Partner Spotlight: Emancipet
Prices at the Adams Avenue Clinic.
One of our top priorities with our 2025 grant cycle has been helping keep pets out of shelters and with the people who love them to begin with. One of the biggest challenges families with pets face is the rising cost of vet care. When I learned about nonprofit vet clinic Emancipet through CARE’s The Gathering conference last fall, I knew they seemed like a perfect fit for a partnership.
Emancipet offers low-cost preventative care, spay/neuter, and special surgeries to tens of thousands of patients every year in Texas and Philadelphia — the Philadelphia Adams Avenue location alone does 30–35 thousand appointments annually and can do up to 30 spay/neuter surgeries a day. The vets are passionate and procedures actually have lower complication rates than the average for private practices. Emancipet does their best to remove every barrier to great care. They offer walk-in appointments with a transparent waitlist system and are a judgement-free zone. No one is turned away or denied necessary services because of an inability to pay.
Our executive director with friends she met at the Adams Avenue clinic in May, including Jenna and Nicole from Emancipet and representatives from CARE.
When we met, the Emancipet team informed us that their two Philadelphia locations tend to see more pit bull-type dogs than their Houston, Austin, and Killeen, TX locations, so we decided to focus our $10,000 grant there. Our funding was able to subsidize 556 preventative care visits and 96 spay/neuter surgeries for dogs in Philadelphia, allowing Emancipet to keep costs as low as possible. We didn’t specify our Hansel Help funds for just pit bull-type dogs because that would be more difficult to track (say it with us: you can’t identify breed just by looking at a dog!), and because low-cost vet care for all dogs all goes towards the mission of keeping pets with their families and shelter intake and euthanasia rates lower.
However, the amazing folks at Emancipet did the math and informed us that this summer, those numbers were also hit in terms of number of pit bull-type dogs served in Philly! From May–July 2025, an estimated 18.4% of patients served were pit bull-type dogs, with over 300 pittie visits each month at the Adams clinic and over 130 at the Roosevelt Clinic.
While our grant only covered preventative services, it’s worth noting that Emancipet found pit bull-type dogs are most heavily represented in their special surgery patients (37%). These are surgeries that are often incredibly expensive at private vet hospitals, and the great need for medical care among pittie patients sheds light on another reason so many end up in shelters. Many families love their pets, but cannot afford thousands of dollars for surgeries like mass removal, repair of broken bones, treatment of pyometra, etc. Widespread, accessible vet care is an essential tool for reducing the shelter crisis for pitties and all pets.
Archer, a patient at Emancipet Houston.
We are so thrilled both by the outcome of our partnership with Emancipet and the fascinating data that has come out of it. They’re doing incredible work serving their communities and supporting the human-animal bond.
A pup vaccinated at one of Emancipet’s Austin clinics with their human BFF.
