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Tip of the Week: Pet Debt Report
September 16, 2024, The Association
A new survey shows that the overwhelming majority of pet owners are experiencing the impact of inflation on pet care costs. How might you better serve the members of your community who have gone into debt for their pets?
According to a new LendingTree survey of 1,375 United States consumers, 85% of pet owners say inflation is increasing their overall care costs, and two in five pet parents have gone into debt for their pets. Those surveyed cited rising costs of emergency veterinary care and price increases for general care, such as petfood and grooming.
Some of the key takeaways from the July 2024 survey, as cited by LendingTree:
- “Almost a quarter of pet owners (23%) say they’ve considered going petless due to costs, and 39% say they won’t own a pet again in the future.”
- “When asked what’s getting more expensive, 76% said pet food, 56% said vet services and 40% said necessary supplies.”
- “Among the 31% of Americans who don’t have a pet, 25% can’t afford one.”
- “Nearly a quarter (24%) say they wouldn’t have gotten their pet if they knew how expensive it would be.”
- “12% have surrendered a pet because they could no longer afford to care for” that pet.
You can read the full summary here. How do these stats and statements align with your organization’s experience? Whether they are spot-on, way off base or somewhere in between, nevertheless they reinforce a need for programs and services that keep people and their pets together, as well as and including increased access to care.
Which populations in your community most need these programs and services? Are you connecting with these populations and meeting those needs? It may be a worthwhile exercise to consider these questions in light of the findings of recent studies like the Pet Debt Report and Hill’s Pet Nutrition’s 2024 State of Shelter Adoption Report.
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The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement is a cohort of leaders on a mission to champion, advance, and unify the animal welfare profession.
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One of the intriguing features of consumer spending on pets is that there is no obvious dip in such spending during recessions. The Department of Commerce tracks consumer spending by quarter (data from 1959 to the present). The data can be found here (https://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm). If one looks at consumer spending on pets as a fraction of overall consumer spending, there is no obvious slow down in the spending on pets during recessionary periods. People may express concerns about inflation and there may (?) be a dip in the percentage of households with pets during recessions as households hold off from acquiring a pet, but spending on our pets does not appear to be a discretionary expense in pet-owning households.
It should also be noted that there are quite large differences in the estimates of how many households have pets produced by the three (AVMA, APPA, and Simmons for Packaged Facts) main pet-owning surveys in the USA. The APPA consistently reports much higher percentages (around 68%) of households have pets compared to the other two (around 57%). The US Census has been surveying pet ownerships since 2013 as part of its periodic American Housing Survey (in 2013, 2017 and 2021). According to the most recent American Housing (2021) survey (presumably the most accurate estimate of pet ownership in the USA), only around 49.6% of US households have at least one pet. Most media stories on US pet ownership cite the current APPA estimate that two-thirds of US households have pets.