News and Reports

Canada Day has traditionally been synonymous in Montreal with moving day: piles of junk on street corners, sweaty bodies carrying couches up and down the city’s winding staircases – and a spike in abandoned animals at shelters.

However, Montreal’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) is no longer seeing a big jump in animal surrenders around July 1, but that’s not because people have stopped giving up their pets before moving homes.

The shelter says that compared with years past, fewer residential leases terminate at the end of June; therefore, instead of abandoning their pets all at once, Montrealers area leaving their animals behind all year long. And the number of surrendered pets is increasing, a trend that Laurence Massé, executive director of the Montreal SPCA, blames on the high cost of living and on a lack of pet-friendly rentals.