Foreclosure pets caught in the crossfire

Back when I started blogging for Pet Connection, Gina and I used to talk a lot about whether we'd have enough really substantive topics to discuss.

Today, we laugh about that, since if anything, there are more issues than we can cover. Seems people with pets aren't really just vapid consumers of cheap plastic toys and the pet food du jour after all.

No, we care about food safety issues, drug and health information, and huge social issues like shelter reform, the no kill movement, animal welfare, and a whole universe of controversial and complex subects.

I've been following the shelter reform movement for around a year now, and I also was interested in writing about the current economic downturn and how it was affecting pet owners and their animals. And amazingly, although I didn't go into the story with this in mind, I noticed that the way the subject of "foreclosure pets" was being treated in the animal community was breaking down cleanly along the ideological lines of the current shelter wars.

You can see where my story took me here on SFGate.com.

There are also some eye-opening and deeply moving interviews with Nevada Humane Society's Bonney Brown -- last years's Shelter Director of the Year, by the way; Cheryl Lang, who founded an organization called "No Paws Left Behind" to offer direct services to pets affected by foreclosure and also to educate the real estate and mortgage industries on the problem; PetFinder.com founder and president Betsy Saul, who is working to raise awareness of how the housing and economic crisis is impacting pets; no-kill advocate and "Redemption" author Nathan Winograd; as well as my email communication with Humane Society of Stanislaus County director Traci Jennings,  all here.

Comments

[Barbara Saunders]

Christie - I found some fantastic scholarship online (and, sadly didn't bookmark it) that offers a theory about this kind of blaming the victim in the pet universe. My attempt to summarize: in the DNA of the movement is a "Victorian strain." In that era, pets were a signal of middle-class status. The very poor had no animals, not even to eat. Those slightly better off had livestock and animals who worked. Animals of leisure could be kept only by people who had disposable income.

By extension, some of this conversation about "responsible" vs. "irresponsible" behavior is code for "middle-class."

In some ways, this prejudice has OK results. For example, banning dog fighting is good whether or not the reason is that, "Dog fighting is not proper behavior."

Evil creeps in, though, in attitudes like, "People who lose their homes obviously are 'irresponsible'." (Look at that whole quotation you included about what people can "afford".) OR "People who can't afford big vet bills shouldn't have pets." (To which I respond, better to rescue an animal from the high-kill pound this year, even if next year you can't pay
for chemo 10 years hence.) It also creeps into those notorious aggressive grillings that happen when people try to adopt pets from certain rescues.

[Christie]

Barbara... great thoughts, and I have to say I agree. One of the things that ended up on the cutting room floor was discussion of the incredible bias against the poor inherent in so much of this discourse, including a lot of dog whistling such as you describe here.

I see it quite a bit in the whole pit bull debate too.

THANKS for your comment!