Category: News/Blog

In this episode of The Informed Animal Ally podcast, Vancouver Humane Society Communications Director Chantelle Archambault and co-host, VHS Executive Director Amy Morris, are joined by UBC animal welfare researcher and associate professor Sasha Protopopova, and post-doctoral fellow in companion animals Lexis Ly. Together, they discuss the emotional and logistical realities behind pet surrender, the complex and overlapping challenges that lead guardians to rehome their animals, the barriers people face when trying to access behavioural support, and how a shift toward community-based care could help keep more pets and people together.

Note: This written discussion has been edited for length.

Chantelle: Hi, and welcome back to The Informed Animal Ally, a podcast by the Vancouver Humane Society. I’m the VHS’s communications director, Chantelle Archambault. Joining me as always is the VHS’s executive director, Amy Morris.

And today we’re also joined by two special guests. Returning to the podcast for the second time is UBC animal welfare researcher and associate professor, Sasha Protopopova and her colleague, post-doctoral fellow in companion animals, Lexis Ly.

Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I would love to ask you some questions about a recent research paper you did, but first could you tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to doing research around companion animals?

Sasha: I can start. So, I’ve been doing research for quite some time now. I think it’s been over 10, maybe even 15 years, so it’s interesting to think back about what made me do research in companion animals. I was actually interested in animal behavior primarily, and I started my research with rhesus macaques in a cognition lab when I was an undergraduate student, and really quickly realized that I actually want to be around animals who want to be around me.
And so that’s what led me to really be interested in domesticated animals. And specifically, just dogs are so wonderful. And so, I’m very dog-obsessed, and so I’ve stayed with dogs permanently.

Chantelle: Fantastic.

Lexis: And then I got pretty lucky. I have a background in animal welfare and behaviour and did a little bit of work on the lab animal side, and then did a little bit of work on the dairy cattle side.
But then I met Sasha, who was at the time also very obsessed with animal shelters and really passed that interest onto me. And so, got really interested in how animal shelters function and the types of support they can provide for people and pets, both within the shelter but then also in their community. I ended up doing a PhD in the animal welfare program that I finished last spring.

Amy: Fantastic. That’s really awesome. I love both of your backgrounds and everything that you work on. One of the things you did recently is that you had an article published in March on the circumstances pet guardians face and the support that they try to seek out before making the decision to surrender or rehome their pet. So can you tell us a little bit about this study?

Lexis: Yeah. So, throughout my PhD I was really interested in the idea of surrender generally. About 30% of animals that come into shelters are surrendered by their owners and from what we know from using animal shelter data, we can often collect a little bit of information about why and how animals enter shelters.

But when it comes to surrender, we often collect and report really only one kind of reason that people surrender animals, which is often why you hear headlines like, you know, more people are surrendering for cost related reasons, which is definitely true, but I also think reduces the complexity of the circumstances that might lead people to surrender their animals.

There are a few studies that suggest that surrender itself is not really caused by a single issue, but instead it’s often that the owner and their animal are experiencing a lot of different overlapping challenges that might lead them to connect with a shelter.

And so, we wanted to kind of capture this by asking and analyzing more questions than just the singular reason why people ended up going to shelters, but instead asking people more about the experiences that happened to them prior to surrendering their animals, including how long they had their animal for, all of the different challenges that they are experiencing, all the different ways that they had tried to keep their pet in their home, and then also all the different methods they might have tried to actually rehome their animals. That might be to a shelter, but also it might be to community members like family or friends. 

Chantelle: I really enjoyed reading this study. I thought it was very interesting and very nuanced and I really appreciated your perspective on it. When people hear that someone surrendered a pet, there can be a lot of judgement. From your research, is there anything that you wish people understood more about what’s really going on in those situations?

Lexis: Yeah. I have definitely heard this. I think that one thing that people could understand a little bit more is that, again, people are often dealing with a lot of multiple overlapping challenges. So, for example, in our study, we used a method called latent class analysis, which instead of taking a look at all these reasons why people surrendered their animals individually, instead it compiles a lot of different questions together and tries to find patterns in the way people respond in order to create groups of people within your sample.

And so, we did find that the sample of participants kind of separated out into a couple different groups, but within these groups, there was a lot of different reasons that kind of contributed to the circumstances that led them to rehome their animal. So, one of the groups, for example, was the new acquisitions group.

So, this was a group that was primarily defined by actually not having their animal for that long, so most of them owned their animal for less than a year and actually rehomed their animal within, like, a month. And so, they made a very quick decision. Most of the reasons as well included having too many animals in their home, but also, they were more likely to have another animal in their home.

While some people might say, “Oh, you know, when people adopt their animals, they don’t even know what they’re getting into” or maybe they have unrealistic expectations, what might actually happen is that they are trying to transition their animal to living in a new environment and have another animal in their home that they might need to introduce their animal to.

And in fact, we found that it was this group that had the highest likelihood of trying to seek out support to try to keep their pets. So, oftentimes folks in this group were trying to connect with trainers and get behavioural support. I think that when thinking about kind of what I wish more people understood about what was really going on, a lot of people do try to get support to try to keep their animals in their homes.

Oftentimes when we only take a look at what happens once they get to the shelter, we might forget the fact that oftentimes people are trying to reach out to their community to try to solve the problems that are at hand before going to shelters.

Sasha: Yeah. And to comment also broadly on this, I think we often hear things like being a responsible owner and it’s irresponsible to surrender and, and I think those are such loaded terms and, and they’re very stigmatizing.

And one can certainly imagine that if someone is in a situation where, for example, they are needing to rehome for whatever reason, maybe there’s a new medical situation in the family that, or a new housing situation, and like Lex has just mentioned, usually multiple, not just one thing at a time. So, it’s many things are all coming together to this family.

Us labeling them as irresponsible is not really all that helpful, and it’s most likely also going to prevent them from engaging in looking for support, and potentially also maybe even, like, preventing them from engaging in companion animals later on as well. And so I think we should just be really careful when we judge people.

Amy: I really appreciate you highlighting those concepts. And I know when I worked in a shelter environment and I was calculating statistics, I was always wondering about what was behind those and who were the people behind the numbers. And the system I was using could only give, you know one option. And so then you’re going off of maybe incomplete information.

I’m really excited to hear what are some of the challenges that people can face that are leading them to surrender a companion animal.

Lexis: In our study, the analysis that we did separated our sample into three different groups, one being the new acquisitions who had these early ownership challenges, maybe with incompatibility with another pet in the home.

But there was also a group that were facing owner hardships, and this group was actually more likely to respond that they were facing multiple different types of owner hardships. So this includes housing, financial, and personal crises. So, that could be, like, a short-term personal crisis or, like, a long-term life change, like moving or having a new job.

And so it was likely that people in this group might have responded yes to multiple of those things meaning that, again, these owner hardships might actually come kind of all together and not just be one particular circumstance. And then there was another group that was experiencing behavioural incompatibility, so some sort of pet behaviour issue, and these were separate from those who were newly acquired.

So, maybe this group of owners with behaviour concern might have had something that, again, maybe developed later in their relationship that might be something that needs to be tackled differently than those who are newly acquiring their animals. We also did find that some of the challenges were actually related to the types of support that people tried to seek out and whether they were successful in trying to seek out that support.

There was a lot of types of support that people wanted to try to seek out or they actually sought out but wasn’t successful for some reason. So, some examples of these were behavioural support, so trying to contact trainers or behaviourists, or even just looking online and trying to do things at home.

There were some people in our study who had talked about trying multiple different trainers and really only stopping because they either felt like it wasn’t helping or because of the cost barriers related to getting ongoing support. Another example of a type of support that people sought out was part-time care.

So, for example, a lot of people needed support from community members or family or friends to try to actually look after their animal, maybe during a personal crisis. So, for example, people talked about getting support from family members to walk their dogs or even to look after their animals for a short period of time.

And again, what we saw in our qualitative responses was that when that type of support kind of ran out, when they had no more friends to ask to look after their animals, or when their friends were going through certain circumstances themselves that stopped them from being able to provide support, that is often when these challenges or these decisions to have to rehome their animal occurred.

Chantelle: It sounds like people were going through quite the, the journey before making the decision to give up a pet, and that makes sense because it’s a really difficult decision to make.

How were you collecting the information about those journeys that people were going through first before making that decision to give up their pet.

Lexis: The way that we did our survey was that we asked people who had surrendered their animals up to five years ago a bunch of different questions about the aspects of surrender that we wanted to learn more about. So that includes things like whether or not they did seek out assistance. If they did, what type of assistance was it?

And if they didn’t, what kind of assistance would they have wanted? We asked folks as well to self-report just, like, all the reasons that they felt contributed to the surrender. So again, instead of trying to ask them, like, what the top reason was, that wasn’t really our concern. It was more so understanding all of the different things that kind of played into their decision.

And then we also asked them about, yeah, their, like, help-seeking patterns. So again, like, whether they tried to seek out assistance, and seeking we used very loosely. So even if it was like, “I wanted to search up, like, a trainer that was in our area,” that is somebody who is trying to seek out assistance to try to keep their pet.

We wanted to be able to capture all of that. I think in the future it would be great to do more studies kind of understanding the temporal aspect of that journey. So people did kind of self-report how long it took them to come to the decision to surrender their animals, and these decisions were often a month or more, which is similar to previous research.

But I think that understanding kind of the when or the temporal aspect of, like, when would be best to actually intervene to try to help support people who might try to keep their pets is definitely an important next step.

Chantelle: Yeah. Thanks so much for that.

Amy: Thank you. Yeah. You also spoke earlier about how some people in your study only had their pets for a short time. What kinds of challenges are coming up early on that might lead someone to feel overwhelmed or unprepared?

Lexis: Yeah. The new acquisitions group was the group that were more likely to have the pet for less time, and they’re more likely to make that decision within a shorter period of time. They were also most likely to report that they had another pet in the home, that one of the reasons why they surrendered their animal was because they had too many animals in the home, and they were also slightly more likely to report that they had cost-related concerns to caring for their animals.

I think that this might have been difficulties with transitioning the animal both into the home itself, but then also potentially with incompatibilities with a household pet that already exists. Interestingly, this group was also the most likely to try to seek out behavioural support, so a lot of people did try to do what they could to support that transition into the home.

So, I would say that while some folks were probably overwhelmed or concerned for introductions to their household animals, it seemed like a lot of people, maybe contrary to popular belief, were actually trying to get trainers and to try to look up online to see how they could introduce their animals together.

Sasha: Um, one thing that Lexis’s research is also really highlighting that we have these, like, animal sheltering systems that are also kind of part of society and we can’t… It almost feels like we can’t really look at decisions of people independently of these broader sheltering systems. And one thing, Lexis, please let me know ’cause I don’t remember the data at all as well as you do, but is it the case that there were people who had already been part of the sheltering system?

So, if they were adopting these animals, then they have a pathway to return those animals as well. And so they are more likely then to engage with the shelter back on the return side as well, or, like, the surrender eventually.

Lexis: Yeah. So this new acquisitions group was also the group that was most likely to rehome their animal through the shelter rather than through, like, friends or family or through some other self-rehoming means.

And again, that could indicate that because they had already engaged with the shelter, they might go back to the shelter because they trust the shelter. And so- There’s a
Sasha: support.

Lexis: Yeah. I think that it’s important to remember that, like, shelters are hoping to position themselves as a community-based support and for a certain group of people.
In our study, it seems like that was the case.

Chantelle: Yeah. It makes sense that they’d be familiar. With the resources and it sounds like the visibility of those resources was really important, giving people the option to reach out to them.

Sasha: Yeah. I think that makes sense ’cause if you are adopting from a shelter, you see that the shelter is a place where companion animals find good homes and, you know, that you’ve, you have adopted yourself.

And so it also makes sense then to surrender to a shelter because that animal will have a better home than you’re giving it. And so it is actually quite an altruistic type of activity potentially.

Chantelle: Thanks for that perspective. You also mentioned earlier specifically the group of people who were experiencing behaviour issues with their pets or a behaviour incompatibility in their home.

And I know you mentioned people reaching out for help with behaviour for their new pets as well, but for those pets who had behaviours coming up later on after they were adopted, what can that kind of journey look like for guardians when they’re struggling to address a behaviour from their pet in the home?

Lexis: Yeah. Unfortunately, our study couldn’t tease apart like the nuances of the behaviour concern itself, but we did ask again about their likelihood to seek help. And interestingly, we did find that this group that was experiencing behavioral incompatibilities kind of later in the relationship with their animal were actually the least likely to seek help.

Only about 14% of them said that they tried to seek some sort of support. And to me, I think that this may indicate that there are particular barriers to receiving or accessing behavioral support specifically. Um, so in the qualitative responses, a lot of people did kind of make mention that they were interested or kind of were trying to seek out support by way of trying to contact shelters in the area, but the reason why this failed or they weren’t able to do that was often due to cost of training or limited access.

Some people said that the trainer that they wanted to go to was just too far or costed too much for multiple sessions, or that these things kind of intersected with their own life related concerns. So for example, there were folks that wanted to continue behaviour training because they really needed to ensure that their animal could stay in, like, a doggie daycare, for example, so that they could continue to work.

And then when all these things weren’t possible, they also weren’t able to… Like, when they weren’t able to get more behavioural support, they weren’t able to keep their animal in the doggie daycare, and then they had to figure out something else to do with their animal. So again, even though we see kind of from the data side that it was behavioural concerns that kind of led the person to surrender their animals, it also seems like these behavioural concerns are compounded by the lack of accessibility of behavioural support specifically.

Amy: Yeah. I imagine you’re sharing a bit about this concept of, like, the binary sort of responsible pet owners versus irresponsible pet owners, and I know we have a lot of keyboard warriors out there on the internet having strong opinions about all sorts of things. How do you hope that this study and your communication around it changes the way people are actually talking about surrender?

Sasha: Yeah. Maybe the answer is yet again more broadly. I think throughout the journey that Lexis has been leading in this research that I’ve been also very happy to be part of, at one point I remember we had a meeting and we had the question of is surrender an actual problem to solve?

Is it a problem? I don’t want speak to for you, but to me that was a surprise that I had asked myself that question, just because we kind of came around full circle in the sense of, well, if sometimes it is not the right place for that animal to be in that home. And so, in that case, the surrender of that animal is actually in the best interest of both the person and the animal.

For example, there is research out there that shows that guardians of dogs with reactivity issues do have higher rates of anxiety. And as a person who had a reactive dog, I definitely have felt that. And in certain situations, perhaps an animal who, uh, doesn’t have to stay in a crate for 10 hours a day is better off in a different home.

And so occasionally, I think we have to kind of ask ourselves the question of if surrender is a bad thing itself necessarily. And another kind of parallel thought to that is also the way that we just think of ownership generally is a bit questionable, that right now we really think of this one animal belonging- to this one owner.

Whereas in a lot of the world, animals are community animals and they have many guardians, uh, who take care of them. They have maybe neighbors who are feeding the cats maybe or the dogs that are running around. Not necessarily that this is something that could be done, let’s say, in Vancouver, but it’s just a different way of thinking about the relationships that we have with animals that maybe more community type care is something that we could look at.

So, I think the whole question itself becomes interesting, and so that is tied to us labeling someone as irresponsible or responsible. Maybe the whole system is flawed there. 

Lexis: Yeah, I love that thought, and I think that this does kind of relate back to the study because, again, one of the things that kind of surprised me was that the second most common, uh, type of support that people wanted or sought was part-time care, and this is something that is not often offered.

Just generally it’s not very accessible. Like, doggie day cares aren’t necessarily the cheapest thing to, to put your animal into. But people often did talk kind of more so about this aspect of community care of kind of needing people to support with, like, dog walking or feeding their cats or even just to look after their animals for a period of time.

And so I think that there is already, of course, and even in the case of, like, self-re-homing, for example, so re-homing to your family or friends instead of going to a shelter, I think there are all these examples of community care of animals in practice that I think are not necessarily talked about in the conversation of surrender and, like, pet retention just generally because a lot of it kind of comes from the perspective that animal shelters don’t want animals to come to shelters, which I do think is still a concern for sure.

And so I think that from that lens, of course, like, in that case, surrender is kind of a problem that does need to be solved, but it may be then the way that we kind of discuss the problem and then in turn the way that animal shelters position themselves hopefully more so nowadays as community resources can also kind of help shift that towards this idea that shelters are just one part of this broader system that we can use to help everybody who wants to have an animal be able to keep their animals.

Amy: I appreciate that so much. I have a friend dog named Taco who started out his life with a woman living in her van and was traveling around having a great time, and then she ended up finding employment on a boat. And so then at the same time, a friend’s dog lost his companion and was quite lonely, and so he took on this dog.

He lives… So middle life, best friend dog, um, hanging out in the city having a good time. And then after that dog passed away, then it was realized that, okay, both guardians are working, they’re not around very much, and so then he went to another friend’s property on Pender Island and where he’s living his retirement life.

And just, like, what a perfect sort of, like, set of experiences for one dog to have, each of those relationships being very meaningful and him being cared for well. So, certainly I think it’s the case that our lives are made rich by the variety of experiences and relationships that we have. 

Chantelle: I love that story, Amy. 

Amy: So, if you could take one key lesson from your study and use it to make a change tomorrow, what would have the biggest impact about keeping people and pets together? Or maybe in this case, making sure pets’ lives are the central priority. 

Lexis: Oh, gosh. This is like the biggest question of my career.

Tell me like what’s, what’s the big change? What’s like the big impact that can be made? I mean, I think that if I were to make a change, it would just be that like every aspect of our lives has at least like an asterisk for the consideration that, that animals are like a part of it. Like, I’m so lucky that even we have like an office environment where there are dogs, and sometimes people bring in their cats.

Like, it’s just crazy that some people have this privilege to be able to provide all these opportunities for their animals and for themselves because animals are like such an important part of so many people’s lives. And I think that where so many of these tensions come just in our community generally are just where, you know, there just hasn’t been consideration for animals, like in housing or even in healthcare decisions and things like that.

And so I maybe if there was one thing that could change tomorrow, it would be that everybody thinks about animals in every aspect of everybody’s lives. 

Sasha: Yeah, or at least understand that a person who is caring for a companion animal, it’s not a kind of a random fun hobby that you can just toss aside to get medical care.

That it is, is an animal part of the family and is really important for the health of that person. And so I think that exactly what Alexis was saying is that actually it’s obvious for us because I’m sure everyone’s listening and, and us, we’re animal lovers, but I think for the rest of society that to understand that we’re not these, like, weird people.

There’s a lot of us who love our animals and want and need our animals around. 

Chantelle: Yeah, absolutely. Animals are part of the family. 

Amy: One thing that comes to mind also is I imagine, um, and I don’t know if the data really spoke to this, but something we see often is people who need to go into treatment or go into the hospital and they ideally would have their pet after they get out of treatment and out of the hospital.

So is, is that an area where, I guess, having more variety of systems and, and not just sort of this idea of its surrender or nothing but that there be options in between. Yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

Lexis: Yeah, this is exactly where kind of the data really, like, spoke to me when the folks were talking about part-time care because it was just something that, like, I hadn’t considered in terms of, like, the breadth of it, in terms of it’s not just, like, that folks might need, you know, emergency boarding services for an emergency that, that, that’s going to be two weeks long or something.

It’s that there are also kind of regular things that happen. And I even think about this when I care for my own cat, is that I’m lucky enough that I have a neighbor friend who lives just downstairs who can come up in at last minute to be able to feed my cat if I need to go away for a weekend. But on top of that is that I have lots of other best friends in my neighborhood who are also able to come by, and so I don’t have to rely on, like, one individual person.

And something that the qualitative responses about part-time care really said was that, um, people are kind of often relying on a wide social network. And when they, people don’t have this wide social network, and we know that this is particularly true of equity deserving groups, like people experiencing homelessness or people who are transient, um, like, it is often the case that these social networks might not be as strong or they might change really often, or it might be that these folks kind of are experiencing own things in their lives that, that stop them from being able to support each other.

And when that kind of social network fails, it, it seems like that is also when the difficult decisions have to be made about whether or not to deal with something like their own personal health or to be able to, to keep their pets. And so I think that the conversation definitely does need to shift almost kind of like it has in the past kind of, you know, 50 to 100 years about, like, childcare.

I think that this concept of childcare being just, like, a huge access issue for caregivers to be able to participate in society. I think that that conversation has shifted a lot, and I think that because of the role of pets in our families being so strong these days, I think that that’s just, like, inevitably a conversation that needs to come up is, like, how do communities already currently, like, leverage their social networks to be able to care for animals?

And how can we continue to leverage those social networks to actually be able to create the kind of community-based solutions to help people, especially people who are the most vulnerable? 

Chantelle: I really appreciate this whole conversation about community connections and the different needs that people have in communities and widening the net to a variety of services that are offered.

And if I can just take a little detour to talk more about one of the projects we’re working on right now. We’re currently launching a collaborative of humane societies across British Columbia called The Humane Societies of BC. It’s a project where seven independent organizations in different places across the province are gathering together as a centralized resource where people can find the kind of tailored solutions for the unique needs of their community, and they’re, because we’re all independent organizations, we can work with our communities and our neighbours and find those needs and help to meet them.

Because we are finding that there are so many pets that are needing to go into the shelter and rescue system, and so it’s overflowing, but there’s also so many pets that are getting surrendered that they have loving homes. The people who are their guardians just need more support and need more access to that support.

So, we’re hoping to make those supports more visible and available across the province. 

Lexis: That’s amazing. Yeah, I think that is a big takeaway that I have not done research on, but I think is important for the future, is that, like, these resources are often available, but potentially not accessible for a number of different reasons.

And I think that one way to increase that accessibility is hopefully, like, collaborative effort to try to support people because ultimately it’s like, it’s all of our communities, I think.

Chantelle: All of our communities, absolutely. Yeah. I really appreciate that. Okay. We really like to end on an action that our audience can take, and I feel like we’ve got so many great learnings from this episode, but is there anything that listeners at home who might work or volunteer with animal organizations can do to help make sure that pet guardians have the support that they need to avoid giving up their pets or to make sure that their pet has the best future possible?

Lexis: Yeah. I mean, maybe one action could be to identify one new community partner that could potentially be helpful. I see this all the time in my other roles as a volunteer at many community-based support services, but I think you’d be surprised at even if you’re continually, like, showing up in the community and, you know, regularly providing services, sometimes people who work for other nonprofits in the area will walk by and be like, “I didn’t know that this thing was a thing. I would love to tell my clients about this.” And so maybe just an action could be to find one new organization to try to share your pet support programs with in hopes that it reaches one more person who might need your support. 

Sasha: And I would suggest that for those of you guys that are volunteering at shelters, for example, and don’t necessarily have organizations of your own to help the community, it may be very worthwhile to meet a neighbour who has a companion animal and befriend that neighbour, befriend that animal, and offer to occasionally babysit or just to provide emotional support. And I think if we all do that, it’ll be better. 

Chantelle: I love that. Those are fantastic actions to take. Thank you so much. This has been just a great and enlightening conversation. I really appreciate both of you being here for it. And thank you also to everyone at home for listening. If you’d like to look at any of the resources that we talked about today, could you let people know where they can find your study?

Lexis: Yes. I bet that the easiest way would just to be to, to search up my name and then maybe Google scholar afterwards. It should be available open access, so you should be able to find it online.

Chantelle: And if you want to look at the other resources we’ve talked about, we’re at vancouverhumanesociety.bc.ca, and the collaborative I spoke about earlier is humanesocietiesbc.ca. Well, thank you so much. We hope to see everyone again next month as we talk about more ways that you can be an ally for animals.

Amy: Thanks everyone. Thank you.