Anyone who has enjoyed the love of a pet knows how important pets are to our physical and emotional well-being. People living with pets cite decreased stress and anxiety when their pets are by their sides. These sentiments are supported by many peer-reviewed medical studies showing that pets are effective adjuncts to medical therapies for severe post-traumatic stress disorder, improving sleep, social re-integration and overall life satisfaction. In fact, 97 percent of physicians interviewed in a study by the Human-Animal Bond Research Institute said they see the positive benefits of pet ownership in the patients they treat.
I suggest that, for some, pets may even serve as a path out of homelessness. While this may sound absurd, I can assure you that having practiced veterinary medicine for almost 30 years, I have witnessed the incredible strength of the human-animal bond and how it can promote health for both humans and pets. As a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a 16-year veteran of running another public health charity, Save Their Smiles, I am interested in harnessing the power of this bond at the intersection of human-animal health to improve the culture of health and housing outcomes for unhoused people in Seattle and beyond.
It is for this reason that I founded Seattle Veterinary Outreach (SVO), a mobile veterinary “clinic” that provides free veterinary care to pets of folks living without homes and offers connections to health, housing and human services.
The model is working! In January alone, while our veterinarians tended to 175 pets, our resource navigator made 804 social service referrals to pet owners, and our team facilitated getting 143 COVID vaccines into arms. Drilling into these numbers, we found that 47 percent of people presenting to our clinics for veterinary care requested help finding food, housing, and/or health care. Think about that. Almost half of the people who come to our clinic for pet care also need care for themselves, care they might not receive if they had not shown up to get veterinary care for their pet.
To be sure, this approach will not work for all homeless people; one must have a pet to seek veterinary care, and it could be difficult for people to learn about the service without that introduction. That said, the model is valuable in that it reaches a subset of people who may be missed by — or resistant to — governmental outreach due to historical trauma. And while the project may not make a large or rapid dent in homelessness, each individual reached is one more person with the opportunity to live a full, healthy life, something every human being deserves.
Creative models like SVO are needed to reach individuals truly disenfranchised from society at large. These on-the-ground, nimble and effective nongovernmental models need government funding to be sustainable in the long term. I propose funding approaches like these to decrease disparities in health and housing.
Seattle has tried more standard approaches. Maybe it is time to call in the pets!
Hanna Ekstrom, DVM, is the executive director of Seattle Veterinary Outreach.
Learn more about Seattle Veterinary Outreach, including the dates and locations of clinics, at https://seattlevet.org
Read more of the Jun 1-7, 2022 issue.