Local animal shelters nearly full, inflation blamed for people surrendering their pets

With hard economic times many animal shelters are seeing their capacity reached due to people forced to surrender pets they can no longer afford to keep.

It’s close to a full house at the Langley Animal Protection Society, with more and more animals coming into the shelter than being adopted out.

And it’s now become a crisis, according to executive director Sarah Jones.

“We are absolutely at capacity, maybe even a little bit over,” Jones told Global News.

“We would love to not have a waitlist and be able to help everybody, but we can’t bring in that many animals.”

While sheltering animals is a key priority, Jones says it doesn’t address the underlying issues at play.

“We want to work hard to make sure that pets can stay with their people,” Jones explained while lamenting how some people are forced to surrender their pets, which they can no longer afford.

“We will do what we can, where we can in order to support some of those root cause issues but we can’t create pet friendly housing.”

Since inflation took hold in the last year, Jones says the challenging economic times have come down hard on people, impacting their housing and their pets as well.