In hardest-hit greater New York, only a few days after the stay-at-home orders came down, something unprecedented happened: Virtually the entire population of dogs in the shelter and rescue system was fostered or adopted. “We definitely don’t have any dogs left to match,” an official from one rescue organization told Bloomberg News on March 25, adding that it’s “a great problem to have.” On April 10, the Instagram account of Riverside County Animal Services in California featured an ecstatic post showing masked workers standing next to a room of empty enclosures. All the animals had been fostered or adopted. According to rescue industry data from Pethealth, “Animals in foster care is up significantly, 48% from March 8th and 790% from last year.” Pethealth estimates 300% to 400% of that increase is due to the coronavirus.
What does it say that, in an acute and unprecedented crisis, people took in all the homeless dogs? A pandemic might seem like an unlikely time to get a dog. Space is cramped, life is uncertain, resources are scarce, and the outside is frightening. And a dog is a lot of responsibility, another mouth to feed, and a not terribly self-controlled member of the household at a moment when we are trying to get everyone to follow the same public health-oriented program responsibly. They need supplies, attention, training, and walks. And yet, the quarantine has been a boom time for dogs. Just as this time has shown many people the previously hidden depths of their bonds with family, it has also revealed an existing reserve of warmth and care in the relationship between us and dogs. If crises uncover what values we truly prioritize, the coronavirus underscores our understanding that dogs ultimately give back way more than they could ever take. And, if we take anything good from this, it should be greater empathy with our powerless friends who are confined, let out just a few times a day, and don’t know what that doctor is up to but have to learn to trust people enough in general to allow that it’s not going to be too bad.
Our dogs don’t know anything about the pandemic or the martial metaphors that have now become commonplace. They don’t know we are on a “wartime footing” or that we are “battling” the coronavirus or that our nurses and grocery workers and sanitation workers and doctors and truckers are now on the “front lines” of the fight, though they might be able to smell the infection. Here in New York, the pups can hear the piercing sirens that wake me up each morning and continue, it feels, all day. But that doesn’t mean anything to a dog. They’re not scared. They don’t feel the ambient grief of tracking which prominent people are getting it, which are succumbing to it, and which friends and friends of friends are in danger. They aren’t glued to the internet or the news, looking back and recriminating leaders for how the response could have been better. They aren’t anxiously assessing and reassessing how long we might be living with quarantines, social distancing, work stoppage orders, and the rest of the changes that have played havoc with the ordinary comings and goings of life.
The crisis through dogs’ eyes has been, if anything, a treat. Four feet below us and much sweeter, dumber, and pro-cuddling, the canine perspective on this is that the humans finally got with their program.
Graham Reynolds, a lawyer originally from Ireland who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with his girlfriend, Caroline, adopted a 3-year-old mixed terrier named Franklin a week into the quarantine via the agency Hearts and Bones. “We had anticipated getting a dog around [the] end of April, and we’d already started buying stuff in anticipation of that. Obviously, coronavirus just sort of sped that forward,” he told me. “He is,” Reynolds confirmed, “a very good boy.”
The pandemic did present some challenges, though, he added. “Typically, you meet the dog in person. You meet with whoever is fostering at the time. With coronavirus, that was a bit of a difficulty. So, we ended up actually having a video call with the dog. We FaceTimed with the person who was fostering at the time, and then, obviously, the dog picked that moment to fall asleep. But I think, at that point, we were sold.”
As if actually finding homes for dogs wasn’t hard enough, in a plague, the handoff presents a point of contact and possible infection that is itself a challenge. People may want to be close to dogs, but not so much to one another. As Reynolds told me, “We had to be sensitive about the contact we were making with the humans. They opened the back of the car, and Franklin jumped out. He was pretty scared at the time. We really didn’t stay and chat at all.”
This echoes what Rebecca Tillem told me. Tillem is fostering Roxie, a senior mutt with deep eyes and graying eyebrows that look alternately wise and goofy. Tillem is living with her mother in Essex County, New Jersey, after quickly and temporarily moving out of Brooklyn when the uncertainty caused by the pandemic made signing a new lease in April too hairy a proposition. The virus made the handoff strange for her, too: “At one point during the handoff, he did get a little closer than my mom and I were thrilled about. Like, he touched the leash that we had, and my mom said, ‘I didn’t want him to touch anything.’ We kind of just had a conversation from a distance. And, for a few moments, he would just take a step closer to us, and we would step further back. So, I don’t know if he was as vigilant in terms of how cautious he was being because of the virus as we were.”
Tillem also told me walks are complex, with everyone following different levels of strictness in how they social distance. “Every owner has their own comfort level about whether they want their dog to be touched by other people or let their dog meet other dogs. So, as I’m taking her for a walk, I kind of dread every dog I see because she really wants to meet them. And most of the owners don’t want to let them meet. And it’s because of the virus, not any other reason. They’re my neighbors.”
But Roxie is definitely worth it. “She’s so easy. She’s so polite. There was a stuffed animal. She will ask before she makes it her toy. She’s the best kind of dog you could ask for,” said Tillem. I asked if she is planning on adopting Roxie forever, to which she semijokingly gave me an 83% chance. “I really want to. I really, really want to. I just don’t know if it’s in her best interest.” Every foster knows their own situation and the dog best, but, as someone who’s had a happy, 60-pound puppy in Manhattan, I hope she will.
And, as Milla Chappell told me, the people who foster dogs are the most likely to adopt them. Chappell is a professional dog photographer who also works for the rescue organization Foster Dogs, and she’s both adopted one dog during the quarantine and fostered another. (She’s my hero.) I asked her if she thinks this will lead to a bunch of dogs that wouldn’t otherwise get adopted finding forever homes, and she does. Statistically speaking, many of the new fosters are going to end up keeping their quarantine companions, like she just did with a big, black, 3-year-old pit bull mix her daughter has named Pattycake. Pattycake was a “long stay,” a dog who sits for months in the system without getting adopted and, in her case, with “not one application. Which is just crazy because she’s such a great dog.”
Chappell described something counterintuitive that everyone I talked to about dogs in the quarantine also mentioned: Now may be a hard moment, but, relatively, it’s an especially easy moment to have a dog. “After we adopted her, we brought home another foster because, you know, we’re all at home, and it’s just a lot easier to do that right now.” With everyone at home, we are all, effectively, on our pets’ schedules. Everyone I talked to mentioned that, unlike the dogless among us, they are actually apprehensive about what will happen when things go back to normal because it will be hard for the dogs to adjust to being relatively humanless. They spoke to me about guilt over what leaving the dogs when they return to work will be like and anxiety about how to “wean” the dogs off the high expectations of companionship and attention they’re getting right now. Dog trainers are providing webcast advice on “how to prevent your pets from developing separation anxiety when quarantine ends.”
It’s a serious concern and also an incredibly sweet one to have. It underlines how people with dogs right now have something that flips some parts of the grim moral universe of a pandemic-stricken America, making the quarantine in this one way a good thing, a way to be useful and caring within the confines of staying home and lounging on the couch and not having much to say except to try to keep your spirits up. It is invaluable that dogs provide us the opportunity for this, and we should never forget it.
As Chappell told me, “People want to feel connected right now to something good and want to be a part of doing something good. Dogs give us the companionship and the joy of having a dog around. But I also think people want to feel, like, ‘I’m contributing, even in some small way.’ We have dogs in need, and I think we all feel like we’re kind of in need right now. If they feel like people can tend to the needs of something else and provide for something else, it does give us a sense of doing something good. Even though, of course, we recognize it’s small.”
This is a reminder: Dogs were already sheltering. Now that we have been made to join them for a while, when we head out into an open society again, it should leave us more empathetic with what life looks like for a pet dog and more mindful of why we should always value them. Right now, shelters and rescue agencies have many people willing to take in dogs, but the in-person events they rely on for fundraising are mostly called off. They’re in need, as are so many. The foster dogs who are adopted out of this will be some of the most silvery linings in a very cloudy period. Some, though, will remain adoptable or will be returned to shelters. This screams out as a tremendous opportunity for anyone who doesn’t have one now that dogs have proven once again their worth, needy and silly and valiant beasts as they are. Dogs are among the heroes of the pandemic, and we should make sure they’re among the winners of this whole mess.
Nicholas Clairmont is an associate editor at Arc Digital and a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner.
