Animal Rescue during a Pandemic: How Quarantine has Affected Charitable Donations to Animal Groups

By Jared Adams

Stonehill College Student and Correspondent

During the pandemic, Americans have increased their generosity to major animal rights groups in unexpectedly great numbers. 

Economically, there has been a great amount of hardship for American workers, especially as pandemic lockdown measures have gone on and shut down places of work. Despite this, charities as a whole have actually seen an uptick in general charitable giving, as a 2020 study from Fidelity Charitable discovered that while in-person volunteering is projected to dramatically decrease during the pandemic (47% of recent volunteers decided to halt their usual work), they found that many Americans actually plan on increasing their average cash donations to the organizations they typically support.

This was reflected in the same study, finding that “Most donors do not plan to shift their giving to different organizations in light of the pandemic; they will stay the course by continuing to support their favorite nonprofits. Many donors plan to continue supporting their usual charities even amid the pandemic. Forty-three percent say they will continue to donate to the nonprofits they supported before, as they will probably be impacted by COVID-19 in some way. A quarter of donors say they will give to different organizations as a result of the pandemic—shifting part or all of their donations to organizations responding to COVID-19.” 

Normally, animal charity groups are among the most popular outlets for donations for Americans, whether it be large organizations like the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) or local shelters for lost animals. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic last spring, however, the economy has shifted in ways no one could have predicted. 

Founded in 1951, the Animal Welfare Institute is one such organization that has seen a wide variety of unexpected and jarring changes since the sudden start of the pandemic. Their mission has largely remained the same, as they struggle to tackle the same issues in a new and changing world.  

A representative for the institute, Marjorie Fishman was able to shed some light on just how much things have changed for their nonprofit: “Our office is still mostly closed, though employees have the option of coming in [...] We have participated in more Zoom webinars to educate the public about animal advocacy campaigns. I am not as familiar with what’s going on at other groups, but the general feeling is that it is a challenge to pursue animal welfare legislation at a time when so much legislative action is focused on the pandemic.”

An interesting development in regards to the specific goals of the Animal Welfare Institute, Fishman says that “We have not shifted focus since the pandemic began, though we have published several pieces recently exploring the intersection between diseases and animal welfare.”

Some of the issues that the Animal Welfare Institute is continuing to address as they did before include “the wildlife trade, fur farms, factory farming”, preserving species threatened with extinction, protecting wildlife from harmful exploitation and destruction of critical habitats, protecting companion-breed animals from cruelty, and more. 

It’s not just the Animal Welfare Institute that saw sudden spikes in donations. Another recent case had a seemingly random flood of donations sent to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars being in a matter of days. 

“It’s been a wild ride for those of us who love gorillas” the Fund said in an official statement,  “Last week the Reddit investor group WallStreetBets started a viral, grassroots campaign to adopt gorillas in support of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, and we received thousands of donations, mostly through our gorilla adoption program [...] We were surprised and honored by this sudden flood of generosity.” 

While the reason that the investor movement spurred by a Stonehill Alum has chosen the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to focus on is unclear, the financial support is being accepted with grateful arms by those who do work for the foundation. 

Like many other organizations, the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund also saw an onslaught of similar challenges due to the sudden outbreak: “The onset of the pandemic in 2020 made our work in the forests of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo more difficult, more costly — and more critical to the survival of gorillas and the humans who live nearby. This pandemic, which scientists agree likely began when a zoonotic disease ‘jumped’ from wild animals to humans, made it clear that, while it is expensive to protect and maintain pristine forests, there is a greater cost to letting these forests be damaged.”

Similar to the Animal Welfare Institute, the Fund plans on focusing their efforts towards the same goals they have always held in high regards: “donations will be used not only to protect gorillas, but to protect their forest home, which is the second largest tropical rainforest on the planet and one of our best natural defenses against climate change. As we often say: when you save gorillas, you save the planet.”

The Animal Welfare Institute and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund are not the only charitable groups that have seen changes since the start of the pandemic. Across the board, there have been fluctuations in rates of economic interest in similar organizations. 

While a majority of these are being focused on pandemic-centric charities like food drives, the Animal Welfare Institute, as Fishman cites, has been seeing a significant uptick in donations since July 2020, mainly in the form of online payments rather than check. 

The increases seen in these cases doesn’t apply to every charity, however. Despite the rise in support for many of the larger and more well-known organizations like the AWI and Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, a study from DonorPerfect found that smaller nonprofits on local levels experienced a more significant drop in giving—down 22% in average income from donations as a result of the pandemic. 

 

The DonorPerfect study conducted 2020-2021 found that “This group, which brings in less than $235,000 in donations per year, saw a drop twice as severe as the ‘large’ nonprofit group in the study, those bringing in over $775,000 in annual donations.” 

 

It looks like bigger nonprofits will survive the pandemic, but only time will tell if local organizations will be able to survive.