Foreclosure Pets: Soaring Rate Of Abandoned Animals Are The Latest Sign Of A Deep Economic Crisis

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/story/138634/foreclosure_pets%3A_soaring_rate_of_abandoned_animals_are_the_latest_sign_of_a_deep_economic_crisis

Foreclosure Pets: Soaring Rate of Abandoned Animals Are the Latest Sign of a Deep Economic Crisis
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2009.

Abandoned animals and "foreclosure pets" are the innocent victims of our financial downward spiral.

Beginning last year and well into 2009, a disturbing media trend emerged, as local news outlets across the country began reporting different versions of the same sad tale: Dogs, cats and other animals were being found abandoned inside and outside of shuttered homes, the "silent victims," apparently, of the foreclosure crisis.

There were the three dogs found dead in Arkansas that had been locked inside pet carriers without food or water; the "emaciated" German shepherd left chained to a tree in the backyard of an abandoned home in Arizona (he was later euthanized); the starving pit bull in Stockton, Calif., discovered in the wreckage of a ruined house, whose owners had "trashed their home before a bank foreclosed on it." (One Animal Protective League officer in Cleveland calls this "part of the revenge process: They leave these animals to defecate in the house to destroy the furniture and to urinate on everything to make it difficult for the mortgage company to clean up.")

As more and more Americans have lost their homes to the wave of foreclosures that has swept the nation, a shocking portion of them, whether due to an inability or an unwillingess to find homes for their animals after being rendered homeless themselves, have simply left their pets behind.

"This has really become an epidemic," Allie Phillips, director of Public Policy at the American Humane Association told the Detroit News earlier this month. According to her estimates, with some 8,000 houses going into foreclosure every day, from 15,000 to 26,000 more animals are in danger of losing their homes daily.

- snip -

The Detroit News tells the story of a woman who came in with her son to give up a 9-year-old purebred Yorkshire terrier after losing their home. "They were just bawling, but they had no place to live," said Kayla Allen, director of the Michigan Animal Rescue League in Pontiac.

And the New Haven Register recently told of a Connecticut woman who was forced to move in with her parents after losing her home, and in the process had to give up her two cats (sisters) as well.

- snip -

In the news and on animal-rescue listservs, stories like this one are ubiquitous. They are also not going away. This past February, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals estimated that the number of cats and dogs at risk of becoming homeless due to the economic crisis stands between 500,000 and 1 million.

"What we've always known is that when times are hard for people, they're hard for their pets," Stephen Zawistowski, vice president at the ASPCA told the Associated Press last January. But with the unprecedented foreclosure crisis now compounded by a broader economic catastrophe, the landscape is looking particularly bleak. "According to national financial estimates, approximately 1 in 171 homes in the United States is in danger of foreclosure due to the subprime mortgage crisis," Zawistowski said in a statement released by the ASPCA in February. "And considering that approximately 63 percent of U.S. households have at least one pet-plus, hundreds of thousands of pets are in danger of being abandoned or relinquished to animal shelters across the country."

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[Liberty Belle]

1. I reported the renters next door -- dog crying for 3 days, looks like they may have moved out.

I notified the owner and today don't hear the dog anymore, so hope the poor thing got rescued.

[Skittles]

2. these people need to be arrested

I understand they are in dire circumstances but there is absolutely no justification for abandoning a pet - NONE

[northernlights]

3. words can't express my hatred for the people

who leave their animals to starve and dehydrate to death.

They left dogs crated to die? What kind of despicable lowlife scumbag motherfucker could do such a thing? Those filthy bastards don't deserve a home. Those dogs didn't deserve to die that way.

You can't take them with you? Then take them to the fucking pound. Being gassed to death is horrible, but not as horrible as dying trapped in a crate, abandoned, days of agony. Filthy scum that did that don't deserve homes. Let them starve and see how it feels.

:cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry::cry:

[Lasher]

4. I hold in very low esteem anyone who needlessly allows animals to suffer like this.

Tragic.

[pnutbutr]

5. wife works at a shelter

and they have been getting at least 10 calls a day about giveups. It's a small town shelter so they have to turn away most of the dogs due to lack of space but do direct people to other nearby no kill shelters which are probably experiencing the same problems. The lack of space in the shelters is probably contributing to the abandonment.

[glowing]

6. We went to the Humane Society yesterday, and there were less dogs and cats

there than I had ever seen before ever. I'm thinking people that are in their homes are using the dogs as security for their homes.