Marvin Mackie, DVM, fixed more than 250,000 dogs & cats in 54-year veterinary career
SAN PEDRO, California––W. Marvin Mackie, DVM, 88, remembered by United Spay Alliance cofounder Esther Mechler and much of the rest of the humane community as “a pioneer in the affordable spay/neuter movement, died on September 23, 2025.
“He brought so much to the movement,” Mechler emailed to ANIMALS 24-7, running four spay/neuter clinics in the Los Angeles area and then branching out to training numerous vets,” both in person and through videos distributed––mostly for free––under the brand name QuickSpay.
(See https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChtwZ7Hb4OuK1zH7q6sALsw.)
“He will be greatly missed by his wife Phyllis, his colleagues in spay/neuter projects, and by the countless ‘pet parents’ he helped over the years,” Mechler finished.
But all of that was an understatement.
“Get 70% or flunk!”
Marvin Mackie also contributed two much-referenced articles to ANIMALS 24-7, Pet Overpopulation & the 70% Rule, which in March 2003 established the importance of sterilizing at least 70% of an animal population before expecting to see the population drop, and The Queen (her reproductive cycle may surprise you).
The latter, posted in 2015, endorsed the “Feline Fix by Five (months)” recommendation of the United Spay Alliance.
Both Pet Overpopulation & the 70% Rule and The Queen drew on Marvin Mackie’s 54 years of performing more than 250,000 spay/neuter surgeries, more than anyone else ever at his 2017 retirement, a record since exceeded only by his onetime trainee Jeff Young of Colorado, founder of Planned Pethood Plus and star of the Rocky Mountain Vet television series.
Demonstrating the efficacy of his QuickSpay technique, Marvin Mackie once performed 160 spay/neuter surgeries in a single day.
Son of a carpenter
Born in 1937 in Martinez, California, the son of housepainter, carpenter, and farmer Ward F. Mackie and his wife Esther Marie Davis Mackie, Marvin Mackie moved with his parents to Buhl, Idaho on Christmas Eve 1942, after his father inherited the farm he grew up on..
The Twin Falls Time News on August 6, 1945 mentioned that Marvin Mackie had been discharged from hospital, then updated on August 8, 1945 that he had been discharged after an unspecified “major operation,” and again updated on August 9, 1945 that he was still “in the hospital recovering” after the “major operation.”
The first of those mentions of Marvin Mackie shared print space with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima; the next two shared print space with that and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
Inspiration from a cloud of dust
After that, the Twin Falls Time News mentioned Marvin Mackie only for winning a Boy Scouts merit badge for agriculture in January 1953, presented by his father, the longtime local Scoutmaster; playing oboe in the Buhl High School band in November 1954; and graduating from Buhl High School in May 1955.
Around that time, reported Brian Charles Clark for the Washington State University at Pullman alumni magazine in November 2016, “A teenaged Marvin Mackie was working all summer on the family farm at the end of the rail line in Buhl, Idaho, wondering what to do with his life.”
“One day I saw a cloud of dust coming down the gravel road,” Marvin Mackie recalled to Clark. “It was the veterinarian and he was going to go save an animal. And the light came on.”
Wrote Clark, “Off Mackie went, first to the University of Idaho,” in Boise, where he was active in the campus Methodist chapel, “for his undergraduate degree, and then next door to Washington State University for his doctorate of veterinary medicine.”
“Raised on a farm around cows and horses,” recounts a brief biography of Marvin Mackie posted by the United Spay Alliance, “he entered veterinary school with the intent of becoming a large animal veterinarian.
(United Spay Alliance photo)
“Transitioned into pediatric small animal medicine”
“After seeing the dire need for more spay/neuter services while working at a 24-hour emergency clinic in Chicago, however, he eventually transitioned into pediatric small-animal medicine.”
Having won his veterinary degree in 1963, Marvin Mackie spent seven years in Chicago before relocating to San Pedro, California, with his wife Phyllis, in 1971.
There, Clark wrote, Marvin Mackie “loved the weather and found lots of work,” including for the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation.
“One thing he hated, though, was euthanizing pets.”
“After 13 or 14 animals,” Marvin Mackie told Clark, “you’re getting ready to give the next dog the shot when he reaches out and licks the back of your hand. And you think, this sucks!
“There was a need”
“There was a need for everybody involved with small animals to do something about overproduction.”
The solution was already at hand. The Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation, under Robert Rush, who headed Los Angeles Animal Services from 1969 to 1992, had already begun sterilizing the relatively few dogs and cats it rehomed before releasing them to their new owners, following the lead of several small southern California humane societies.
The national organization Friends of Animals had begun a low-cost spay/neuter clinic open to the public a dozen years earlier, in 1957, in Neptune, New Jersey.
But spay/neuter, for the most part, was still better documented in veterinary literature than practiced by the humane community.
(Beth Clifton collage/Wikipedia photo)
Liautard & Flynn
Alexandre Liautard, who founded the American Veterinary Medical Association at Astor Hall in New York City in 1863, just a few doors away from Clinton Hall on Astor Place, where Henry Bergh founded the American SPCA three years later, had already literally “written the book” on animal castration in 1884.
Kansas City, Missouri veterinarian J.C. Flynn (1878-1954) went on record as early as 1913, just three years after earning his veterinary diploma, deploring that most veterinarians were “uninterested” in acquiring best practice dog and cat skills, including learning how to do spay/neuter.
Flynn developed the basic early-age sterilization techniques used for dogs and cats in 1925.
That was three years after Flynn developed the now almost universally recommended small-incision spay technique, which he called “Spaying without sutures.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
From Flynn to Lieberman
This was essentially the same QuickSpay method rediscovered and taught by Marvin Mackie beginning circa 50 years later.
Flynn, and later his protege Leo Lieberman, DVM, (1915-2006), who practiced for 30 years in Waterford, Connecticut, pushed spay/neuter and especially early-age spay/neuter for 50 years between them before any national animal advocacy group began to advance the idea.
The American Veterinary Medical Association approved the standard dog and cat spaying and castration surgeries in 1923, but the American Humane Association immediately denounced the AVMA position as “vivisection,” although it had actually voted anti-vivisection societies out of eligibility for membership circa 40 years earlier.
Spay/neuter vs. eugenics
Then-American SPCA president Sydney Coleman, a devout Catholic who later headed the American Humane Association before returning to the ASPCA, felt that if spay/neuter was accepted for use on animals, the humane community led by the AHA would have a much more difficult struggle to prevent spay/neuter from being inflicted on humans in the name of eugenics.
Many humane societies at that time operated orphanages, perhaps more then than actually operated animal shelters.
The child protection division of the American Humane Association, begun in 1878, just a year after the AHA itself was formed in 1877, was then engaged in a desperate and ultimately winning political struggle to prevent compulsory eugenic sterilization of orphans.
Coleman articulated his perspective repeatedly in The National Humane Review, the American Humane Association monthly membership magazine.
(Kansas City Veterinary College photo)
American Humane opposed s/n until 1973
So did Richard Craven during a 10-year tenure as National Humane Review editor, preceding his formation in 1940 of the AHA division that monitors U.S. screen productions through a contract with the Screen Actors Guild.
The American Humane Association, while lamenting in the early 1950s that spay surgery cost too much to be widely adopted, did not actually withdraw opposition to spay/neuter surgery on dogs and cats until 1973, by which time practically no one remembered why this policy was ever adopted in the first place.
Liautard, Flynn, and others could have taught exactly the same skills taught and popularized by Marvin Mackie and the other originators of high-volume, low-cost spay/neuter surgery, if the humane community had been willing to pay attention.
Naramore & Bonner
Indeed, no technology is involved in gas anesthesia as practiced in spay/neuter clinics today that was not known to animal gas chamber inventor Raymond Naramore in 1937, who then headed the Humane Society of Rochester & Monroe County, and to Richard Bonner, who as Los Angeles animal control chief, popularized the use of decompression to kill animals, beginning in 1949.
Naramore and Bonner just did not choose to address preventing dog and cat overpopulation instead of trying to kill it out of existence.
The humane community, represented by the American Humane Association, did not challenge their priorities, partly because so-called “pound seizure” laws at the time required that animal shelters had to surrender dogs and cats to laboratories on demand.
Euthanasia was considered preferable to surrendering animals to be experimented on and used for surgical practice.
(Spay Mexico photo).
Mercy Crusade & Marvin Mackie
Marvin Mackie, however, pointed out that animals who are never born would never either need to be euthanized or be surrendered to laboratories..
The City of Los Angeles in 1974 took over the operation of a low-cost sterilization clinic opened a year earlier by Mercy Crusade, and started the first city-subsidized open-to-the-public sterilization program in the U.S.
Marvin Mackie ran it as an independent contractor.
Recounts the United Spay Alliance, “In 1976 Marvin Mackie discovered his mission with the effort to humanely control pet overpopulation. Partnered with a colleague, he opened a spay/neuter clinic each year for the next six years.
“Breaking ground by demonstrating new standards of production, he transformed the image and status of the spay/neuter clinic.
“In 1989, he began promoting early-age spay/neuter by distributing a well-done amateur video demonstrating the ease with which the surgery could be performed and the rapid recovery of his young patients. In 1991, he partnered with stakeholders to effectively include feral cats.
“During his last full year of clinic ownership in 2007, he added 1,562 ferals to the clinic’s scheduled 7,276 patients using his efficient, minimally invasive, safe surgical system.”
Took over entire Los Angeles s/n program
While Marvin Mackie’s clinics gradually took over the workload of low-cost spay/neuter surgeries for the general public, the Los Angeles Department of Animal Regulation continued to do in-house spay/neuter surgeries until a budget crunch resulting from the 1991 Rodney King riots brought a year-long suspension of the program.
In the interim, Marvin Mackie demonstrated that he could do more surgery for the city, faster, less expensively, at his own private clinics than the in-house clinics had.
Beginning in 1992-1993, Los Angeles opted to job all spay/neuter work out to Marvin Mackie and other private contractors.
Shortly before Marvin Mackie retired from full-time spay/neuter practice, he was honored on June 9, 2006 by the Los Angeles City Council.
“An instrumental force”
Said then-Los Angeles Animal Services chief Ed Boks, now known for his daily blog Animal Politics, “Dr. Mackie was, and continues to be, an instrumental force in transforming not just our local Los Angeles community, but the entire nation and other parts of the world from outdated catch-and-kill animal control methodologies to humane, non-lethal, no-kill animal care strategies and programs.
“Dr. Mackie has openly and courageously transformed an entire generation by being the change he wanted to see in the world. He taught many hardheaded animal control directors like myself that there is a better way.
“We in Los Angeles have perhaps benefited most from the fact that Dr. Mackie is an Angelino. As a result of his inspirational leadership, over the course of his career, the number of animals needing to be rescued annually from the streets of Los Angeles by Animal Services has declined by 40,000.
“More significantly the number of animals killed in our local shelters has fallen from 60,000 per year to 19,000 and continues to decline significantly every year,” progress that continued for most of another decade before declining emphasis on providing low-cost spay/neuter surgery coincided with rises in intakes and killing in recent years.”
Victor Valley
Along with his work in Los Angeles, Marvin Mackie from 1980 to at least 2007 provided spay/neuter service to the Victor Valley Animal Protection League in Apple Valley, California.
In April 2005 Victor Valley Animal Protection League president Carleen Newman presented a plaque to Marvin Mackie recognizing 75,000 spay/neuter surgeries performed under the VVAPL auspices.
“We must include affordable spay/neuter in our menu of services to the pet community,” Marvin Mackie said. “A clinic can easily and profitably provide this service by gaining confidence in surgical skills and eliminating unnecessary steps that add nothing to the successful outcome of the surgery.
“Only since the veterinary community began to address the issue of pet overpopulation, meaning birthing beyond ownership capacity, as a serious problem, can it be said that the profession is now doing its part in the effort to humanely reduce pet overpopulation.
Star pupils
Planned Pethood Plus founder Jeff Young, DVM, who has performed and taught spay/neuter surgery on every inhabited continent, is only the most prolific surgeon among the many who flocked to Marvin Mackie’s clinics to learn to do what he did.
Not all of those who came to learn were actually veterinarians. Las Vegas entrepreneur Mary Herro in 1988 began the Animal Foundation of Nevada to do high-volume, low-cost spay/neuter.
The Animal Foundation clinic, modeled after Mackie’s, opened in January 1989. Within another year the Animal Foundation clinic was performing more than 10,000 spay/neuter surgeries per year. About one surgery in four was done at no charge for low-income pet keepers.
Animal Foundation took a wrong turn
The Animal Foundation later operated branch spay/neuter clinics in both Los Angeles and Dallas, Texas, but found working at multiple sites unsustainable.
The Animal Foundation in 1995 took a wrong turn, however, that Mackie advised against, taking over the Las Vegas city animal control contract at cost of a bruising multi-year political battle, lawsuits, and years of media attacks, during which Herro won public favor by pledging to make Las Vegas a no-kill city.
This has yet to be achieved, largely because the Animal Foundation de-emphasized spay/neuter.
Herro in 2001 retired from personally directing shelter operations to focus on running the Las Vegas pet licensing program. Her successors, focusing on no-kill sheltering and adoption promotion, have repeatedly run into overcrowding and shelter disease outbreaks.
(See Doggy crap game: Las Vegas gambles again on a “no-kill” panacea.)
Hiro Yamasaki
Another of the many who learned spay/neuter technique from Marvin Mackie was Hiro Yamasaki, whose Animal Rescue System Fund has become by far the largest low-cost, high-volume spay/neuter service provider in Japan.
Reported the Daily Yomiuri Shimbun on December 26, 2016, “Hiro Yamasaki personally understands the ineffectiveness of shelters because he helped save abandoned cats and dogs after the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995, and operated a shelter under his previous organization, Animal Rescue Kobe, until 2005.
“I sheltered more than 1,000 cats and dogs, but the rescue requests never stopped,” Yamasaki told Daily Yomiuri Shimbun.
(Spay Mexico photo)
From Japan to Mexico
“While involved in rescue activities,” Daily Yomiuri Shimbun continued, “he learned about animal welfare practices in North America and decided in 1996 to establish an organization to employ its own veterinarian and provide neutering and spaying at low cost within a decade.
“He invited Marvin Mackie, a Los Angeles-based spaying and neutering specialist tackling pet overpopulation, to Japan to lecture on his activities at the Japanese Board of Veterinary Practitioners in September 2004.”
Yamasaki subsequently visited the Marvin Mackie spay/neuter clinics in Los Angeles at least three times between 2005 and 2015.
Yet another Marvin Mackie student was Spay Mexico founder Craig Neilson. Marvin Mackie in October 2010 helped Neilson and a team of “almost 100 volunteers” who “actually fixed 1,055 pets in four days,” Neilson told ANIMALS 24-7.
(Joaquín Villaseñor/Spay Panama photo)
“Seek older vets to do s/n”
Late in his career Marvin Mackie became increasingly outspoken about controversial issues in shelter veterinary medicine, beginning with who should be recruited to do spay/neuter surgery.
As early as the 1993 Spay USA conference in Walpole, Massachusetts, Marvin Mackie advised that people who want to start a low-cost neutering program should seek “Veterinarians who have been in practice 15-years-plus, who for various reasons are not happy with full-service work but are too young to retire and want a practice or lifestyle change.
“Note,” Marvin Mackie cautioned, “that younger veterinarians have often spent eight years or more in college preparing for general veterinary practice, and understandably want to test their skills in the full-service arena. They are unlikely candidates for a neutering clinic.
“Younger vets have to worry more about money”
“Young veterinarians also have to worry much more about money. They typically have a huge debt load to pay off the cost of their education and of setting up a practice, and are also likely to have young families plus unpaid home mortgages. Even if they endorse the idea of low-cost neutering, they may be financially unable to do much of it.
“Older practitioners by contrast may have earned financial security, including provisions for retirement. They can work for less,” Marvin Mackie said, “if they choose to do so,” typically in exchange for more time off.
(PET Los Cabos Facebook photo)
Predicted failure of Neutersol
On June 27, 2004, amid much excitement about the introduction of Neutersol, an injectible chemosterilant that ultimately failed in the marketplace, Marvin Mackie predicted the failure at the Second International Symposium on Non-surgical Contraceptive Methods for Pet Population Control, held in Breckenridge, Colorado.
Mackie explained that a spay/neuter veterinarian typically builds a profit margin into each aspect of doing a surgery. Replacing sterilization surgery with an injection might reduce the number of potentially profitable procedures per sterilization from ten to just two.
“While routine,” continued Mackie, “each surgery does in fact serve to teach or hone soft-tissue surgical skills. With each surgery the veterinarian and staff are practicing their coordination of anesthesia, surgical prep, monitoring system hook-up, tech support, and recovery. These training exercises are essential for the smooth execution of less routine and more involved cases as they arise.”
Fixing 70% of feral population requires fixing pet cats first
Marvin Mackie in May 2016 observed to Animal Issues blogger Phyllis Daugherty that, “Trap/neuter/return programs across the country have made big claims, but have no provable success in large cities with transient populations,” basically because the progress made in sterilizing feral cats is continually offset by accidental births among owned cats who are allowed to wander outside without being fixed.
“Experts claim that 70% of the feral population must be sterilized,” Mackie continued, “to stop an increase in the number that are sustained and replenished in the streets. Without an effort to impose owner responsibility before the cat becomes feral,” Mackie said, “obviously the source will be greater than the remedy.”
Pushed early-age s/n, but not too early
Also speaking to Phyllis Daugherty, Marvin Mackie in March 2017 took issue with a Best Friends Animal Society claim that, “Eight-week-old healthy kittens are fully weaned and should soon be ready to be spayed or neutered and to find their new forever homes.”
As strongly as Marvin Mackie favored early-age spay/neuter surgery, especially the “Feline Fix by Five” concept, he equally rejected sterilizing kittens too soon.
Said Marvin Mackie, “Kittens at this age by necessity are focused on their own survival. At six weeks they are being thrust by Nature from dependency on their mother or a ‘foster’ into a world where they must be able to provide for their own subsistence and safety. Adopters should look for a kitten old enough to develop interests beyond his or her basic egocentric needs so that they can forecast the basic personality and desire for human interaction of a pet who will share their home for the next 15 to 20 years.”
(Phyllis Mackie Facebook photo)
Progress to be proud of
When Marvin Mackie started in veterinary practice, under 10% of all pet dogs in the U.S. and under 1% of pet cats had been sterilized. Few veterinarians could sterilize more than three or four dogs or cats in a day’s work.
Today more than 70% of all pet dogs––albeit only about 20% of pit bulls––and upward of 90% of all pet cats are sterilized, mostly by vets using the methods that Marvin Mackie taught and demonstrated, continuing to fix about 40 animals per day until age 70.
With practice, Mackie method vets routinely sterilize from 30 to 50 dogs and cats per day.
(Daniel Leventhal photo)
Mackie would have been very proud of that, and of growing recognition within the animal welfare community that high-volume spay/neuter surgeons are worth every penny of salaries now competitive with those of other veterinary specialists.
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Dr. Mackie is a lifelong inspiration and hero for me, as he is for countless others whose focus is truly on caring for cats and reducing the senseless, preventable suffering and tragedy of feline overpopulation. We owe him a huge debt of gratitude and the best way to repay it is by encouraging and supporting those he has inspired to carry on his work.
RIP this great man and heartfelt condolences to his loved ones and colleagues.
Sharing with gratitude.
Mackie was one of my heroes. He was a great man with vision and compassion.
I remember that one of the first times I worked with him, he asked me “Why do you make your incisions that long? I had just fallen into the routine of monkey-see-monkey-do, and with that I started making my incisions about half as long.
I remember one of the last times I worked with him in Mexico, and how shacky his hands had become, yet everyone listened to his every word as he talked his way through the surgery.
MORE THAN ANYTHING I CONSIDER HIM A GREAT FRIEND. REST IN PEACE MY FRIEND, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. HA, I AM NOT THAT FAR BEHIND YOU..
Thank you friends. I was mentally ready for this because I had been informed early this month by my friend vet in LA.
Thank you again for your writing about Dr. Mackie.
I worked with Dr. Mackie for a short time when I lived in California. In 23 years, Roger Prior, DVM and I did 78,000 spays and neuters at our Cat Spay/Neuter Clinic in Colchester, Vermont. Sad to lose Dr. Mackie, as he got spaying and neutering started in California.
For more about Peggy Larson’s legendary career, as former rodeo performer turned rodeo foe and rare combination of veterinarian/lawyer, see Who will fix Vermont cats with Peggy Larson retired?
I think you buried the headline… I started reading not expecting this very sad news. Still a wonderful tribute and a valuable historical review. Thank you M&B!
The animal world lost a great champion. It’s too bad that more vets don’t use his methods, and that more shelters don’t follow the s/n concept.
Great article! Keep up the good work.
The AVMA very recently brought out a policy change in that it now supports other types of canine sterilization besides spay/neuter. This means that vasectomies in dogs are acceptable now, and they are very simple to do. The ovary sparing surgeries which involve removal of the uterus and one ovary are also now acceptable.
Is it possible that owners of pitbulls would opt for vasectomies on their males? This, of course, assumes testicles are fully descended into the scrotum. Undescended testicles should be removed. I doubt if pitbull owners would accept the ovary sparing surgery.
As some of you know, the early spay/neuter of ferrets has greatly shortened the lives of many of them because of secondary adrenal neoplasia.
I personally don’t see that there can be any exception to spay/neuter in cats. After all, their sexual behavior and rapid cycling make spay/neuter essential.
At any rate, times change. I personally don’t like seeing dogs with complete absence of secondary sexual traits. I understand the shelters’ need to sterilize puppies before they go home. However, the puppies could be vasectomized in the time required to castrate. If the owner later elected to have testicles removed, that could easily be done. I think we need to accept the fact that testosterone is an important hormone for body development. Estrogen also is, but would shelters ever consider ovary sparing spay? I doubt it.
I will be writing an article for http://www.CityWatchLA.com on Marvin Mackie’s passion for decreasing pet population by early-age spay/neuter, with photos taken during the filming of the DVD we made together. It was also translated into Spanish so we could distribute it to Latin countries. It should be posted next week. He was great to work with and so generous with his time and knowledge!!! He gave his gift to the world during his lifetime and held nothing back!
• I’m so very sad to hear of Dr. Mackie’s passing. His fervor and commitment to pediatric neutering and high-volume sterilization techniques has inspired me for more than 30 years, searching for models to systematize and achieve levels of suppressed dog and cat reproduction that really make a difference preventing unwanted litters, and ways to fund the same. Thanks, Merritt and Beth for sharing some details of his early life, and referring to another hero of mine, Leo Leiberman, as well as the lost time due to earlier opposition to sterilization by the humane community.
Dr. Mackie’s passing feels especially dark, given the current struggles to fund and deliver the level of spay neuter it seemed like we could do a decade ago. I hope Dr. Mackie’s passing inspires a next generation of SN mavericks. Rest in peace, MM.
I went to him at his Animal Birth Control clinic in Los Angeles in 1998 to learn his techniques. Thank you to him on behalf of all the animals his teaching enabled me to more proficiency fix.
Dr. Mackie was a wonderful friend and I will miss him though our contacts in recent years was limited to exchanging “funny ” emails. Always upbeat, positive and smiling throughout our nearly 40 year friendship.
He loved helping animals and being a veterinarian. I know he is in heaven watching down. God bless him.
My mother, Betsy Pullen, who ran a humane society in Michigan in the late 70’s to the 90’s and then started a non profit with her shelter friends – C-SNIP praised Dr. Mackie every day for advocating for the huge number of animals euthanized in shelters and advocating for spay and neuter to become mainstream. He was her hero!