By Aidan Poole

National news sources have been reporting that “people are abandoning their pandemic pets nationwide as returns to work [and school] loom” (www.fortune.com) and, while local animal shelters say they too have seen an uptick in surrenders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is not the newly-adopted pets who need to be re-homed. 

Kathy Lundgren, the volunteer outreach coordinator of the Baypath Humane Society in Hopkinton, said “our dog surrender rates have doubled” between July 2020 to July 2021, “but the surrenders haven’t necessarily been the pups adopted through the pandemic.”

Instead, Lundgren said, “the surrenders that we have been seeing have been from people who have had their dogs for years” and are giving them up due to pet behavior problems, personal health issues, or life changes, such as losing a home or job. “It’s a delicate situation so we don’t pry as to the reason for the surrender unless it is a behavioral surrender,” she said.

Barbara Farrington, the director of the Milford Humane Society, connected the dots between certain surrenders and pandemic-related hardships. “Some of the surrenders have been directly related to COVID and job loss leading to home loss,” she said, recalling one family who had to surrender their cat because the main breadwinner was an event planner, one of the “types of jobs [that] could not survive the pandemic.”

Although COVID-19 has contributed to the Milford Humane Society’s workload, Farrington said that many of their surrenders are for other reasons such as pet owners changing their residence or elderly people becoming unable to care for their animals.

Lundgren says, at Baypath Humane Society, adoptions are also up by about eight percent overall which helps offset the above-average surrender rates, and is “most likely due to the pandemic and families looking for companion animals.” 

“It is an unfortunate number of surrenders and most of the time we understand that it is a tough decision for people to surrender their pets for various reasons,” said Lundgren, adding that Baypath Humane Society is “thankful that people do surrender them appropriately to a shelter” rather than “just [letting] them out some place to fend for themselves.”

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