Abandonment Of Family Pets & Foreclosures

In Northern California, a recent story in the San Jose Mercury News serves as a reminder that family pets are a continuing casualty in the boom in home foreclosures. Excerpts from the story:

• "People are losing their homes, and animals are the fallout of that," said Cecily Tippery, a Coldwell Banker agent who specializes in foreclosed properties, and now also in rescuing pets left behind. Here in one of the nation's foreclosure hotbeds, Tippery and her colleagues say they have found several pets in abandoned homes -- enough to spread the animal care workload among them.

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• No one has documented the number of pets turning up after foreclosures, but there is anecdotal evidence of a statewide problem, said Paul Bruce, regional program coordinator for the Sacramento regional office of the Humane Society of the United States. Foreclosures are "leaving the cities with all of the problems, including animals that have been left behind," said Bruce.

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• For Tippery, the problem has grown into a rallying cry for a "no-kill" shelter in the city. Some of the pets that her agents have found are older or sick or have no veterinary records. Neither Contra Costa County nor Antioch maintain no-kill shelters, and Tippery said the agents are reluctant to send the pets to them. Local rescue groups lack resources to pay for veterinary care. The agents in some cases have paid for health checks on the forsaken pets and developed a network of potential adopters. [...] The pets are considered personal property and cannot be removed [from vacant foreclosed homes] until 18 days after a foreclosure sale. The banks, the agents say, do not want the agents to feed them. They do it anyway.

For more, see Pets becoming casualty of foreclosure.

For more on "foreclosure pets", go here and go here. petsII and foreclosures