Last week, two volunteers and two advocates — one for people, one for their animal companions — met in a small room at Neighborhood Pets in Slavic Village. The volunteers will be the first in a new program called PALS, Pet Assistance Linking Support. Both will be assigned to a Cleveland senior who lives alone but owns a dog or cat. Every week, they will visit that person to care for the animal. Walk the dog, clean the cat’s litter box, wash the bedding, bring food or other supplies – whatever the animal needs.
The goal is simple: “Keep people and their pets together,” said Becca Britton, founder of Neighborhood Pets and one of the advocates leading the meeting. “For some people, giving up a pet involuntarily is the worst thing in the world. It should never happen, but it happens all the time.”
PALS is a collaboration between Neighborhood Pets, which provides free and low-cost services for dogs and cats in Cleveland and East Cleveland, and Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging, which serves aging adults and their caregivers in Greater Cleveland. The program, the first of its kind in the nation, is built on two beliefs: that pet ownership provides benefits to older adults, especially those who live alone; and caring for pets can be a burden for the owner or the owner’s caregiver.
“Helping pets is helping people,” said Jessica Bibbo, senior research scientist at Benjamin Rose and Britton’s partner in training the PALS volunteers. Wellbeing is not just a measure of health, they explained. It includes “living the life you want to live,” and many older people want to share their lives with animals.
“For a lot of folks, a pet is that last relationship where someone is dependent on you,” Bibbo said in an interview with Signal Cleveland. “That provides a lot of meaning to people who are older, people who are socially isolated. Pets can be really important.”
Funded by Community Care Corps, PALS is built on Bibbo’s research, which focuses on the benefits and challenges of human-animal bonds in older adulthood and the effects on the pet owner’s caregivers.
In one of Bibbo’s early studies, the researchers asked healthcare and other professionals who work with older adults if they’d seen or been informed of difficulties related to caring for a pet. Eighty percent said they had.
“Hands down, the most common issue was basic care,” Bibbo said in an interview last year. “Abilities change [as people age], and the ability to care for a pet is also going to change.
“On the flip side, the overwhelming benefit that they had seen was that companionship their older clients had experienced by living with a pet. Right after that was the sense of purpose a pet can bring.”
Large majorities of doctors report that pet ownership improves their patients’ physical health and mental health, and even how they relate to medical staff. The benefits extend to people living with PTSD, depression and dementia. Walking a pet can lead to more contact with neighbors and connection to the community.
‘Take care of each other’
Serving people wasn’t part of the plan when Britton founded Neighborhood Pets in 2016. But over time, she saw how people and their animal companions’ lives become intertwined in ways that no one organization or agency was designed to support.
“If somebody comes in and they’re living in their car because they don’t want to give up their dog, do we just give them [dog] food and say goodbye?” she asked.
Helping people started organically, she said. A client who got more food than they needed from the Cleveland Food Bank would bring in the excess to share with others. A community grew around Neighborhood Pets’ mantra, “Take care of each other.”
About three years ago, Earl Pike, former executive director of nearby University Settlement, connected Britton with Chico G. Lewis, outreach coordinator for The Centers (formerly Circle Health Services). That led to The Centers using Neighborhood Pets’ storefront on East 65th Street as a regular stop for its mobile substance use disorder services. Lewis’ team is there every Thursday with information about treatment for those who are ready to stop using and with harm-reduction supplies for those who aren’t.
In the beginning, he would see five to 10 clients per visit, Lewis said. Now it’s more like 25.
“We are working together as a team right now, this is a team-up,” he said. “And hopefully we can save some lives.”
On Tuesdays, Neighborhood Pets hosts The Centers’ HIV care and prevention services.
Earlier this month, Neighborhood Pets launched a new partnership with the Cleveland Food Bank, delivering pet food and supplies to homebound Food Bank clients. The first round of deliveries last week fed 22 dogs and five cats. (This program is funded by a grant from Cuyahoga County.) Deliveries will also be offered to pet-owning clients of Benjamin Rose.
On June 22, Neighborhood Pets will host its second annual (and humans only) Health and Safety Fair, featuring Legal Aid Society of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County Department of Health, Cleveland Animal Care and Control, God’s Vision Foundation and many others.
‘People are doing the best they can’
The training session for PALS volunteers included a lot of discussion of dog and cat body language. In other words, avoiding bites.
But there was just as much focus on the people whose homes the volunteers will be entering. Some people will be apprehensive, Britton explained, fearing they’ll be judged for how they and their pets live. Or worse.
She relayed the story of a client who took his dog to a vet who then called animal control because the dog’s fur was so badly matted the dog would have to be sedated for grooming. Neighborhood Pets intervened. The staff knew the man; he’d suffered a brain injury a few years before and often forgot things and got confused. But no one who knew him doubted that he adored his dog.
“There’s always reasons,” Britton said. “You have to peel back the layers. Ninety percent of the time, people are doing the best they can.”
To learn more about the Pet Assistance Linking Support (PALS) program, contact Rebekkah Whelan, manager of volunteer services at Benjamin Rose, at [email protected].
This story emerged from the work of Cleveland Documenters covering meetings of the Cuyahoga County Council.
