50 Most Wholesome Rescue Pet Photos Of The Month (February Edition)

At the beginning of the lockdown, animal rescue organizations were reporting a rise in adoption and foster applications. Later, however, various contradicting articles began to emerge.

Temma Martin, Public Relations Manager at Best Friends Animal Society, told Bored Panda that people indeed stepped up to foster at an incredible rate immediately after things shut down in mid-March of last year.

"24PetWatch is a shelter management software developed to support shelter and animal care operations, which has been tracking total aggregate numbers for the 1,200 organizations that use their database to show the impact of the rate of change since COVID across all organizations. According to their data, they saw a 93% increase in animals going to foster during the first week after the shutdowns began (March 14-20, 2020), compared to the week prior," Martin said.

Eventually, adoptions and fosters leveled off as the weeks and months of COVID and 2020 wore on but it still ended up being a good year for pet fostering and adoption.

"The conflicting reports about how it compared to the prior year need some explanation and are the result of comparing total numbers of adoptions and pets in foster, year over year vs. looking at the percentage adopted or fostered compared to the number available in shelters."

"Here's the explanation: While there are certainly many cases of groups that have seen higher actual numbers of adoptions and fosters since the beginning of the pandemic, the national stats sources that organizations use show a slightly more complex picture," Martin explained.

Actual (raw) numbers of adoptions are down from 2019. However, the rate of adoptions as a percentage of intake is up. This means that thankfully because there was a lower intake—fewer animals entered shelters in 2020—so there were fewer animals that needed to be adopted as well.

But the percentage of animals adopted in relation to the number available was higher than in 2019.  

"According to 24PetWatch, shelter populations were down dramatically in 2020 (as compared to 2019), so there were fewer animals to adopt," Martin said. "Adoptions (in raw numbers) were nearly 20% lower in 2020, but as a percent of animals in the sheltering system, they were over 4 percentage points higher than in 2019."

"Like adoptions, foster rates (as a percentage of the shelter population) were higher in 2020 by nearly 6 points (but lower in the raw number of animals fostered by about 3%)," Martin added. "Increases in fostering were more significant for cats than dogs, although rates for both increased."