Overwhelmed Animal Shelters Look for Solutions

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Wall Street Journal
By: Peter Funt
Published: August 17, 2023

Among the few feel-good developments during the pandemic was the remarkable rate at which Americans brought pets into their homes, emptying cages at animal shelters. Even better was how the trend appeared to survive—at least until now. This summer, facilities in many parts of the country face severe overcrowding, prompting pleas for pet adoptions to avoid the need to euthanize healthy animals. According to the nonprofit Shelter Animals Count, “non-live outcomes” for shelter dogs was 25% higher in the first half of 2023 than during the same period two years ago.

What happened? How did a heartwarming story flip so dramatically? The sad answer is that the economic difficulties affecting many Americans are also creating problems for their pets. Housing needs and high food prices are among the factors forcing people to give up or abandon animals acquired during the pandemic.

So-called puppy mills and backyard breeders that went into overdrive during Covid are now stuck with unwanted animals. Compounding the problem is a nationwide shortage of veterinarians, resulting in less spaying and neutering. At the personal level, “Many people who took puppies into their homes during the pandemic are finding the animals have grown too large to keep,” said Beth Brookhouse, an executive at SPCA Monterey County in California. “Many of these dogs were never trained or properly cared for, and now they’re flooding shelters across the country.”

Typical is the situation in Cobb County, north of Atlanta. Steve Hammond, the county’s director for animal services, said “Our intake for the year is up 17%,” which translates to more than 1,000 additional animals. His unit recently had to euthanize 44 healthy animals due to lack of space.

Why are intake numbers up so much? “The housing crisis here is the biggest problem,” Hammond explained. “We’ve heard of landlords demanding pet deposits as high as $3,000. There are even some apartments charging as much as $400 monthly rent for pets. Some folks have been forced to live in their cars, and as the temperatures rose this summer they simply couldn’t keep a pet.”

In North Carolina, Kim Janzen, president of SPCA of Wake County, said, “We are seeing a significant increase in the number of medical cases we’re taking in, and an increase in the number of dogs with behavior issues. That means animals stay longer in our care, which means we can take in fewer animals.” The nearby Wake County Animal Shelter announced on Aug. 3 that it was “overwhelmed with more than 208 dogs and cats” arriving the previous week.

Before the pandemic, most people adopting animals were in stable circumstances and accepted the responsibility of owning a pet. Covid brought a new universe of pet owners, many of them first-timers, who were either unprepared for the responsibility or eventually found that their economic circumstances made it too challenging. These second thoughts, along with the vet shortage, threw shelter populations out of balance.

Stephanie Filer, head of Shelter Animals Count, explains, “The past two years have been challenging for animal sheltering organizations, with many more animals coming in than are leaving. We have been holding on to too many animals since the beginning of 2021. This means that shelters are now in their third year of having too many animals in care.”

Though multiple factors contribute to overcrowded shelters, a solution is available: policies and programs to facilitate pet adoption. Jim Tedford, president of the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement, one of the nation’s most respected nonprofits in the field, offers this surprisingly encouraging assessment: “If every dog in every animal shelter was placed tomorrow, we still would not have met the demand of the consuming public for pets.”

According to Tedford, certain parts of the country—New England and the upper Midwest, for example—are not suffering from pet overpopulation. “What we’re dealing with today,” he explains, “is more a distribution problem. I think if we could move those pets to places where there’s higher demand and lower supply, then we could come much closer to balancing the equation.”

Unfortunately, the shortage of veterinarians limits the redistribution of animals from one state to another because in most cases dogs and cats can’t be moved unless they are sterilized and pronounced medically fit. The shortage of doctors is so severe that schools such as Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee are training undergraduates to be veterinary technicians, to assist doctors and free up their time. Meanwhile, three new veterinary schools will graduate their first classes over the next three years, which is expected to boost the nation’s total of vets by about 20%, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.

The private sector is also playing a significant role in facilitating pet adoptions. Petfinder, operated by Purina, and Adopt a Pet, a division of Mars, are among the largest online services connecting people and pets. Using software known as Shelter Buddy, created by RSPCA Queensland in Australia, shelters upload information about available animals to searchable databases. Another product, known as Pet Alerts, marketed by Baseline Creative in Kansas, allows prospective adopters to receive messages from a local shelter as soon as a desired animal becomes available.

This month, NBCUniversal is conducting its ninth annual Clear the Shelters pet adoption campaign, which so far has placed some 860,000 pets in new homes. As part of the effort, on Aug. 1 animals in overcrowded shelters were flown from Fort Lauderdale to facilities in New Jersey and New Hampshire. Making the journey were Mercy, a 2-year-old boxer mix, and Captain Hook, a 17-week-old, one-eyed kitten, along with some 270 other rescued dogs and cats.

There are other ways to ease crowding at shelters. One is by providing foster homes for pets awaiting adoption, a process that expanded significantly while people stayed home during the pandemic but has receded as Americans have returned to work. “We’ve always used foster care as a stopgap measure in sheltering,” explains Tedford, “particularly for those animals that may need a little bit more TLC before they’re ready to go into the adoption system. During Covid there were waiting lists in some communities where there were way more foster homes than there were animals to give them.”

Another avenue for relieving overcrowding is through legislation to restrict puppy mills and retail sale of pets.

When Patti Page’s song “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” became a hit in 1953, it reflected simpler times as well as an unenlightened public. Since 2017, six states and numerous cities have outlawed the retail sale of commercially bred dogs and cats (and in some cases other creatures, like rabbits) because of its documented harm to the animals. California was the first state to act; New York became the most recent late last year. Most of the laws eliminating retail sales allow pet stores to join with local shelters to showcase animals available for adoption.

This summer Steve Hammond’s shelter in Georgia is offering free adoptions—risky, in some cases, because people might give less thought to the burdens and responsibilities of having a pet. Yet, he says plaintively, “For some of these animals this is their only chance to get out.”