The COVID-19 pandemic forced dog shelters and rescues to take in an exponentially higher number of dogs over the past two years, but how the intake crisis began is quite the opposite.

In 2020, nearly 18,000 new pets entered the care of Maricopa County Animal Care and Control, according to Maricopa County. With the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, dog shelters and rescues experienced mass adoptions as people were stuck at home and needed companions, said Sandra Schenone, procurement specialist at Maricopa County Animal Care and Control.

As people returned to work, or started to struggle financially, the rate of returned and abandoned dogs skyrocketed, said Tracy Bertlesman, volunteer at Valley Dogs Rescue.

With the surrender rate of the dogs increasing during the lockdown portion of the COVID-19 pandemic, dog rescues in Arizona became overwhelmed with the number of dogs that were suddenly in their care, according to Bertlesman. They were unable to have fundraising events due to lockdown restrictions, which negatively impacted the rescues, she said.

Dog rescues in particular were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finding families to foster dogs requires many factors to be taken into consideration for the families’ and the dogs’ safety. Many dogs need homes with no other animals due to behavioral issues, and “finding fosters that don’t have other animals is like finding a unicorn,” said Kim Mason, president and founder of Creative Contributions, a nonprofit public charity set up to help shelter/community animals get medical care, and volunteer at Maricopa County Animal Care and Control.

In the case of Valley Dogs Rescue, Bertlesman said that every foster site is full to the brink, and at one point she “personally had 20 dogs.”

Financial challenges

Because many shelters are funded privately and considered nonprofits, the COVID-19 pandemic restricted their ability to fundraise in-person.

“Because we could not do adoption events, there was no opportunity for us to get exposure to the public, which is a huge part of what we rely on — donations,” Bertlesman said.

The east shelter of Maricopa County Animal Care and Control was shut down. It lost many volunteers due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Mason.

It is already tough for dog shelters and rescues to stay afloat.

“It’s very difficult to recoup the cost of taking care of an animal in a shelter situation,” Schenone said.

Adoption fees come nowhere close to covering the full cost of caring for a dog in a shelter or rescue situation, and many shelters and rescues reduce the cost of fees to encourage adoption, according to Schenone.

After the Aug. 26 Supreme Court ruling that invalidated the federal eviction moratorium, Schenone said there was a fluctuation in the population at Maricopa County Animal Care and Control.

“If your choice is feeding your child or feeding your pet, you are going to feed your child, rightfully so,” she said.

Moving forward with a solution

According to Bertlesman, Mason and Schenone, one of the most substantial ways to curb the crisis is to spay and neuter dogs, which stops the animals from reproducing. The procedure is completely safe when done correctly.

It is a societal issue, as some pet owners feel that the procedure will have negative effects upon their animal, Schenone said. She also calls for community outreach and spay and neuter clinics to educate people on the benefits of altering their animal. Even this one solution was affected by the pandemic, as spay and neuter appointments became very limited with COVID-19 restrictions.

Besides spaying and neutering, the only other thing that has any chance of controlling the immense problem of an overabundance of stray and abandoned dogs is education and volunteers, Schenone said.

She added, “educating people about the commitment that a dog takes” is the only way to fix the problem.

The commitment includes the vet bills that will come up, the training, the time commitment, the effort and the energy involved.

“People don’t realize when they get their animal that there will be a monetary commitment to it later; you don’t just bail on it when it gets expensive,” Mason said.

Editor’s note: Alyssa Bickle wrote the article as a journalism student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University.