So say new pet parents like Mary Childs, an NPR reporter living in Richmond, Va., who adopted a three-month-old puppy on March 15. Childs, who formerly wrote for Barron’s magazine , realized that working remotely for the next few weeks or months to fight the spread of the coronavirus was the perfect opportunity to adopt and train a puppy.“It’s great to get to spend so much time with her, even though the circumstances are awful and scary,” Childs, 33, told MarketWatch.
There has been concern that as the coronavirus spread across the U.S., that the animal shelters would be overwhelmed by Americans surrendering their pets because they became too sick to take care of them, or out of the mistaken fear that COVID-19 could be spread by dogs and cats. “It was just really wonderful to see people rally together to protect pets,” Ashley Zeh, the rescue’s associate director of communications, told MarketWatch.
But some shelters, particularly in the southeast, are still buckling under a pet overpopulation, according to Kim Alboum, the director of shelter outreach and policy engagement at the Humane Society of the United States. And the regular transports, which bring animals from overcrowded shelters to the rescues that have a greater demand for dogs and cats to adopt, have been disrupted by the current health crisis.
Indeed, Americans collectively dropped a record-breaking $95.7 billion on their pets last year, according to the American Pet Products Association, which is up from $72.56 billion the year before. Many people don’t realize just how much scratch is going to their four-legged friends. A 2018 Rover.com survey found that, while people thought that owning a dog was running them $26 to $75 a month, they were actually spending $153 a month on average — adding up to $1,836 a year.
Except the shelters are all closed
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