The rising cost of pet food is just one more stressor for struggling families in Central New York, but local agencies are working together to help.
Syracuse Dog Control officer Barbara Mortas is seeing more loose dogs running through city neighborhoods than ever before.
“We can just assume from the numbers that they are not just stray dogs,” said Mortas. “They started somewhere. You know people just let them go.”
Dog control also gets more requests to bring an animal to the city’s dog shelter. But that’s problematic because the shelter is full all the time, in part because fewer people are adopting dogs these days.
“The dogs don’t move like they used to,” Mortas said. “People just can’t make ends meet, especially adding extra family members, so I think that’s why we’re stuck.”
While some families are forced to choose between feeding themselves and their pets, Syracuse Pit Crew founder Stefanie Heath says the housing crisis is only making the problem worse.
“People have to move and they can’t find housing that can, you know, meet the finances, their financial needs, but also a pet requirement or that they have like a restriction that that housing or whatever it looks like. they have to give up their pet,” Heath said.
The Pit Crew joined forces with the city of Syracuse, local food pantries, the Humane Society of the United States and Chewy, the online purveyor of pet products, to start a program to address the root of the problem.
Chewy donated 25 pallets stacked with pets and supplies to three Syracuse food pantries that will begin offering pet food to clients. In the pantry of St. Lucy, in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, volunteer Tina Fitzgerald hears requests for pet food all the time, but can’t help it. This changes all that.
“It shouldn’t be a choice between feeding yourself and feeding your animals,” Fitzgerald said. “Like our elders, our elders rely on those animals for love and support.”
Heath said her organization has a program called Keep Us Together to raise funds that will keep the pet food shelves stocked at local pantries, once all the Chewy products are donated.
“We want to make sure that having a pet is equal for everyone, and so we want to be able to provide that service of offering free food, other supplies like kitty litter or toys and collars and leashes,” said Heath.
