HALIFAX -- With the COVID-19 pandemic causing a negative impact on many industries, pet adoptions seem to be benefiting.
Pet adoptions are up in the Maritimes and some believe it’s due to the increase of people spending more time at home.
The Purrfect Cup is one of many businesses reporting the increase in adoptions. They say adoption numbers are up, and surrender numbers are down.
“Once we reopened, our cats have been going so fast,” said Brenna Gauthier, the assistant manager at The Purrfect Cup. “They’ve been getting adopted so quickly we haven’t been able to keep up. The shelters haven’t been able to keep up with them either. It’s been amazing honestly.”
The Purrfect Cup says overall they’ve experienced fewer adoptions than normal since reopening in May but they attribute those numbers to having fewer cats available overall, and less kittens at the café.
According to the SPCA, they say nationally they’ve also seen a drop in dogs going into shelters.
“We get questions every single day on our social media channels of people calling saying, ‘why don’t you have any dogs’. Truly every day. We have a lot of cats,” said SPCA Director of Development Christine Kennedy-Babineau.
Dogs were the popular pandemic pet of choice in some areas, leaving cats scratching looking for a placement.
Kelly Ingles, the manager at Sheltering Helpless Animals in Distress, believes this could be due to the vet backlog for spraying and neutering cats, early on in the pandemic shutdown.
Ingles says she lobbied the Nova Scotia Veterinary Medical Association for all shelters to help with this work.
“The SPCA was allowed to do spays and neuters at that time but no other shelters were and I didn’t feel that was fair when we were trying to help,” said Ingles.
“When the doctors kept saying to flatten the curve of covid, we needed to flatten the curve of the animal population.”
Ingles said their biggest struggle through the pandemic has been the inability to host events and fundraise to keep shelters in operation.
