A perfect storm of factors has led to unprecedented overcrowding in animal shelters. We spoke to shelters to understand what's causing the overcrowding and what can be done about it.
Read the full transcript below:
Sam Dingman: This is Northeast Notebook from WAMC. I'm Sam Dingman.
Karli Russell: So, it's this perfect storm of people literally cannot afford to keep their animals anymore.
Sam Dingman: Overcrowding has become the norm at animal shelters across the Northeast.
Karli Russell: There are also an increase in court investigations and cases like that.
Sam Dingman: On today's program, we will dig into what's contributing to packed shelters and how the region is responding.
Karli Russell: These guys are available for adoption. Lots of different ages, sizes, breeds, etc., um, including-
Sam Dingman: This is the Saratoga County Animal Shelter. Inside a conference room, rats and rabbits are settling into their temporary homes. The kennel area is currently full up.
Karli Russell: We have over 350 animals within our care, meaning almost every kennel is full.
Sam Dingman: Karli Russell is the public relations coordinator for the Saratoga County Animal Shelter. Like shelters around the country, in August, they marked 'Clear The Shelters Month.' In a recent conversation with Northeast Notebook producer Annie Bennett, Karli said the situation for many animal adoption and rescue organizations is dire.
Karli Russell: With the amount of animals in our care, we are at capacity, so in order to properly care for the animals that we currently have, we've had to temporarily pause intake.
Annie Bennett: Okay. So what do you do when somebody comes in and wants to surrender and you can't take it?
Karli Russell: We give them other resources and in emergency situations, we will take the animal in, and that's where our foster families really come into play.
Sam Dingman: But why has there been such a noticeable increase in recent years?
Well...
Karli Russell: Things are getting more expensive.
Sam Dingman: A recent report by Bank of America found a
42% increase in vet care costs since 2019, and a 22% increase in pet food and treats. The number of pets being abandoned
is unprecedented.
Cynthia Sweet: I've been doing this for 21 years, and I have never seen anything like this.
Sam Dingman: Cynthia Sweet is the director and founder of Sweet Paws Rescue in Groveland, Massachusetts, north of Boston.
Cynthia Sweet: We in rescue talk about pre-COVID and post-COVID.
Sam Dingman: Pandemic puppies took over households back in 2020. Since then, many owners realize that the reality of having a pet is a lot more than they bargained for.
Cynthia Sweet: Everybody got dogs during COVID, and then they went back to work. They didn't do a lot of socialization because we couldn't go anywhere.
So these poor dogs were sort of stuck in people's homes, in their backyards, and then all of a sudden they're told to go back to work and they're like, "Oh, well, I gotta send my dog to doggy daycare."
Well, your dog doesn't know how to even function outside in the world, let alone a doggy daycare, right? So people started giving up their dogs a lot, like, you know, 2023.
Sam Dingman: But sometimes even the most prepared animal lovers are no match for a tumultuous economy.
Cynthia Sweet: It is almost near impossible to find housing that won't be so far out of your budget, and then to throw a dog or a cat on top of that, it's, you- people can't afford to live with an animal. Then another aspect is the increase of veterinary bills because corporations are gobbling up mom-and-pop veterinary clinics.
So it's this perfect storm of people literally cannot afford to keep their animals anymore.
Sam Dingman: Historically, overcrowded shelters
were most prominent in the American Southeast. But today, it's a national problem. In the years before COVID, Cynthia says many of Sweet Paws animals were transported up to Massachusetts from the Deep South.
But now they have their hands full here.
Cynthia Sweet: So 97% of our animals came from Mississippi and Alabama pre-COVID. Nowadays, probably, like, 45% of our dogs are coming from Massachusetts. That's up from 3%.
Sam Dingman: The problem of homeless pets is more multifaceted than it may seem. To dive into this, I sat down with WAMC producer Annie Bennett.
Give me an example of an experience you had at a shelter where you thought to yourself, "This place has hooks into a larger story happening around the region," if that question makes sense.
Annie Bennett: One of the things that I thought was really interesting was the gap in education. Anytime you see a food desert, you're also seeing an animal welfare desert.
Even though animals are adopted at similar rates across all different backgrounds, they are taken and seized from communities of color at higher rates.
Sam Dingman: One of the groups investigating those trends is Companions & Animals for Reform and Equity, or CARE. This is a clip from a promotional video on their website.
Video Clip: Animal care can look different within different communities and different spaces, so understanding that different communities have different needs and access to resources. So as we move to different communities, we wanna start thinking about how to create animal welfare that is reflective of that community and that supports the needs of that community.
Sam Dingman: Advocates told Annie about the importance of recognizing not all demographics share the same attitudes around animals. And in order to solve the education gap around animal care, organizations are working to meet cultures where they are.
Annie Bennett: I think that a lot of these organizations are seeing it as a microcosm for some racial disparities as well, and how can we bridge that gap so that it's not just, you know, white suburban families getting education about why spaying and neutering is important and things like that.
Cynthia Sweet: A lot of the animals that we are seeing that are sort of not up to the care of what we in rescue would you know, say is good care, a lot of it tends to be in cities where there's a big immigrant population. So a lot of it is not intentional abuse. It's just a lack of education on knowing how to take care of an animal because they come from a culture where animals are just seen differently than they are here in the United States.
People who don't know about rescue will say, "Oh my God, those people are sociopaths." Nope. No, they're not. They're just very desperate. They're just very desperate to figure out what to do with the dog that they can no longer care for.
Sam Dingman: That idea of education being the key to keeping pets safe isn't new.
It's popped up in reporting by WAMC's Aaron Shellow Lavine. He's written about the pressures on animal shelters across Upstate New York over the past year, including from high-profile cases of animal hoarding.
Aaron Shellow Lavine: A lot of the folks that I've talked to at these situations on the vet and shelter side of things aren't as ready to blame the people that they're getting these surrendered animals from as you might think, as people who deal with it so regularly.
Sam Dingman: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Annie Bennett: Yeah.
Aaron Shellow Lavine: And perhaps it's, you know, it's because of their proximity to it, where they're saying when you are dealing with hoarding, you don't realize it necessarily. So it's not always like a this person is doing it just from a greed perspective, from a, you know... There are cases where folks just cannot recognize that what they're doing is leading to hurting themselves and these animals until it's too late, until they're, you know, it's a situation where these animals must be removed immediately to try and save their lives.
Cynthia Sweet: First of all, they're just doing the best they can money-wise to take care of their animal, and when they make a choice of, um, you know, whether or not they're going to spend $40 a month on monthly preventative so their dogs don't get fleas, or they're going to get groceries that week, obviously we know the answer to that question.
Sam Dingman: In Upstate New York, an increase in animal cruelty investigations has led to calls for action. Some state lawmakers are pushing for a statewide animal abuser registry. More than two dozen New York counties, that's nearly half, have established their own lists.
Aaron Shellow Lavine:
What would help this situation across the state is training standards and education for law enforcement.
You know-
Sam Dingman: Mm-hmm ...
Aaron Shellow Lavine: If police were better trained in, in being able to advocate for animals and say, "Well, wait a second, I can do X, Y, or Z about this thing that somebody's coming to me for-
Sam Dingman: Yeah ...
Aaron Shellow Lavine: uh, that I have been told would make a pretty dramatic difference.
Sam Dingman: Well, so did-
Annie Bennett: Even offloading this from law enforcement to like-
Aaron Shellow Lavine: Yeah, no, definitely
Annie Bennett: social services-
Sam Dingman: Sure, sure ...
Annie Bennett: things like that-
Aaron Shellow Lavine: Yeah, yeah ...
Annie Bennett: that are, are-
Sam Dingman: Right ...
Annie Bennett: are designed to handle more emotionally charged situations.
Aaron Shellow Lavine: Mm-hmm.
Sam Dingman: Back at the Saratoga County Animal Shelter, they are seeing firsthand the effects of these trends.
Here's Karli Russell.
Karli Russell: It's a little bit more expensive to care for an animal and to house an animal in your home.
We do offer and work with different programs in the area to try to help with that issue. There are also an increase in court investigations and cases like that. As a municipal shelter, we are responsible for housing those animals temporarily until they are released, and then a solution is figured out.
Sam Dingman: But the more kennels that are available inside the shelters, the less likely people are to abandon animals on the side of the road. Even though Saratoga County has stopped officially accepting intakes, they're still accepting emergency surrenders, and they're doing everything they can to try to empty cages.
Karli Russell: Absolutely looking for foster homes for a wide variety of species. We are also hosting a number of adoption clinics and really trying to do a big social media post, um, to get the word out there that the shelter exists, that we have animals. And if you're looking for something specific,
there's a good chance that we have it either here in the shelter or out in foster care
Sam Dingman: Northeast Notebook is a production of WAMC, Northeast Public Radio.
It was produced by Annie Bennett. Our editor is Diane DeVore. Our executive producer is Lucas Willard. Music by Eduardo Rivera. Consider subscribing to Northeast Notebook wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like the show, take a second to rate and review. It really does help others find the show.
I'm your host, Sam Dingman. Thanks for listening.
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