I recently joined the volunteer team for the Missoula chapter of the Street Dog Coalition. This Colorado-based organization provides “pop-up” vet clinics for people experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity. Its 60+ chapters served more than 9,000 pets and their humans in 2025.

In Missoula, the vet clinics occur once a month and are advertised at shelters, food pantries, and other places people who might need them might be. The vets and vet techs, along with a dozen or so pet-loving volunteers, serve a seemingly unending stream of people of all ages with dogs and cats of all sizes over a few very busy hours.

The vets provide vaccines, check-ups, advice, and vouchers for to get the pets spayed or neutered. The vet techs clean ears, trim nails, and more. The volunteers weigh the pets, dispense food, donated leashes, collars, and toys, fill in paperwork, hold squirming pets for nail trims, clean messes, and hand out treats. Lots of treats.

Assigned to assist one of the vets, I got to hold dogs ranging from a 9-week-old puppy to an older dog who had been through a lot before finding her current human, a warm and loving woman who was working every angle to try to get the dog some care she urgently needed.

The chaos of vets, techs, and volunteers, along with a crowd of waiting patients, didn’t help reassure the already nervous dogs. (The cats were in a separate, quieter space.) Many of the dogs were too stressed to even take treats. Those dogs generally skipped the nail trim.

It’s still pretty chilly in Missoula, and many of the pets come in wearing sweaters, jackets, and onesies of all types and colors. Donated dog- and cat-clothing is popular and disappears quickly from the giveaway table.

Next to the giveaway table is a second table, piled high with bags of dog and cat food, separated into adult and puppy or kitten foods, most of it donated by area pet stores. At this clinic, the vets were also giving out flea & tick preventive and heartworm preventive, also donated by clinics that were clearing out stock that is close to expiring.

Chatting with one of the vets, I heard about a continuing ed seminar she’d been to recently about mosquito-borne illnesses, including heartworm. Since we barely  had winter this year, she said that we should be giving the preventive tablets year-round, since we can’t count on having enough days of weather cold enough to kill the mosquitos. That’s probably as surprising to most Montanans as it was to me!