However, despite being “full to the rafters”, chief executive Lindsay Fyffe-Jardine is worried they will be asked to take in even more, as donations to the animal bank are at the very least.
It means the home cannot fulfill all requests for the 86 food banks it supplies in Central Scotland, the Lothians and Fife.
This, in turn, means that the staff knows that pet owners have to go without food to feed their beloved companions. When they can no longer do it, they are forced to go through the trauma of giving up their animals.
The scale of the crisis can be seen in the number of daily calls to the home helpline which reached a record high last summer and has never been decreased.
“People call us constantly saying they don’t know how to cope and we try to support them through the food bank, but when we’re at such low levels, it’s a real challenge,” Fyffe-Jardine said.
“We try to prevent dogs and cats from coming into homes through food banks and through our outreach work, but when we are at such a low level of donations, we are struggling. We are reaching out to get these supplies and they go down.”
The home team is doing everything they can to keep the animals with their owners, but they fear that more will be forced to give up.
“I think there will be a lot more people who will carry the trauma of losing a pet in this way and watching that moment of trauma happen to that person is not something that gets over easily,” said Fyffe-Jardine.
“I don’t think it makes an animal or a person better because the impact on the mental health of losing that animal is absolutely huge. We know what a pet can do for someone and I absolutely defy anyone to watch someone give up the their pet when they don’t want it. It’s just one of the worst things in the world.
“I don’t want anyone to be part of that process and that’s why we put so much energy into trying to keep food banks going, but we’re struggling right now because we’re at the lowest levels of donations we’ve ever seen.”
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The donations are so low that the house is often not able to provide the food banks with the amount they need.
“We know it means people have to feed their animals their own food and that is absolutely heartbreaking,” said Fyffe-Jardine (below).
One of the reasons the pet food bank was created in 2019 was because food banks had reported that people were asking for items like canned tuna and corned beef – not because they wanted to eat them, but because they could feed it to their animals.
By the end of the following year, the home provided 50 food banks with pet food through the pet food bank and now keeps about 4,500 pets with their families every month.
“If we were to get even 2% of those dogs and cats, we would completely close the doors,” Fyffe-Jardine said.
At the moment there are more than 60 dogs and 20 cats in the house.
“We are absolutely full, but people are spending more time at the moment and those who challenge could be considered quite comfortable three or four years ago are no longer comfortable,” he said.
“A lot of people are quite quick to say you shouldn’t get that dog, but a lot of owners have had a stable situation and now the mortgage and energy bills are going up and the general cost of living has destabilized them and has made to possess an inaccessible animal.”
The costs mean that people are less likely to take larger dogs from home.
“They just have fabulous personalities, but they’re struggling to get home as people are a bit wary of the cost of getting a bigger dog,” Fyffe-Jardine said.
If it is not possible to take a dog or cat from home, it can be supported by direct debits, one-time donations or donating pet food at donation stations in supermarkets.
“It’s a big issue for us to be able to have enough money to pay all the bills and still have enough to get food and supplies to the food banks, so any support we get goes a long way,” Fyffe-Jardine said.
