Several years ago, Surrey, B.C. resident Alisa Nelson, 42, started fostering pets for the Paws for Hope Animal Foundation, helping the organization care for animals whose owners were in crisis. She didn't expect to become one of those owners. “I’m on disability, so I can barely make ends meet," she says. "And [paying for] extra vet expenses at full price [was] not possible.”
Nelson says her own pets are her whole world. She lives with fibromyalgia and depression, and says her dog, Neetschy, is also her lifeline to the outside world. So when Neetschy contracted a stomach bug and Nelson couldn’t afford the veterinary treatment he needed, she turned to the same B.C. foundation she volunteered with. In addition to crisis foster care, Paws for Hope offers free veterinary clinics and helps with veterinary costs for pet owners in need.
Without prevention built in, shelters and rescues can become a revolving door: pets adopted, returned, and adopted again, each time on a hope that the next placement will stick.
Paws for Hope covered $300 of Neetschy’s urgent care. Through the organization’s Better Together program, Nelson also gets ongoing help with more predictable costs, like annual exams, vaccines, and prescription food, i.e. expenses where the partial subsidy stretches further. “We only [had to] pay a portion of their vet costs. So it helps a lot for yearly vet checkups,” says Nelson. Without that support, Nelson says the only way she could have kept her pets would have been to skip paying her own bills, or even meals.
I've volunteered to walk dogs and foster for shelters myself, and I’ve seen how stop-gap rehoming fails. Without prevention built in, shelters and rescues can become a revolving door: pets adopted, returned, and adopted again, each time on a hope that the next placement stick will stick. It’s costly for shelters, and it does nothing to fix the financial barriers that got the pet there in the first place.
Prevention is much cheaper than the alternative. Addressing the reasons that people surrender their pets – financial hardship, housing insecurity, no access to veterinary care – costs less than what happens after an animal enters the shelter system. It's also far more humane to both the pets and their humans.
These programs are only going to become more necessary. In the second quarter of 2025, only 24% of Canadians said it was easy to meet their household’s financial needs, down from 40.5% in the same quarter of 2022. For pet owners, vet bills are often the biggest financial worry. The Ontario Veterinary Medical Association puts the first-year costs of owning a puppy at more than $5,000 – for some owners, that's 5% to 10% of their income. Canadians spent $9.3 billion on veterinary care in 2022-2023, up from $4 billion in 2019. The gap between who can afford a pet and who can’t is widening, and shelters are bursting at the seams as they try to make up the difference. A year ago, Paws for Hope was turning away 40 to 80 applicants per month due to lack of capacity. This year, that's jumped to 200. Vet costs have skyrocketed, and more and more Canadians are struggling to afford the basics every day. Something has to give, and it's often the pet.
Kathy Powelson, founder and executive director of B.C.’s Paws for Hope, says the old-school shelter model basically boiled down to: If you can’t afford a pet or its care, you shouldn't have one. She calls that model horrendous from a humanitarian perspective, and just as bad from an economic one.
“It’s just stupid,” she says. “You're taking that animal [into the shelter], you're hopefully providing that medical care that that animal initially needed that resulted in this surrender, and now you have to care for this animal in your shelter until you find this animal a family who you believe is more suitable to care for this animal." That care can take a long time, and it doesn't come cheap, which is why prevention programs are so important.
At the Toronto Humane Society (THS), the mean cost to house a pet in shelter is $115 per day, but its Urgent Care fostering program, which places pets with temporary foster families while their owners get through a crisis, has a mean cost of just $19 per day. In 2022, animals in its Urgent Care fostering program stayed there a mean of 160 days, down from 187 in 2020 as the program got more efficient. Multiply that against the $115-a-day shelter cost, and the shelter cost for a single animal for the same stretch could cost as much as $18,000; the fostering program's mean cost would be just $3,040. Most animals don't stay that long, but even a short stay at the shelter can add up fast, while 74% of pets who went through the crisis program were eventually reunited with their families.
There are benefits to these programs that go beyond money. People with pets are more likely to remain in unsafe living situations if they have nowhere to bring their pet; in Canada, 56% of women delayed leaving an abusive situation because they couldn't take their pets with them. Powelson has seen situations with people who want to get treatment for substance use or move into supportive housing and get off government assistance, but they can't or won't because there's nowhere for their pet to go. “It even goes, in my mind, beyond the savings to the shelter for the number of animals that are being surrendered, but in terms of the social care that they're receiving through government,” she says.
Linda Armstrong knows the benefits firsthand as board chair and president of Ontario's Progressive Animal Welfare Services (PAWS, unrelated to Nelson's organization). Its main program subsidizes veterinary costs at around $300 per pet – again, a fraction of what it would cost if the owner had just surrendered the pet. That's what resonates with municipalities and other funders, Armstrong says.
"Municipal leaders, foundations who do granting, they're looking for impact; they're looking for cost-benefit," she says. "When I'm talking to municipal leaders, the best dollar you spend will be on prevention, and people get that... our donors get it, foundations get it, so we're having some success in terms of getting funding based on the prevention model."
Armstrong says she's seeing more animal welfare organizations embrace these prevention models, pointing to the Humane Society of London Middlesex in Ontario, which now partners with PAWS to prevent pet surrenders before they happen. “It still meets their goals; it's just a change in mindset, and it's a change in focus on where you spend your dollars,” she says.
Vet costs have skyrocketed, and more and more Canadians are struggling to afford the basics every day. Something has to give, and it's often the pet.
Most people who surrender their pets have tried to get help. In a 2026 study of pet owners across Canada and the US who'd recently surrendered a pet, nearly half had sought some kind of assistance before the surrender, and that rate gets higher for those surrendering for housing or financial reasons. For both fiscal and compassionate reasons, shelters want the same thing: pets staying in homes, not getting stuck in shelters.
Owning and keeping a pet shouldn't be something only the wealthy can afford, and it doesn't have to be. Municipalities and funders are starting to see that the old shelter model is unkind and much more expensive than preventing the surrender in the first place. We need to stop asking if someone can afford a pet, and start asking what it costs everyone when pet owners don't get help to keep one.
