Pandemic-era pet boom collides with reality of inflation
When the street cats of Chicago’s Hyde Park get out of control, Frances Spaltro’s neighbors know they can call her for help.
She shuttles the cats to foster homes, but there aren’t enough for all the strays, which often aren’t strays at all — just pets looking for their homes and the owners that turned them outside. During the worst days of the summer, when Chicago’s oppressive heat drove abandoned animals to court strangers for food, water and air conditioning, Spaltro’s rescue assisted 35 homeless cats from a neighborhood of fewer than 30,000 residents. One volunteer from Spaltro’s Hyde Park Cats rescue keeps foster homes for six felines.
That story has played out across the country. Not too long ago, Americans opened their homes to a historic number of pets, a development comparable to the post-World War II baby boom in terms of its size. More than 23 million U.S. households — nearly one in five nationwide — have adopted a pet during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. President Biden even adopted two pets: a dog, Major, and cat, Willow.
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While most of those animals have remained with their adopters, animal welfare organizations are now scrambling to help some pet owners provide for their cats and dogs — or come up with the resources to care for animals given up under economic duress — lest some owners face an impossible decision: Surrender or abandon their animals so they can keep themselves and their human families afloat.
Thirty-five percent of pet owners in September said they were concerned about the expense of having a pet in the current economy, according to data from the American Pet Products Association trade group. Of those, half said they may have to give up their pet.
Veterinary and shelter officials say it is a troubling sign about the future of American pet ownership. Middle- and upper-class households are spoiling their companions with new toys, top-shelf foods and luxurious day care and boarding accommodations. Meanwhile, pet adoption for lower-income households is slipping out of reach.
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The overwhelming majority of pet owners who have fewer animals now than three months ago say it’s because one of their pets died, APPA reported. But 14 percent said they could not afford to keep their pet, while 12 percent said their pet was re-homed and 9 percent said they could no longer take care of their pet for a variety of reasons.
“When the economy is struggling, families are struggling,” said Lindsay Hamrick, director of shelter outreach and engagement at the Humane Society of the United States. “That shows up as surrenders.”
Animal shelters across the country told The Washington Post that they have seen an influx of pet surrenders this year as inflation retains its chokehold on household budgets. Even though there has been some easing recently, gas and grocery prices remain high, as does most Americans’ biggest expense, housing. The national median rent swelled 5.9 percent year-over-year in November and almost 18 percent in 2021, according to real estate broker Apartment List.
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Meanwhile, pet upkeep is not cheap: Annual food, supplies and routine medical care cost between roughly $500 and $1,000 for a dog, and $650 for a cat, according to the ASPCA. Surprise veterinary care can cost thousands of dollars. More than 4 in 10 pet owners reported that a vet bill of $999 or less would cause them to go into debt, according to a Forbes Advisor survey.
As Americans fall behind on rent, animal welfare groups have braced themselves for staggering numbers of pets on the street. In mid-October, 5.2 million households were behind on rent, according to the National Equity Atlas. While that’s down from 6.2 million the year prior, it still puts 7.4 million pets on the verge of homelessness, according to a calculator developed by American Pets Alive, a nonprofit animal shelter advocacy group.
“This is unprecedented,” Hamrick said. “It’s not the students who are moving and leaving their animals. … It’s people who were losing their jobs or losing their apartments, or maybe they didn’t set aside enough time to figure out what they were going to do with their cats when they moved.”
In Philadelphia’s 10 lowest-income Zip codes, the number of stray dogs has jumped 53 percent in the past year, and surrenders are up 31 percent, said Sarah Barnett, co-executive director of ACCT Philly, the largest open-intake shelter in the region.
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“We are just seeing people at a breaking point,” she said.
Share this articleShareIn El Paso, where the poverty rate is nearly 20 percent, pet surrenders swelled after covid-era rental assistance programs shut down. El Paso Animal Services, a municipal shelter run by the city and county of El Paso, took in 53 cats and dogs in July, up from 10 in July 2021. Nearly 1 in 4 pets was given up for economic reasons in 2022, compared with 1 in 10 during a typical year, shelter officials said.
“We are seeing more and more people coming to the shelter to surrender because of evictions … or no longer being able to afford it,” said Michele Anderson, the shelter’s public engagement manager. “Sometimes they can’t afford food or they’re having to make a tough decision between feeding their human children versus feeding their pets.”
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To keep families together, El Paso Animal Services launched a pet pantry program in partnership with the local senior center. Beneficiaries have run the gamut: a young couple who recently had another child, seniors on fixed incomes, people experiencing homelessness.
For those who surrendered their pets, it was usually their last resort, Anderson said. In late July, a deaf woman came to El Paso Animal Services with her five cats, along with an eviction notice. She had found Turi and Mia, two black-and-white strays, and adopted them. Mia then had a litter of three kittens. Their owner was devastated to give them up.
Renee Rojas, a community and pet support supervisor at El Paso Animal Services, found a temporary caretaker and has been sending the owner pictures and constant updates of her cats while she looked for permanent housing so she could adopt the cats back. Within a few months, the owner came back and took Turi back home.
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Anderson worries that if the tide of surrenders persists, the sheer amount of pets will overload shelters. At El Paso Animal Services, there are over 1,000 pets in the shelter and over 2,500 in foster homes. ACCT Philly takes in around 15,000 animals every year — some of them, Barnett said, were redirected from other limited-intake shelters that can reject a pet because of space or breed restrictions.
To desperate owners, shelter overcapacity forces them to make a heartbreaking decision: Leaving their pets to the streets.
That’s what happened to Baby Girl. In a picture circulating on social media in early May, the mixed-breed canine appeared to be tied to a fire hydrant in Green Bay, Wis., quietly sitting in the middle of the neighborhood, next to a backpack full of supplies. It was clear she was eagerly looking for someone.
A local news station reported her owner was living on the street and going through chemotherapy. Before parting with her, he called seven shelters, but none had a vacancy.
But this story ends happily: Baby Girl was rescued by Wisconsin Humane Society and then adopted.
“Financial distress is the number one reason people surrender,” said Angela Speed, communications director at Wisconsin Humane Society. “That’s ultimately the Baby Girl story.”
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