Building safety nets for pet owners without housing

Just 60 days of foster care can make the difference for people who are struggling to find housing and keep their pets. Research to be published later this year shows that safety net foster care programs—networks of volunteers who care for people’s pets temporarily—are highly effective in keeping owners and pets together.

Lisa Gunter, an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech School of Animal Sciences, and colleagues from Virginia Tech and Arizona State University studied 500 pets who passed through safety net fostering programs in 18 shelters across 13 states beginning in 2020. On average, most pets spent two months in the programs. Eighty percent were reunited with their owners. Without the program, the number would have been close to zero.

Gunter says shelters that want to set up safety net programs first must overcome their fear of offering people help. “People need time to find new housing. It’s difficult for a shelter to hold the animal for that long. It’s also hard on the animal. When we can, we should try to keep people and pets together.”

She advises shelters creating these programs to put the information on their website and be clear about what they offer, such as specifying the maximum amount of time volunteers can care for pets.

Balancing boundaries with flexibility

Pima Animal Care Center, an open-admission municipal shelter in Tucson, Arizona, created one of the safety net foster programs Gunter studied. The program launched in late 2020, and the first year was rough, says Kaitlyn Pappas, pet support coordinator. There was only one staff member overseeing the program, and owners and foster volunteers were calling her at all hours on her cell phone.

The program relaunched in March 2022 with boundaries—clients can only call during business hours, and fosters can only call after hours in an emergency. The shelter offers 90 days of foster care in 30-day increments. Eighty-six percent of the clients are unhoused or about to lose their housing.

The program took in more than 800 animals from March 2022 to March 2025, with a big influx during the summers when it was too hot to live in a car. The reunification rate was 66%. It would have been higher, but some of the issues in owners’ lives couldn’t be quickly resolved, and finding housing became increasingly difficult during that period, Pappas says.

The shelter tries to be flexible. When an owner diagnosed with cancer asked for longer-term fostering for her beagle, on a schedule adjusted to her medical treatment (three weeks on, one week off), the foster volunteer agreed to the arrangement.

Another owner was about to lose her temporary housing just as the 90-day limit on foster care for her two cats approached. The foster volunteer was out driving and happened to see the client on the street. The foster offered the client a ride and the two got to talking. After the foster realized the owner’s situation, she offered the client a low-rent place to live in her own home.

Foster volunteers like the program because it’s similar to pet sitting—they can focus on caring for the animals and don’t have to market them for adoption, Pappas says. It’s a short-term commitment with a powerful impact. Without the two or three months of care, she says, most of the animals would be surrendered to the shelter, and people “would lose their pet forever.”