At the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, animal welfare advocates had an urgent favor to ask: Empty the shelters. Now they’re calling for help again.
As eviction moratoriums end andpotentially millions of people and families lose their housing, their pets could be thrown into limbo, too. But many animal shelters are already full.
“If you add evictions on top of that, it will quickly become an emergency,” said Kristen Hassen, director of American Pets Alive. Her organization is an advocacy group that works to stop pets from being killed in shelters.
A 2014 Apartments.com survey of more than 3,000 renters found that more than 70 percent owned pets, with dogs and cats making up the majority.Although the reverberations of the eviction moratorium’s end won’t be clear for months, shelters across the nation are bracing for an inundation of pets.
