The Impact of the Pandemic on us and our Furry Friends

The time we all spent in lock­down was hard and many of us expe­ri­enced feel­ings of lone­li­ness. A lot of peo­ple felt that buy­ing a pet or sim­ply spend­ing more time with their pet was a good way to fight the pan­dem­ic blues. 

At first glance, the trend of adopt­ing ani­mals seems a pos­i­tive side effect of the pan­dem­ic. Many ani­mals found a lov­ing home and in our local ani­mal shel­ter in Zurich, Switzer­land, there were only three dogs left at times com­pared to about ten nor­mal­ly. I was able to talk to Rom­my Los, the like­able, blue-eyed man­ag­er of the “Zürcher Tier­schutz” (Zurich Ani­mal Pro­tec­tion) shel­ter right next to Zurich Zoo.

Ani­mal shel­ters exist because peo­ple buy a pet, then some­thing in their lifestyle changes and they are forced to give the ani­mal away. Now, due to the pan­dem­ic, more peo­ple have bought pets. In Ger­many there has been a dras­tic increase of 1 mil­lion pets from 2019 to 2020 as pub­lished by the IHV (Indus­trie­ver­band Heimtiere Ger­many). Some of them with­out a full under­stand­ing of what buy­ing and own­ing an ani­mal means. Rom­my Los feels peo­ple tend to “go with the flow”, not wor­ry­ing about what the future may bring.

The lock­down led to a mas­sive increase in demand for dogs. Accord­ing to Tier Sta­tis­tik Iden­ti­tas, an orga­ni­za­tion which devel­ops and oper­ates soft­ware for the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, reg­is­tra­tion and the mon­i­tor­ing of live­stock and com­pan­ion ani­mals in Switzer­land, the num­ber of dog own­ers in Switzer­land at the begin­ning of 2020 was around 400’000, but by the end of 2022 there were around  40’000 more which is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence to the year of 2018 to 2019 where the increase was only about 10’000 – and the lock­down expe­ri­ence affect­ed the pets them­selves as well as their own­ers. The increase in demand led not only to emp­ti­er ani­mal shel­ters, but also to over­flow­ing ani­mal hos­pi­tals and pets with behav­ior prob­lems, as I was informed by Aure­lia Keller, a fifty-three-year-old local vet­eri­nary prac­tice assis­tant with many years of expe­ri­ence at a pop­u­lar clin­ic. She told me: “The lock­down led to many dogs not hav­ing enough con­tact with oth­er dogs which result­ed in dogs with abnor­mal behav­ior and con­cerned owners.” 

The sup­ply of ani­mals, espe­cial­ly pup­pies in Switzer­land and oth­er west­ern coun­tries, was not able to keep up with the demand, as accord­ing to Tier­sta­tis­tik Iden­ti­tasin August of 2021 imports of dogs peaked at about 4000 import­ed dogs, com­pared to the aver­age amount of about 2500 imports per month. Accord­ing to dogstrust.org.uk the prices for dif­fer­ent dog breeds in the UK have all increased con­sid­er­ably. The most dra­mat­ic dif­fer­ence was for the “Chow Chow” breed. The aver­age price for a pedi­gree dog went up from £1’119 to £2’618. That is an increase of 134 per­cent. As a result, peo­ple start­ed search­ing for more afford­able ani­mals, or some­times just any pet at all. This is where the “Pup­py  Prob­lem” starts.

“Trade in young pedi­gree ani­mals of all species is flour­ish­ing. In the Coro­na year 2020, espe­cial­ly the demand for dogs from abroad increased dra­mat­i­cal­ly” the ani­mal wel­fare orga­ni­za­tion VierP­foten shared. Rom­my Los empha­sized that the prob­lem is very com­plex, and the pos­si­ble solu­tion depends on which sub­or­di­nate issue is addressed. For exam­ple, the ille­gal import of pup­pies must be con­trolled through leg­is­la­tion but inform­ing peo­ple about the risks of import­ing cheap pup­pies from poten­tial­ly bad breed­ers must be done at a more local level.

The prob­lems described above leads Rom­my Los to expect­ing a larg­er intake of ani­mals in the near future, although there was a tem­po­rary decline of housed ani­mals. Ani­mal wel­fare orga­ni­za­tions all over the world are work­ing hard to raise aware­ness about this, with detailed infor­ma­tion pam­phlets and cam­paigns for adopt­ing a dog from the ani­mal shel­ter instead of import­ing one.

Both experts I talked to agreed that even if the buy­ers of a new pet are con­sid­er­ate, have informed them­selves and think they have found the per­fect addi­tion to their fam­i­ly, there can be pit­falls. Aure­lia Keller shared a shock­ing sto­ry with me. A cus­tomer came in with a new pup­py, which was import­ed from an area where urban rabies exists. A shot was there­fore required, and the own­er had papers to prove this shot had been admin­is­tered. A dog with rabies can pass this dan­ger­ous dis­ease to oth­er ani­mals. But the num­bers didn’t add up. The papers claimed the pup­py had been giv­en the shot at four months old, but the pup­py which came in with the cus­tomer was too young for that to be pos­si­ble. There was no way the papers were cor­rect. The pup­py was con­fis­cat­ed by the police with­in two hours of the appoint­ment at the vet, as it posed a poten­tial dan­ger for oth­er dogs, to the huge dis­ap­point­ment of the fam­i­ly which had just wel­comed it into their household. 

Covid-19 and the sub­se­quent lock­down cre­at­ed an inter­re­lat­ed prob­lem which we are now being forced to address more active­ly. It’s true that ani­mals can improve people’s qual­i­ty of life and even help with their men­tal health — but when you buy an ani­mal you must remem­ber that you are now respon­si­ble for its phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al well­be­ing. As Rom­my Los put it: “Cats can live up to the age of 20 and dogs to about 15. Dur­ing that peri­od the own­ers’ lives are almost cer­tain to change. If peo­ple do not think about the future enough, seri­ous con­se­quences can fol­low. This is what must be prevented.