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McALLEN — The smell was the giveaway.

For more than a year, Hilda Luna suspected something was off inside the house that sat behind hers in a neighborhood in North McAllen.

Watering her plants every evening, Luna would see at least 10 dogs running around her neighbors’ yard, the larger dogs affixed with muzzles to protect the smaller ones. The dogs barked and whined as one of the owners shouted at them to be quiet.

But a few months ago, Luna stopped seeing the dogs because they were no longer being let out into the yard. She could still hear them, though, and she definitely smelled the foul odor of piled up feces every time her neighbor opened the door.

An Uber Eats driver caught wind of it too and was the one to make the call that led to the discovery of 93 dogs and a cat in the home.

McAllen law enforcement, some dressed in white coveralls, descended upon the neighbor’s house on March 30, spending about nine hours removing dog after dog from the house.

“Look at that,” Luna said as she watched from her backyard. “That’s what I thought.”

The neighbors, two women, were arrested and charged with 94 counts of animal cruelty. In the months that followed, another three cases of animal hoarding made headlines across the Rio Grande Valley.

Now, McAllen city officials are considering joining other cities throughout Texas in setting a limit on the number of pets allowed per household without a permit, a measure that animal rescue groups see as only a first step toward addressing exponential growth of the stray animal population.

During a workshop last week, the McAllen city commissioners debated the benefits of adopting such an ordinance which, as initially proposed, would have limited residences to four adult pets, either cats or dogs. Pets that exceed the limit would require a permit.

City officials did not immediately adopt the ordinance but recommended that the pet cap be increased to 6 or 8, that the permit fee be reduced or completely eliminated, that fosters not be counted toward the total and requested clarification on the permit application process.

Stacy Smith, executive director of Humane Tomorrow, a nonprofit animal rescue organization in North Texas, said ordinances like the one being proposed in McAllen are common. Though the positive effects of pet limits are difficult to measure, Smith said not having limits is a problem.

“Hoarding is probably the single worst thing that we're facing as rescue groups these days in Texas,” Smith said, noting that such an ordinance provides the city’s code enforcement a tool by which to discourage pet hoarding.

It’s that type of tool that residents can point to when they suspect hoarding, said Rebecca Chavez, director of development for Yaqui Animal Rescue which is located about 27 miles west of McAllen.

“You have to have something on paper that gives law enforcement or code enforcement the opportunity or the ability to go into someone's house and say, you are violating this code,” Chavez said.

Luna, the concerned McAllen neighbor, had contacted the city health and code enforcement department about her concerns months before the arrests but was told nothing could be done. She had decided against calling the police because she didn’t think the situation was severe enough to require law enforcement, she said.

Not everyone agrees.

McAllen City Commissioner Joaquin “J.J.” Zamora thinks the ordinance would only be another burden for law-abiding residents.

“It’s the hoarders that are not going to comply and are not going to pay the permit and they’re certainly not going to get their home inspected,” Zamora said.

To really deter pet hoarding, and address the growing population of stray animals in the area, Zamora believes they need to focus on providing low cost spay and neuter clinics, a service that Chavez agrees is urgently needed.

The problem is exacerbated in the unincorporated areas of the county, Chavez said, and so in an effort to combat the problem, Chavez presented a report to Hidalgo County officials.

The report suggested an estimated 750,000 to 1,000,000 animals roam the streets, second only to Houston which has about 1.2 million stray animals.

And the numbers keep growing.

Most stray animals in Hidalgo County, according to Chavez, are found in colonias which are low-income neighborhoods that often lack running water and adequate sewage systems.

Chavez estimates there are at least 860 colonias that each have 60 to 100 stray dogs. If half of them are female and are capable of giving birth to a litter of six to eight puppies twice a year, that means hundreds or even thousands of puppies added to the population every year.

“We cannot keep up with it,” Chavez said.

Upon the discovery of the hoarding cases, the animals were taken to Palm Valley Animal Society in the city of Edinburg. The shelter contracts with a handful of cities in the county for animal services.

The city of McAllen is working with the shelter to expand their services, agreeing to invest $820,000 into the design of a regional animal care facility for Palm Valley. The completed project would expand the shelter's current facilities which city officials found to be inadequate to house a large number of animals.

The city is eyeing 2025 for the beginning of construction.

But the root of the problem is the shortage of low-cost spay and neuter services, Chavez said. And while she considers McAllen’s proposed ordinance as a step in the right direction that paves the way for other cities in the region, she doesn’t think they’ll get very far if the shelters and the cities don’t work together to provide mobile, low cost spay and neuter services.

“We're just trying to empty out an ocean with a spoon,” she said. “That’s all we’re doing.”

McAllen City Commissioner Victor “Seby” Haddad said increasing the availability of those services is the ultimate goal for the city as well and passing the ordinance would enable them to allocate more resources each budget session to address the problem.

“We’ve spun our wheels for the last 40 years with the same system and processes in place and obviously it hasn’t worked,” Haddad said, “so we need to proactively focus on changing that and doing something better.”

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/07/30/mcallen-texas-pet-population/.

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