Published Oct. 10, 2024 on CT News Junkie (By WTLI Volunteers Kaitlyn Duffy and Shannon Duffy)
It’s a decision dog owners throughout Connecticut are grappling with now more than any other time during the eight years we’ve been volunteer intake coordinators at Where The Love Is Animal Rescue in Hamden.
Historically, our shelter has focused on rescuing and finding loving homes for abandoned or abused dogs. That changed about three years ago when a desperate dog owner contacted us because she had lost her home and needed to find a new family for Casie, her Pitbull of seven years. She could not find any affordable, pet-friendly housing.
Helping someone surrender their beloved pet was not a typical scenario, but we agreed to intervene on Casie’s behalf. Soon, our good intentions became our initiation into a new kind of heartbreak for dogs – losing the place that had been their home and the loved ones who had been their family.
Today, we are inundated daily with requests from pet owners begging us to find their pets new homes because they can’t afford or find pet-friendly housing. Diminished affordable-housing and rental markets and strict rental and insurance policies are forcing owners to give up their family dogs. This sad fact hits home every time a dog is left tied to a tree or abandoned on the side of the road because their owners feel they have no other choice.
Recently, our shelter temporarily halted the intake of new dogs so we can focus on finding new homes for surrendered dogs. At the same time, our volunteer-run shelter is in crisis. Kennels are full, foster families – who are overburdened with housing dogs until they can find permanent homes and families willing to adopt – are few and far between as they return to work or struggle with bills. The situation is so tenuous that the Connecticut Animal Care & Control Officers Alliance wants to place a moratorium on shelters taking in animals from other states until facilities like ours are not as overburdened.
This perfect storm can be backed up with statistics: A nationwide survey conducted by the Human Animal Bond Research Institute revealed that close to 75% of people reported it is difficult to find pet-friendly housing. The survey also found that this struggle was the reason that about 25% of those residents moved and another 15% had to surrender their family pet.
This situation is needlessly dire. The problem is arbitrary and costly pet restrictions. The answer is legislation that eases pet restrictions on rental housing and home-owners’ insurance. New laws that do so are gaining traction across the country. It’s time Connecticut followed suit.
Connecticut has made some progress over the years. As a result, disabled tenants requiring service animals and, more recently, those needing emotional support animals can no longer be denied housing with that pet. But lawmakers can do more to prohibit, or at least restrict, landlords from denying housing to dog owners.
Most rental-property owners have blanket pet policies that impose hefty security deposits and monthly fees on renters or altogether deny them the right to house animals. One recent example of such a landlord-tenant dispute came before the New Haven Fair Rent Commission. A tenant filed a complaint that her landlord wanted to raise her monthly rent from $1,000 to $1,250, which included a new charge of $150 a month for her Chihuahua. Luckily, in this case, the commission intervened and set the new monthly rent at $1,100 with a one-time-only pet fee of $150.
In the case of home owners, these policies allow insurance companies to do the same, imposing extremely high fees or denying insurance policies to those with pets. New laws in some states eradicate these blanket pet policies and only allow landlords and insurers to deny in specific reasonable cases, such as to animals that have proven to put themselves and others at risk. For example, California is considering a bill that would prohibit hefty pet fees and blanket pet bans in rental units. In these cases, however, landlords could require dog owners to purchase pet insurance. In Colorado, new pet rental laws put a cap of $300 on pet deposits, regardless of the property’s rental rate. In addition, a cap of $35 per month has been placed on pet rental fees to account for the possibility of wear and tear on flooring and furniture.
Should Connecticut enact similar legislative acts, the positive impact would be two-fold. First, families could keep their beloved pets in their homes – a situation that benefits the health and wellbeing of the animals and humans alike. In addition, overcrowding in rescues across the state would significantly decrease as current pet owners could keep their pets and other families could afford to adopt. Data gathered by the Human Animal Bond Research Institute found that if restrictions on housing were lifted, about 35% of those surveyed that did not have pets would add a pet to their household and about 30% of current pet owners would get another pet.
Without any of these pet-owner protections in place, Where the Love Is Animal Shelter did everything it could to keep Casie with her owner, including providing dog food and connecting her owner with resources for housing. Ultimately, we had to take Casie into the shelter and made sure she received heart surgery to implant a pace maker. She was adopted into a beautiful family where she lived out the remainder of her life both happy and healthy.
As things stand, we feel more helpless every day and cannot keep up in this crisis. However, the potential for new legislation focused on ending the current restrictions on pet-friendly housing gives us hope. While we will never give up on helping rehome the countless pets in need, we look forward to change on a larger scale so that more pets can remain right where they are – in their current homes with their loving families.
