From enrichment to burden – a fate shared by many newly acquired pets from the Corona period. The owners are overwhelmed, the animals are poorly socialized and therefore sometimes aggressive. Young dogs and “difficult” breeds in particular are increasingly being given away.
When the door to the kennels opens, there is a deafening barking. A number of dogs run excitedly up and down behind the bars. Romeo, on the other hand, immediately disappears through a hatch into the inside of the dog wing. “He’s very anxious,” says Tanja Schnabel, who runs the Nuremberg animal shelter. She can only guess what the three-year-old mongrel experienced. The dog is a found animal: He was tied up in a residential area for three hours before someone brought him to the animal shelter. And Romeo is not alone.
The Nuremberg animal shelter is currently home to around 60 dogs, around 120 cats and even more small animals. “We’re full to the roof,” says Schnabel. As a result, the shelter can no longer take in any more animals. According to the German Animal Welfare Association, the situation is similar in other animal shelters in Germany. “The many animals in care push the staff to their limits,” says President Thomas Schröder.
Mainly because many of the dogs are difficult to handle and need a lot of care. A nurse will therefore later go for a walk with Romeo. You can’t entrust such an animal to the volunteers who usually walk the dogs in Nuremberg.
“The assumption is that these are the aftermath of Corona,” says Schnabel. That’s what Beate Kaminski from the Berlin animal shelter thinks, too, where a noticeable number of young dogs of larger and more demanding breeds were given up last year. “People had probably brought little puppies into their homes in the wake of the Corona pet boom, but they hadn’t done the necessary upbringing work. By the time puberty started, they were completely overwhelmed by the young dog,” she says. The animal shelter has since imposed a freeze on admissions. There are more than 80 dogs on the waiting list alone, which the owners would like to give up.
There are not only a lot of dogs in the Saarbrücken animal shelter at the moment, but also a particularly large number of young ones. Otherwise older animals would be given away, says Frederick Guldner. Many of the dogs behaved strangely. “They don’t know how to communicate. They react aggressively and bark at strangers.” Others had disorders of the muscles and skeleton. “That makes it difficult to convey the animals,” says Guldner.
No one takes a German shepherd that has hip problems by the age of one. “Udo Kopernik from the Association for German Dogs (VDH) also notes that the Corona period has left its mark on young dogs.” The dogs already have a deficit. They have grown into a time when you moved in a cocoon,” he says. They were used to being cared for around the clock and had little contact with other dogs and people. As the owners after months When they had to go back to work in the home office, the problems arose because they couldn’t take the dog with them, but they didn’t want to be alone or be looked after by others.
Another problem is the illegal puppy trade, which has blossomed due to the great demand for dogs in the Corona crisis. Last year, 170 puppies that the police had freed from illegal transport ended up in the Nuremberg animal shelter alone. Many of the puppies are far too young to be separated from their mother and siblings, says Kopernik. “When they are puppies, it is not noticeable that they are missing a crucial step in socialization. But this becomes apparent when they reach puberty. The dogs become aggressive, and there are biting incidents in the family.”
According to Kopernik, the illnesses in young dogs reported by the Saarbrücken animal shelter can also be traced back to dubious breeders who did not carry out proper health checks on the parent animals. “It’s all about mass and making money quickly.”
Animal shelters often find it difficult to find a new home for such dogs – especially now that the Corona pet boom has subsided. “At the moment there are hardly any requests for our animals. Maybe it’s because people don’t want animals anymore,” says the animal shelter in Salzgitter, Lower Saxony.
