If you remember anything about the spay-neuter surge launched three years ago in neighborhoods overrun with dangerous loose dogs, it’s most likely the privately funded campaign’s audacious target — to perform 46,000 free surgeries annually in southern Dallas.

So how did they do? With the $16 million effort winding down, I got the first chance to see the near-final numbers and can report that the Let’s Fix This surge accomplished only about two-thirds of its goal.

But those approximately 82,000 surgeries over three years represent an unprecedented success, not just in Dallas but anywhere in the nation. The surge posted record numbers and contributed to making neighborhoods, their people and their pets much safer.

Private donors seeded the spay-neuter project in 2017, less than a year after the mauling death of Antoinette Brown in South Dallas forced the city to confront the loose-dog crisis.

Peter Brodsky, one of the surge leaders, is right to make no apologies for the campaign’s results. “We set the number way high, but the growth is still huge," he told me. “It’s a crazy number of surgeries to actually have gotten done.”

It’s also work that’s hardly finished. Although the percentage of fixed dogs arriving at the city shelter has increased a few percentage points since 2016, more than 80 percent of the animals — roughly 24,000 annually, most from southern Dallas — have not been spayed or neutered.

That’s why those of us who care about animal welfare and public safety hope private money will be found to continue the surge beyond its March 31 end date.

SPCA of Texas boss Karen Froehlich pointed out that the numbers have grown each year and momentum is still building for Let’s Fix This. “None of us want to walk away at the end of March … and say, ‘Sorry, but we’re done with that,’” she told me.

The spay-neuter surge was among the Boston Consulting Group’s 2016 recommendations to combat the loose-dog epidemic. Most of BCG’s findings focused on a top-to-bottom overhaul of Dallas Animal Services, but one was a challenge to philanthropists: Provide the millions needed to fund free spay-neuter operations to the pets of southern Dallas residents.

The city shelter performs spay-neuter operations on all of its pets before adoption, so its work — funded solely by taxpayer dollars — has been key to reaching for the 46,000-a-year goal. Dallas Animal Services provided about 30,000 spay-neuter procedures over the three years.

Spay Neuter Network and the SPCA of Texas, with the help of $16 million in private funds, had the harder job. They tracked down residents with unsterilized dogs, then had to persuasively educate them, one by one, that spay-neuter surgery is not only the law but is also better for the animal’s welfare.

The two providers performed 13,531 surgeries in year one, 18,076 in year two and project to be close to 20,000 when the final year ends March 31. That’s a total of 51,607 surgeries.

The spay-neuter surge is crucial to improving public safety because research shows that neutered dogs are generally less aggressive and less prone to wanderlust. The majority of bites by loose dogs occur in southern Dallas, and incidents are dropping steadily, 10 percent in the last fiscal year, from 620 to 558 reports citywide.

Behind those numbers are gruesome stories: In November, an elderly woman living in the Red Bird neighborhood was seriously injured by three dogs — none of them sterilized — that had escaped from a nearby yard.

Brodsky, who also serves as chair of the city’s Animal Commission, hopes to see another loose-dog survey this year, similar to the one done by the Boston Consulting Group in 2016. For now, he and Dallas Animal Services director Ed Jamison note that DAS receives far fewer calls about roaming animals and the topic has all but disappeared from community meetings.

The surge also has provided Jamison and his staff with an invaluable tool in their enforcement of the city’s mandatory spay-neuter ordinance. Along with a ticket, non-complying dog owners get info about the Let’s Fix This campaign: Get your dog the free surgery within three weeks and the ticket goes away.

“We’re not the bad guys anymore,” Jamison said. “We’re no longer writing tickets without providing a resource, and that resource is thanks to the spay-neuter partners.”

In fiscal 2019, more than 7,000 citations — 54 percent of the total — have ended with compliance-dismissal after a resident hooked up with the free service.

One of those was southeast Oak Cliff resident Jacqueline Douglas, the owner of Purple Rain and Loco. When a Dallas Animal Services outreach team knocked on her door, Douglas was upfront that one dog was in compliance, but not the other. Once she learned about the surge, she worked with SPCA to do the surgery and the ticket went away.

Kallie Guerrero, 3, Rebecca Lopez and Richard Lopez visited Dallas Animal Services last summer as they considered adopting a dog. Among the benefits of the spay-neuter surge has been that residents who previously couldn't afford the surgeries for their pets now have free access to the service. That means fewer dogs wind up at the often-too-crowded shelter. (Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

The Let’s Fix It effort has been funded by a number of Dallas foundations, with a lead gift of $10 million by The Rees-Jones Foundation and significant support from other groups that have long funded animal-related cases, such as The Meadows Foundation, Dallas Foundation and McCune Charitable Foundation.

In addition, several Dallas institutions focused on the project’s public safety piece contributed, including the W.W. Caruth Jr. Foundation, the Harold Simmons Foundation, the Moody Foundation, the Lyda Hill Foundation and the Rainwater Charitable Trust.

The funders’ dollars closed the access and affordability gaps for southern Dallas pet owners. But the education-persuasion piece — which comes only from building trust and relationships — has proved to be a much more difficult assignment than some on the surge team initially expected.

“To help residents understand that this is good for the pet and good for the community is an expensive proposition,” Brodsky said. ”Without these funders, we’d be nowhere.”

The at-cost price tag of each surgery accounts for millions of dollars. Another big chunk of the money has gone for outreach teams canvassing neighborhoods and other marketing efforts. When communications strategies flopped — and a handful of them did — the team devised a new plan.

Bonnie Hill, director of the Spay Neuter Network, told me soon after the surge began that the resistance would be formidable. Last week, Froehlich explained it like this: “We were unknown outsiders coming in, saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to pick up your pet to get it spay-neutered and vaccinated, then bring it back at the end of the day.’ There wasn’t a lot of trust.”

Perhaps the surge team’s perseverance is best illustrated by the plight of two dogs living on chains in an Oak Cliff backyard. It took months for SPCA community outreach coordinator Rosa Monterrosa to win the trust of the dogs’ owner — who had never even named his pets.

Froehlich said he eventually agreed to surgeries for both dogs, whom he subsequently named Alaska and Ohio, and allowed the SPCA to build enclosures for them. Now two dogs previously confined to life on a chain are happy, healthy pets being taken for walks through the neighborhood.

I get exceedingly jazzed by heartwarming anecdotes like that one, but what matters even more are the cold, hard facts. Those numbers show the surge has provided some spectacular results, especially when it comes to public safety.

It would be a terrible shame to see this unprecedented surge stop before the job is finished.