal, not on a tally sheet. Sara Pizano pushed us to do that so we could report our own local access gap instead of borrowing the national number. It also flags the first-ever exam, which is exactly the animal most likely to be carrying the thing you were seeing and could not treat.
We line up a referral veterinarian before the clinic day, not after. Ours has agreed to take heartworm positives and other medical referrals that surface on the day. That means when we find something, it has an address to go to.
And we track whether the referral actually landed, because you are right that a large share will not follow up on their own. If we do not measure that, we are guessing, and I would rather know our real follow-through number than assume the good one.
None of that makes the clinic into a veterinary practice. It is not one. But it turns the day from a one-time event into an intake point for a family that had no relationship with care at all, and that is a different thing than what you were describing.
On your TNR conversations with local officials, the framing that finally worked here was to stop asking for money and start offering the town a project with their name on it. A town that has no budget can still say yes to hosting, promoting, and endorsing, and once one town says yes out loud the next conversation is a different conversation. Happy to walk you through how we structured it if that is useful for the feral cat side.
And you asked a question I could not answer, which means it belongs on our intake form. I am adding it. Thank you for that.
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Join The Shift To Prevention.
BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
calendy.com/animal-angels
bjadkins@animal-angels.organimal-angelsfoundation.org
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-16-2026 04:57 PM
From: Bryan Langlois
Subject: We stopped asking a county for money and offered them a project instead. Here is what happened.
Hi BJ,
Very interesting work and would love a copy of how you are going about things, as the group I am with has also had preliminary talks with a lot of local government officials about helping make some clinics happen (although we are more on the TNR feral cat side of the discussions right now).
I am curious to hear if you have studied or looked at some of the reasoning so many pet owners seem to have preferred to go to this vaccine type clinic set ups than to a local vet for more established care. I know where you are, and a lot of similar areas, have the veterinary shortage that makes getting an appointment for new pets incredibly hard. With all the people signed up in your Facebook group awaiting help at these clinics, have any said why they are waiting for the clinics and have not tried to get appointments with the local vets in their area?
I know I will likely get a little flack for this, but I really am torn on these "pop up" vaccine clinics that are available all over. In past years I had even worked a few of them, and what bothered me was not that we were able to provide much needed protection through vaccines, but rather the other health conditions I was seeing in a lot of the animals being presented that I could not address properly except to say, "you need to follow up with a local vet on this". On occasion I might have had some small amount of eye meds or something to get them started with some help, but could not really provide proper follow up care. I know 90% of them would not be able to follow up for various reasons. So I have always had a little conflict inside me on them as to if I am really doing the animal more of a disservice by giving the owner the impression that these shots are all that are needed. I know this is likely a whole other thread discussion topic, but I guess is a long roundabout way of inquiring as to if this has really been looked at or not.
Thanks again for offering all this info.
Bryan
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Bryan Langlois
Medical Director
Spay/Neuter Save Network
PA
"Greatness is a title never to be self imposed"
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