OCALA, FL (352today.com) – For the past two years, Marion County has provided grant funds to three local organizations, the Humane Society of Marion County Florida, Inc., Sheltering Hands, Inc., and the Voices of Change Animal League, who’ve provided critical and essential services, including spay/neuter programs, microchipping and vaccinations. An update on the grants was provided at the Marion County Board of County Commissioners meeting on Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025.
“Our vets at the [Marion County Animal] shelter have performed 7,944 Spay and neuters in the last fiscal year, said Angel Roussel, Marion County assistant county administrator. “So, in addition to the numbers you’re going to hear, when you combine all these totals, it’s over 9,200 spay and neuter surgeries that we have done. On the public side, it was 3,500.”
A history of helping
The grant received by the Humane Society of Marion County, a nonprofit, has played a significant role, said Eddie Leedy, Humane Society of Marion County executive director.
“I would like to go back and give a little history of how this grant got started,” said Leedy. “There were some meetings that took place back in 2023. Commissioner Bryant, Commissioner Stone and Angel [Roussel] met with some of our local rescues, which were OHAR, Quality of Life, Sheltering Hands, VOCAL, Florida CHAIN and Melissa Bell’s Rescue. The purpose of that meeting was to discuss the overpopulation of our shelters, our own county shelter and those of us who run adoption centers.”
Overpopulation has been a great concern when it comes to the deep volume of animals in the community, but measures have been taken to meet the challenge head-on, such as spay and neuter programs.
“The last grant money that we received, we were able to do 358 procedures,” said Leedy. “I want to say procedures other than just spay/neuter because this grant also allows the opportunity to vaccinate these animals and give them their rabies shot.”
A lot of people in this county aren’t against spay/neuter, but they aren’t able to afford it, said Leedy.
“If you have your own personal pets, and you’ve been to a clinic, you understand the rising cost,” said Leedy. “I will say running a high-volume spay/neuter clinic is nothing less than organized chaos. My hat’s off to my staff at the Humane Society, VOCAL and Sheltering Hands, the amazing staffs that they have to be able to produce these numbers at a low cost. This grant affording us the opportunity to get people in who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get those animals in.”
The grant the Marion County Humane Society has received has provided an opportunity to reduce the clientele at the Marion County Animal Shelter by the thousands, said Leedy.
“We also have and aggressive TNR [Trap, Neuter, Release] program for cats that the Humane Society, VOCAL and Sheltering Hands have been aggressively working on,” said Leedy, who thanked the Board of County Commissioners for the partnership and their support, and the support staff provides. “Last year, we started to see some results from that because you wonder, are we having any affect. In 2024, we had at the peak of kitten season, close to 230 kittens in foster care. Last year we reduced that by about 50%. We were kind of excited to see those numbers come down.”
Commissioner Kathy Bryant thanked the Humane Society, Sheltering Hands and VOCAL for all of the work that they do, recognizing that they all provide a valuable service to the community.
“I view it as an extension of Marion County Animal Services,” said Bryant. “We’re all in this together. I think that we’re all doing the best that we can. We need to continue to push spay and neuter, microchipping and promoting responsible pet ownership and this is truly one of the best things we can do to do that.”
The power of purpose
Sheltering Hands’ mission is to make the world better one cat at a time, with the nonprofit’s spay and neuter services central to how they fulfill that purpose, through funding that’s provided by their Marion County grant, said Bronson Mosely, Sheltering Hands partnership director.
With the county’s assistance, Sheltering Hands is able to maintain a higher standard of care, said Mosely. Sheltering Hands also provides cats in their care with FVRCP vaccines, free medications, dewormers and addresses any urgent medical needs the animal may have. These services are provided to local community cats. One of Sheltering Hands’ objectives is to alleviate the burden that has been a primary challenge for Marion County Animal Services: cat overpopulation.
“In the last calendar year, Sheltering Hands had performed 545 sterilization surgeries on community cats, using the Marion County grant funds,” said Mosely. “The recipients of these services come from the highest at-risk populations.”
It’s through the nonprofit’s ability to offer free spay and neuter services exclusively for these cats, that they’re able to empower the rescue community to go out and secure the animals without the burden of cost, said Mosely.
“The ones that reach our care under this program, receive more than just surgery, in addition to this procedure and their rabies vaccine, they receive the FVRCP vaccines, flea medicine, dewormer, additional wound care and in the direst of cases additional medical surgeries,” said Mosley. “A female cat can reproduce over 100 kittens in a lifetime. Over a period of seven years, one unspayed female cat and her offspring, theoretically could give birth to hundreds and thousands of kittens. Just one cat in seven years. What does that all mean? For Marion County Animal Services, this partnership means less trauma showing up at their door. It means a reduced strain on a community already struggling uphill to protect its wildlife.”
Spay and Neuter is the most humane and ethical way to control cat overpopulation, said Mosley. The number of animals depending on Sheltering Hands will always rival the available resources they have to serve them.
“However, with the support of Marion County’s grant, we can say yes to more of the cats who need saving, and to the people that want to help make a difference,” said Mosley, who thanked the board of county commissioners.
Providing a voice that can be heard
In the previous year, VOCAL performed 528 surgeries with the grant; this year, they’ve performed 438 to date, said Kate, Rengel, VOCAL executive director.
“We actually have $3,000 left that we’re going to use in December, we already have those appointments scheduled,” said Rengel. “The gift of spay neuter is just not handling overpopulation. It’s also giving a gift of health to the pets in our community. The amount of animals that we see on a regular basis that will never see a vet in their lifetime is very sad.”
VOCAL wants to be able to provide as much help as they can to the animals that are in the care of the nonprofit, said Rengel.
“We’re able to vaccinate them,” said Rengel, “A very common virus that we see in our community is Parvo Virus, which is very deadly to puppies, and then we also have a lot of feline distemper that we’ve seen this year… It’s really protecting the community’s pets’ health in general. It’s not just that individual, it’s helping the health of all of the animals.”
VOCAL has a food bank and has been active in food distribution, said Rengel. One of the requirements is that all of the pets in that program have to be in Marion County, and they have to be spayed and neutered. The pet owners can get their pets spayed and neutered free of charge and get pet food from the pet food bank.
“We had a partnership this summer with Bissell [Pet Foundation] and Bissell will provide a high-volume veterinarian for free, but you have to offer the services at an extremely low cost in order for them to do that,” said Rengel. “We were able to put this grant with that partnership. We were able to help so many animals this summer. We had almost three months of free spay/neuter. It was really amazing. As nonprofits it’s super important that we hold ourselves and each other accountable. This grant allows us to show what we can do, when we are provided with the funding to do a job that we set out to do.”