Abstract
Ethnographic research in an animal welfare organization challenges common, and harmful, framings of what causes guardians to surrender companion animals.
I first noticed Marva leaning against a fence post, blowing her nose and wiping streaks of melting eyeliner from her face with a tissue. As a long-time volunteer and fieldworker at the Pacific Animal Welfare Center (PAW), a high-intake public animal shelter in Los Angeles County, I was accustomed to encountering people in this state. So many had to give up beloved companion animals. “Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked gently. Marva startled, surprised that I had spoken to her, took a rattling breath, wiped her eyes again, and then burst forth with the story. Her two small dogs were impounded at PAW, and she was desperate to get them back home with her.
Like so many of the people I encountered at PAW whose animals had either been picked up by PAW’s animal control officers as strays, or who had been surrendered to PAW, Marva did not want to lose her companion dogs. But, ultimately unable to pay the fines and fees for both of her dogs and with her appeals to shelter workers dismissed, she was able to reclaim only one; the other dog became part of a system of redistributing impounded companion animals from areas with high-intake animal shelters to areas with low-intake shelters. Marva’s dog was sent to the Pacific Northwest, far from the sunny, lively Mexican-American neighborhood of which he had been a part for the prior eight years, far from the woman who loved him.
Stories like Marva’s are all-too-common in the world of animal sheltering, in which low-income people are disproportionately likely to lose guardianship of their companion animals. This is due to the punitive practices of many animal shelters and the various forms of precarity that make it challenging for many poor people to maintain geographically proximal relationships with anyone important to them. Housing instability stemming from an overall housing shortage and its attendant high costs and expenses, the challenge of finding rental properties that permit companion animals (especially pit bulls and larger dogs), migration, deportation, arrest or imprisonment, financial obstacles, and overpolicing all make it harder for lower-income people of color than for more affluent and White people to continue to care for companion animals for the duration of their lives.
Ultimately, humans and animals, who form bonds they experience as important and meaningful, are caught up together in a web of inequalities. Particularly poorer people’s bonds with animals are fractured in this system—a fact that is not lost on them. As I learned from speaking with people who lost their companion animals to the shelter system, these losses represent just one aspect of the institutionalized violence of poverty, racism, and xenophobia. A Chicano man I spoke with couldn’t afford the $300 in fines and fees the shelter was levying in order for him to reclaim his German Shepherd from impoundment after the dog escaped his yard. Wearily, he told me, “This is just how it is for people like me. Why would I expect it to be any different?”
For a time, the conditions associated with COVID-19 changed common shelter beliefs about people forced to surrender pets. Because dominant cultural narratives about people who lost work early in the COVID-19 pandemic depicted them as unfortunate victims of unforeseeable circumstances, rather than as idle, lazy, or unmotivated, as poor people often are viewed in the United States, animal shelters and rescue organizations touted their efforts to provide free or low-cost food and veterinary care to guardians of companion animals in need. But, as the pandemic wore on, the more durable construction of low-income people as “irresponsible pet owners” reemerged as the dominant frame for making sense of why and how companion animals come into animal shelters in the United States, where about one million of them are killed every year. Embedded as a volunteer, I spent four years conducting ethnographic research at PAW, where I had extensive contact with people surrendering, attempting to redeem, and adopting animals, as well as with staff, volunteers, rescuers, and impounded companion animals, especially dogs and cats. From May 2020 until December 2021, I also attended conferences and seminars (mostly online due to COVID-19) hosted by major companion animal welfare organizations operating at the national level, including the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement, American Pets Alive!, and Best Friends Animal Society. Analyzing data from this fieldwork, I examine here how the myth of the irresponsible pet owner developed, some of the reasons it persists, and what its continued consequences are for the humans and animals who come into contact with PAW. Throughout, I use the terminology of the myth itself, namely that of the irresponsible pet owner, although in my own work I eschew use of the infantilizing and problematic term “pet,” and the property-focused status of “owner,” in favor of companion animal guardian.
An Overview of American Animal Sheltering
The myth of the irresponsible pet owner has its roots in the early development of the animal protectionism movement in the United States. This movement facilitated the founding of the nation’s first animal control agencies, animal shelters, and humane societies. From their inception in the late 1800s, these agencies, whose founders and supporters employed religious and moral claims that harm toward animals corrupts the souls of humans, focused on policing animals and human-animal relationships. Leaders in the animal protection movement were typically affluent and White, and in this moment of moral crusades, they were frequently women. Their orientation was often punitive: they sought to punish humans who they saw as violent, morally corrupt animal abusers who threatened the moral health of the community around them.
Animal control was an extension of policing models, with its moral crusade both benefitting and harming animals and people.
Early animal sheltering and regulation of domesticated animals demanded that guardians to animals engage in specific practices vis-á-vis animals. Frequent targets of animal control included working-class people and people of color who used animals, such as carriage horses, cart and plow oxen, and other “beasts of burden,” for labor, as well as animals who were members of communities rather than belonging to one specific owner (e.g., free-roaming domesticated animals). Further, animal protectionists participated in a respectability politics in which “civilized” people practiced kindness toward companion and working animals; this involved a duty on the part of an owner of animal to care for that animal, including by restricting the animals’ contact with other people (i.e., keeping dogs on leash and/or muzzled) and not engaging in acts of violence or neglect against the animal. Human violators of these emergent norms were subjected to carceral responses, including fines and imprisonment, whereas animal victims and violators were impounded and often killed. Unsurprisingly, Black Americans, newer immigrants, poor and working-class people, and the animals in their care were (and remain) overrepresented among those who animal control officers policed. Animal control was an extension of policing models that sought to control these populations, with its moral crusade both benefitting and harming animals and people.
Whatever protectionists claimed about humane treatment, most animals who came into American animal shelters during roughly the first century of these institutions died there. In late 19th-century New York City, animal control killed 95% of impounded animals. When I began volunteering at PAW in 2012, PAW was still killing over 80% of impounded cats and 30% of dogs, but these rates dropped precipitously: by fiscal year 2021-22, the shelter killed just about a third of impounded cats and 13% of impounded dogs. During the same period, intakes at PAW also dropped from about 20,000 animals to about 6,000 annually. By some estimates, 2019 was the first year in which the number of animals killed in animal shelters nationally dropped below one million, although kill rates have been creeping up since the start of the pandemic.
Much of the longer-term reduction in shelter intake and shelter killing over the latter part of the 20th century and into the early 21st is the outcome of the shifting role of companion animals in U.S. households, as well as the wider use of surgical sterilization. In the 1990s, many national and local animal charities and shelter animal advocates began pushing shelters to commit to reductions in killing. Shelters improved their adoption and rescue programs, variably implemented sterilization and microchipping of all adopted animals, and enhanced the quality of care provided to impounded animals. One thing hasn’t changed, though: the shelter industry has maintained that the core group of people responsible for intakes remains irresponsible owners.
The Myth of the Irresponsible Owner
What I call the myth of the irresponsible owner supports shelters impounding and killing companion animals who live in low-income and/or non-White communities. Irresponsible owners are people who the shelter industry (and often people outside of it) constructs as lacking the moral fitness to be responsible guardians to companion animals. Irresponsible owners fail to spay or neuter and/or to provide adequate veterinary or behavioral care to their companion animals. Irresponsible owners of dogs allow their dog to roam free, enable or facilitate their dog getting pregnant and having puppies (usually for money), and/ or keep their dog primarily outdoors in a fenced yard. Further, irresponsible owners would rather the shelter impound and possibly kill their companion animal than take responsibility for whatever issue led their animal into the shelter. They try to dodge or negotiate shelter fees—another slice of evidence that they avoid taking responsibility for their actions. As a set of characteristics, then, irresponsible owners are people who are lazy, indifferent to animals’ needs and suffering, and parasitic users of public resources like shelters.
These are, of course, stereotypes, and they are powerful ones. They echo and reinforce dominant cultural tropes about welfare recipients, and they reflect the broader social suspicion in the United States about the moral fitness and respectability of people of color and poor people. While research shows no class- or race-based differences in whether human guardians view companion animals as family members (about 90% of U.S. animal guardians do), the myth of the irresponsible owner purports that only responsible owners do. These responsible owners are imagined as embracing the practices of White, middle-class petkeeping, including sterilizing companion animals, keeping animals under direct control, and utilizing behavioral and veterinary services.
In my encounters with so-called irresponsible owners, namely people surrendering animals at the shelter or seeking to reclaim impounded animals, I witnessed time and again how much human guardians wanted to keep their companion animals with them, but faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles to doing so. Marva, the woman who was crushed because she could not afford the fees to get back both of her dogs, was hardly singular in this regard: Overwhelmingly, people I spoke with did not want to surrender their animals. Many had tried to find solutions besides the shelter, whether attempting to rehome their animals with a friend or family member temporarily, negotiating with a landlord, or taking on an extra job to pay for veterinary care. But, they felt they had no other options—and, in my estimation, they very rarely did. I also frequently encountered guardians trying to reclaim their companion animals who were impounded after getting loose, but who faced a bureaucratic maze of requirements for reclamation that they could not navigate.
There are few resources available to help guardians who want to keep the companion animals in their care, and PAW staff rarely pointed guardians to those that did exist. In the spring of 2021, I counseled a woman named Hina whose beloved pit bull, Taro, struggled with fear and anxiety around loud noises and had damaged Hina’s apartment (and injured himself) when the neighbors shot off fireworks. Hina’s landlord announced Taro had to leave or Hina, who was struggling to make ends meet due to lost work hours related to the pandemic, would be evicted. After the small window of time her landlord had given Hina to get Taro out of apartment ended without Hina having found a place for Taro with friends, neighbors, or a no-kill rescue group, Hina took him to PAW. During the intake appointment, shelter workers offered no services or assistance to keep Taro and Hina together. Taro was impounded and, although highly adoptable, killed within a few weeks. When I asked shelter staff about Taro’s killing, I was told that “his owner just abandoned him here,” and that the shelter was just “cleaning up their mess.” Even Hina internalized the myth of the irresponsible owner, telling me after she brought Taro to PAW that she felt she had “failed” him. Yet what was she to do? Even describing the safety net for people and dogs like Hina and Taro as a net is a poor metaphor: what they had available to them were a few shreds of string, hardly enough to grab onto.
Constructing a boundary between irresponsible and responsible actors shifts responsibility for shelter killing away from shelters that fail to protect animals and from the society that treats companion animals as commodities and accepts shelter killing as a reasonable response to homelessness among companion animals. The blame for shelter killing instead falls on irresponsible owners. This is a neat trick that masks the structural conditions that actually lead animals into shelters: overpolicing, housing insecurity, and precarious employment in the low-wage service and gig economy. And when irresponsible owners take the blame, PAW and the broader society can justify operating shelters as they do.
The Embattled Myth
As is often the case for durable myths, the myth of the irresponsible owner is an embattled myth, one which some participants and organizations within the animal sheltering industry question or even outright reject. Questioning of the myth, and implementing corresponding changes in practices, became more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, for several reasons. First, the pandemic led to greater public discussion of the importance of companion animals for stress management and companionship. This translated, at most of the conferences I attended, into attention toward building humane communities and supporting animal guardianship for all people. Second, the economic downturn in the early part of the pandemic suddenly rendered people who might have previously been understood as irresponsible owners as, instead, victims of the pandemic shutdown. I saw some sheltering organizations shift their discourses away from talking about “irresponsible owners” to instead seeing people who can’t keep their companion animals as “facing heart-wrenching choices.” There was also a corresponding newer emphasis on needing to help “keep families together” by providing services to low-income animal guardians. Third, following the 2020 wave of humans acquiring companion animals, rumors abounded on social media about middle-class people abandoning their dogs at shelters once they had to return to their workplaces. This thrust a new population of humans into question as irresponsible owners, possibly reflecting a cultural anxiety about the contagion of irresponsibility leading new folks to acquire animals for personal reassurance during a crisis, then abandoning them when life returned to “normal.” Interestingly, data from Shelter Animals Count and other organizations show that an increase in owner surrenders never occurred nationally; the narrative, however, remains prominent in the public consciousness.
Finally, the murder of George Floyd and #Black-LivesMatter protests brought renewed attention to racial inequality in the United States that led to more discussion about to human inequalities within the sheltering industry. For the first time since I started conducting research on animal sheltering about a decade earlier, I started hearing industry insiders engaging in conversations about how they needed to rethink animal control and sheltering because of how the industry reproduces racial inequality. These conversations typically focused on contemporary practices of animal sheltering that sever poor people of color from their companion animals, as well as on issues of workplace diversity. Less frequently, discussions addressed the racial and class history of animal control and sheltering in the United States or the legacy of that history, including shelter distrust among low-income communities of color.
Seemingly in response to these shifts, during the pandemic, over 150 shelters and rescue organizations joined an initiative by one national companion animal welfare organization to commit to increased community services intended to prevent shelter intake. Their efforts included having animal control officers distribute supplies for companion animals, such as flea control medications, food, and cat litter. Rather than looking for guardians to cite for violations of local ordinances regarding animals, such as failing to have a dog license or allowing a dog to run free, these animal control officers work to offer guardians material aid and advice to help them care for companion animals. But such programs remain the outliers, especially among the largest public shelter systems, which are responsible for most of the shelter killing in the United States. Additionally, with low unemployment rates in 2022 and 2023, people struggling financially have been alienated again from the designation of the deserving poor; this has undermined investment in pandemic-era programs.
For now, the myth of the irresponsible owner remains durable within the shelter industry. Resonating deeply with other powerful U.S. beliefs about poor people and people of color, it offers a path of low resistance for understanding the complex problem of unhoused companion animals. Individuals involved in companion animal welfare are ideologically diverse, and some firmly believe that companion animals live better lives in the care of more affluent (and generally White) people than they do in the care of lower-income people of color. Many people at PAW and within the shelter industry resist talking about the role of racism and classism in how animal control agencies were founded and how they continue to operate. At conferences, I observed some members of the sheltering industry become avoidant or hostile when presented with analyses showing how their practices, such as lengthy adoption applications, high adoption fees, promotion of carceral responses to cases of alleged neglect or abuse, and the persistent social media and fundraising narratives of mostly White, affluent people “saving” dogs from poor communities of color, are discriminatory and/ or reproduce racist and classist ideologies. My own experience being attacked, trolled, and doxed on social media and blogs by a former principal in the shelter industry who pilloried my scholarship for engaging critically with race is just one example of the kind of hostility that attention to the structural causes of unhoused companion animals can generate.
The persistence of the myth of the irresponsible owner is unfortunate and counterproductive. It harms both humans and animals. Shelter intakes were 17% lower in 2022 than in 2019, but kill rates at PAW and at American shelters collectively have been increasing steadily since late 2020. Industry experts consistently expect those numbers to continue climbing as an outcome of a large drop in adoptions, chronic understaffing at shelters, and shifts in the types of animals coming into shelters (i.e., more animals who the public finds less desirable). Focusing on the narrative of the irresponsible owner hides these and other contributing factors to intakes, low adoption rates, and shelter killing. This is bad news for animals and for the humans who love them. By viewing people like Marva as irresponsible owners, shelters end up employing strategies to reduce animal intakes that are misguided and often injurious to the communities they purportedly serve, reinforce existing structures of racial and class inequalities, and operate more to sever human-animal bonds than to maintain them.