In the first blog of this series, Give Pets a Seat at the Social Services Table, Human Animal Support Services (HASS) introduced social services roundtables, a national effort to connect animal welfare and human service organizations to talk about shared challenges and solutions. Those discussions highlighted how deeply human and pet well-being are connected, and how community collaboration is essential to supporting families on both ends of the leash.

In this second installment, we move from conversation to investigation. National HASS research showed that the most common drivers of pet relinquishment and barriers to reunification are not a lack of love, but systemic issues such as affordability, housing restrictions, and access to resources. Families want to keep their pets, but financial strain, veterinary expenses, limited pet-inclusive housing, and gaps in communication channels often get in the way.

Recognizing this and that 98% of pet owners consider their pets to be family, the HASS Human Commonalities Project set out to identify the common challenges in a community that present barriers to pet retention and reunification. In Omaha, Nebraska, HASS partnered with the Nebraska Humane Society, a nonprofit with a municipal contract and an intake of over 13,000 animals in 2024, to explore the experiences of pet owners who had relinquished a pet or reclaimed a lost pet. Using surveys, shelter data, and ecosystem mapping of local resources, the project identified community needs, collaboration opportunities, and resource gaps to help keep pets and people together whenever possible.

Key Findings

The Human Commonalities Project revealed several factors that influenced pet relinquishment and lost pet reunification, highlighting opportunities for shelters and social service organizations to support families more effectively.

Veterinary Costs, Nuisance Behaviors, and Housing Barriers Drove Relinquishment: A lack of access to affordable veterinary care, behavior support for common pet behaviors, and pet-inclusive housing were the primary drivers of owner surrender intake in Omaha. These trends are similar to HASS’s 2024 analysis of owner surrender data from 32 sheltering organizations, which found that 10% of surrenders were due to financial constraints, 6% to owner reported nuisance behaviors, and 17% to housing challenges. Understanding these patterns can guide funding requests, program development, and partnership opportunities to meet these critical needs. 

Understanding the Local Ecosystem Mattered: Mapping the local ecosystem shed light on pet support needs, contributors to intake, partnership opportunities, and resource options for families in the shelter’s service area. By compiling community resources, we identified gaps in available resources and strategic partnership opportunities to address the organization’s largest categories of intake.

Owners Found Resources Online and Through Word of Mouth: Most pet owners looked for information on available resources and services for themselves and for their pet through online searches, friend and family referrals, and social media. Strengthening an organization’s online presence, search engine optimization (SEO), and leveraging public resource databases such as pets.findhelp and findhelp can help families access holistic support more easily. To take this a step further, organizations can also help pet owners in their community access support by making SEO a key part of their strategic partnership conversations with local social service organizations. By aligning social services and animal welfare in online search ecosystems, families can more easily identify holistic support that addresses the needs of their whole family.

Surrender Reasons Were Complex: Most survey respondents indicated multiple reasons contributing to their decision to surrender a pet, rather than a single issue, underscoring that relinquishment results from accumulated stressors. Data from this project in 2025 and previous HASS Intake Triage projects in 2022 and 2024 have also shown that owners select more than one reason to describe their decision to relinquish their pet. Circumstances are more complex than what one field of data entry can convey based on staff interpretation of what an owner shares. Methods that allow capturing multiple, standardized reasons for intake provide more accurate and meaningful pet support needs data for your community than one field alone. 

Pet Identification and Community Awareness Supported Reunification: Reclaimed pets most often had a current microchip, but many still had no identification at all, a collar without a tag, or an outdated microchip. Strong shelter marketing and the community’s awareness of the shelter helped owners reclaim pets even when no ID was present, but improving pet identification could further reduce intake. This could allow finders to quickly identify a pet’s owner without the need for a shelter stay at all, reducing strain on shelter staff, safeguarding animal welfare, and reuniting families more quickly.

Similar trends were observed at LifeLine Animal Project’s DeKalb County Animal Services, where fewer than 1% of 1,236 found pets that entered the shelter over a period of 5 months had a physical ID tag.

Tracking Data in Your Community

Tracking data in your own community will inform the most effective solutions to support the people and pets you serve. Learn about your local ecosystem of resources, non-profit organizations, businesses, and social service agencies. Capture multiple, standardized reasons for intake, learn about what help your community is missing, and understand what resources may have prevented unnecessary surrender. These actionable insights inspire powerful programs driven by evidence to support the human-animal bond and keep families together whenever possible.

Turning Insights Into Action

The Human Commonalities Project highlights how understanding shared community challenges can help shelters and social service organizations design more effective, connected solutions. By examining the experiences of pet owners and analyzing local intake patterns, shelters gain actionable insights into the factors that drive relinquishment and reunification.

In Part 3 of this series, we’ll explore how ecosystem mapping can turn insights into action. By compiling and visually mapping community resources, gaps, and partnerships, shelters can coordinate support more effectively and ultimately keep more people and pets together. 

To discover more about the needs of your community, visit these HASS resources.

Follow up with shelter visitors to gather feedback about their experience: Intake-to-Placement: Shelter Foot Traffic Data Tracking

Source: Human Animal Support Services