You hear it all the time: “If people can’t afford to care for a pet, they shouldn’t get one.” Does that belief help animals or hurt them?

In a thought-provoking presentation at the recent Best Friends No More Homeless Pets Conference in Jacksonville, Fla., Kim Wolf of Beyond Breed challenged her audience to re-think their attitudes toward dogs in low income and minority neighborhoods.

She presented a case study on dog adoption events in Brooklyn, New
York, showing the events are almost never held in poor or minority
neighborhoods.

“I have a real problem when people say we can’t go into
those neighborhoods because people don’t want rescue dogs there,” she said. “I see people rescuing dogs there all the time.”

Those dogs aren’t coming from organized rescue groups and shelters, however. Nor are they coming from pet stores, online retailers or breeders. They are mostly adopted directly from the streets, or from family members or friends who have lost their housing or can’t take care of them. The litters of people’s own unaltered dogs and cats are another source of pets in those communities.

“People everywhere love animals, regardless of income,
zip code and race,” said Wolf. “So here’s a question:
What if we flooded low-resource areas with adopted
pets?”

Animals from shelters and rescue groups are already altered and vaccinated, she pointed out, unlike the pets that the people in those areas are currently rescuing. In those communities veterinary offices are almost as scarce as adoption events. People often lack the means to travel to, nor can they afford veterinary care offered in other areas, especially with large dogs.

So what if we replaced the stream of new pets with our own pets, who are already vaccinated and will not be as likely to get sick, and who are already altered so will not produce future litters of pets? Wouldn’t that save the lives of pets currently dying in our shelters, and reduce expenses for low income pet owners by saving them the cost of spay/neuter as well as preventing many of the common illnesses unvaccinated pets can contract?

If that happened, she said, shelters might even be able to divert some of their resources to providing low cost health services to the pets of low income families — an important piece of the story, given the lack of veterinary resources in those communities, as well as their lack of the ability to pay for such care.

“We have to ask, are we reflecting our communities in our efforts?” Wolf said. “Because there is a lot of low-hanging fruit here. There are a lot of
opportunities.”