The Dog We Weren't Ready For

In the spring of 2020, something unusual happened at the Toronto Humane Society on River Street. For the first time in the organisation's 126-year history, the shelter ran out of dogs. Not briefly, not on a single weekend — for weeks. Fosters emptied the kennels. Rescue transports from overcrowded shelters in the southern United States arrived and were cleared within days. The waitlists for puppies stretched to months. The organisation's leadership described conditions they had never encountered before. Canada was experiencing the fastest and most concentrated surge in companion animal adoption in its recorded history.

The numbers, when they were finally assembled, were striking. The Canadian Animal Health Institute's 2021 pet population survey tracked growth in the Canadian dog population from approximately 7.6 million in 2018 to 7.9 million by 2022 — a multi-year surge concentrated in the pandemic period. The BC SPCA reported a sharp increase in adoptions in March and April 2020, with promotional events drawing hundreds of new adoptions in a matter of days. The Ottawa Humane Society saw similar surges. Even breeders — who had quietly maintained waitlists of six to twelve months for popular breeds — found themselves overwhelmed. Labrador Retrievers, Golden Retrievers, and Bernese Mountain Dogs saw waiting lists extend to 18 months or more.

Why Canada, why 2020

The drivers were well understood even at the time, if underestimated in their combination. Canadians were, for the first time in most adults' working lives, home all day. The loneliness of the early lockdowns was profound — Statistics Canada's crowdsourcing initiative on the impacts of COVID-19 on Canadians, conducted April to May 2020, found that 24 percent of participants reported fair or poor mental health — compared with only 8 percent in the 2018 Canadian Community Health Survey — and that 52 percent reported their mental health had worsened since physical distancing began. A dog offered company, routine, and a reason to leave the house. The federal CERB payments that went to more than 8.9 million Canadians also provided, for many, a financial cushion that made a new pet feel affordable. Time was suddenly available. Money was, temporarily, flowing. Loneliness was acute.

What the surge also produced, without much comment at the time, was a cohort of dogs who had never known anything other than their owner's constant presence. They were puppies in 2020. They had never experienced an empty house. They had never been alone for more than an hour. The behaviour consultants and trainers who were paying attention were warning about this from the beginning: these puppies had no experience of being alone, no tolerance for an empty house, and no preparation for what would come when offices reopened.

The surrender wave: what the data shows

The wave, when it arrived, was gradual rather than sudden — which made it both harder to see coming and harder to respond to quickly. It began in earnest in the second half of 2021, as vaccine rollouts allowed a partial return to offices, and accelerated through 2022 as Canada's major employers moved from optional to expected in-office attendance. The shelters that had emptied in 2020 began to fill again. By late 2022, the Toronto Humane Society was reporting intake volumes 30 to 40 percent above their pre-pandemic baselines — not exclusively pandemic dogs, but the pandemic cohort was visible in the data.

The BC SPCA was more specific. In February 2023, general manager of communications Lorie Chortyk said publicly that the organisation was seeing animals surrendered for the same reasons as during the pandemic — only now in reverse. Where 2020 brought people home to dogs, 2022 and 2023 brought dogs back to shelters when the people left. The Ottawa Humane Society's intake data for 2022 showed a 22 percent year-on-year increase in dog admissions (from approximately 851 to 1,039), with behaviour problems — primarily separation anxiety and destructive behaviour linked to extended alone time — cited as the leading reason.

The behaviour problem nobody planned for

Separation anxiety is not a new problem for dogs. It is, however, a problem that pandemic conditions were almost perfectly designed to create at scale. A dog acquired as a puppy in April 2020, raised through a full two years of constant human presence, and then abruptly left alone for eight to ten hours five days a week, faces a psychological transition for which it has received essentially no preparation. The condition manifests as destructive behaviour when alone, excessive vocalization, inappropriate elimination, and in severe cases self-injury. It is treatable — but treatment requires time, often medication (most commonly fluoxetine, prescribed by a veterinarian), and a structured desensitisation programme. Those are resources that owners who are newly back at full-time work often lack.

What the shelters learned

The major Canadian humane societies drew several consistent lessons from the cycle. The first was the importance of pre-adoption counselling — not as a gatekeeping exercise, but as a genuine assessment of whether the adopter's life circumstances could sustain a dog through the full range of possible futures. The Toronto Humane Society revamped its intake questionnaire in 2022 to include questions about return-to-office plans, childcare commitments, and housing security. These are uncomfortable questions. They are also necessary ones.

The second lesson was about behaviour support. The BC SPCA expanded its post-adoption behaviour helpline in 2022, offering free one-on-one consultations for adopters experiencing behaviour challenges in the first year of ownership. The evidence for this kind of early intervention is strong: a 2020 review in the journal Animals found that the vast majority of dog surrenders for behavioural reasons involved problems that were both manageable and, critically, addressable had the owner received competent guidance early enough. The window between 'this is getting difficult' and 'we can't keep him' is often shorter than owners or shelters realise.

The long tail: 2025 and beyond

By 2025, the pandemic dog cohort — born 2019 to 2021 — was entering its middle age. The acute surrender crisis had eased, though shelter intake figures at major Canadian organisations remained above their 2019 baselines. The lasting legacy of the pandemic adoption surge was more diffuse: a generation of owners who had adopted a dog without fully reckoning with what a dog's life actually costs — in time, in money, in the constraint it places on spontaneity. A 2022 national survey of Canadian pet owners conducted by Narrative Research found that nearly half of Canadians who adopted an animal during lockdowns encountered challenges with their pets when their lifestyles returned to pre-pandemic schedules. The proportion who ultimately rehomed or surrendered pandemic pets remains difficult to establish precisely from available published data.

Even a conservative estimate of the proportion who ultimately rehomed their pandemic dogs represents tens of thousands of animals across Canada. It is not a disaster. It is not a wholesale indictment of the people who adopted during a genuinely terrible period and tried to do right by an animal under impossible conditions. But it is a number large enough to take seriously — and one where better preparation, better post-adoption support, and more honest pre-adoption conversation could have meaningfully reduced it.

What responsible adoption looks like now

The Canadian Federation of Humane Societies updated its adoption best-practice guidance in 2023 to include structured pre-adoption lifestyle assessments and a mandatory 'life change' consultation for first-time dog owners. The guidance asks prospective adopters to map their average week — honestly, not aspirationally — and assess whether a dog fits that week, not the version of their life they would like to have. It is, on paper, a simple exercise. In practice, it is a harder conversation than most people expect. The dog you are imagining is the dog for the life you wish you had. The dog you are adopting has to live in the life you actually have.

This is what the pandemic dog boom ultimately taught Canadian shelters, researchers, and the owners who lived through both the acquisition and the difficulty that followed: the human–animal bond is real, and it is demanding, and the two facts are inseparable. A dog does not ask less of you because you are returning to the office. It asks the same as it always did. The question the shelters are now trying to help people answer before they adopt — rather than after — is whether you are genuinely ready to give that.