Metro Phoenix was long known for a relatively low cost of living. But prices are now on the rise, and the impact of people pushed to their financial limits is also being felt at local animal shelters.
What started as a normal day ended in tears for Laura. KJZZ agreed to only use her first name for privacy. She was recovering from a recent surgery when she found her cat, Sally, severely injured.
“The eye was like sticking out, it was so bad and I didn’t know what to do. I really don’t know what happened to her to this day,” Laura said.
Laura immediately called multiple veterinary clinics looking for help. She was told Sally’s care would cost over $1,000, which was out of her budget.
She considered putting Sally down, but that also came at a cost.
“I just thought, I need to take her in and see if they will put her down for me. I mean, I couldn’t even afford to have her put down because that costs money, too,” Laura said.
After exhausting all of her resources, Laura decided the best thing she could do was relinquish Sally to the Arizona Humane Society.
With her cat and daughter, Laura drove half an hour to the Humane Society’s Sunnyslope campus. With tears in her eyes, she explained to the employees what had happened and signed the papers.
With a drop of ink on paper, Sally was no longer Laura’s. Though devastating, she says that was not the only thing that upset her.
“I took her in and it was so sad to see because all these people were surrendering their pets. And I didn’t want to surrender mine but honestly I didn’t have any money and couldn’t find a vet to help me,” Laura said.
It's been a decade since then.
Metro Phoenix has recently become much more expensive. The trend is often measured in housing prices, incomes and even grocery bills. And owners are still facing difficult decisions around surrendering their pets.
With the cost of living rising, more and more people are surrendering their pets, according to Kelsey Dickerson, spokesperson for the Humane Society.
“If there's an unexpected expense, and it's between putting food on the table for your family or continuing to care for your pet. Unfortunately, a lot of times, you know that's the first thing that people do is relinquish their pet,” Dickerson said.
She said the organization is facing overwhelming numbers of intakes and surrenders.
“We're averaging about 400 to 500 owners' surrender applications through our animal assistance program a month. So that just kind of shows the scale of how many people out there are looking to rehome their pet,” Dickerson said.
She added than in 2024, the organization took in more than 22,000 sick, injured and abused pets, the most they’ve seen in a decade.
Dickerson said because so many animals are coming in and application numbers are so high, they are having to prioritize homeless and severely injured animals with nowhere else to go.
This leads to long wait times for people to physically go into the shelter and surrender their pet. As a result, more animals are ending up abandoned on the streets.
“It's a huge problem when people are not able to continue caring for their pets, when they're not able to find places for them to go,” Dickerson said. She adds another issue is “abandoning their pets or putting them in precarious situations.”
David Weimer is political economy professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. One of his areas of expertise is the effect the economy has on pet owners.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he explained, the opportunity cost of owning a pet went up. Pet ownership costs more than just money, it also costs time.
“There are a lot of wonderful benefits of having dogs, but they're also costs. And they're not just the dollar costs, but they're the time costs, and they're the flexibility costs, flexibility in your lifestyle,” Weimer said.
After COVID-19 restrictions were lifted and many people went back to work, they discovered they no longer had the time for their pets. That's one of the contributing factors to the rise in surrenders.
He said the cost of owning a pet averages out to approximately $1,000 a year. That number can be five to six times higher based on needs, such as unexpected medical expenses.
“It’s expensive, and if you think of a family that's barely making it, $1,000 a year is a lot,” Weimer said.
He said the decision to rehome a pet is very hard because for many people, their pet is a part of their family.
“Well, it is a big problem. Especially because many people view their pet dogs as family members, and you don't get rid of a family member,” Weimer said.
Like Weimer, Dickerson said pets rely on owners their whole lives. They count on owners to provide them with everything they need, and in turn, they show unconditional love.
To avoid separations, Dickerson says the organization will exhaust every resource to try and keep as many pets with their families as possible.
Laura is an example of this philosophy. The day after she surrendered Sally, she received an unexpected gift. She had come to terms that Sally was no longer hers, when she received a phone call from the shelter.
“They said, well, we went ahead and saved your cat, they had to remove her eye,” Laura said.
They told her as long as she gave a donation of any amount, she could have her cat back. She raced back to the shelter, gave them what she had, and got Sally back.
“It was just so unbelievable, what they had done. It was the nicest thing ever,” Laura said.
Laura had Sally for years before she died of old age. She says for a while, she felt like she couldn’t talk about the surrender.
“I couldn’t really talk about it, I didn’t think people would understand. You know what I mean. But Sally was family,” Laura said.
She now does whatever she can to help other owners in similar precarious situations.
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