This story that I wrote for The Washington Post is about the ongoing craze of people adopting and buying dogs during the Covid-19 pandemic.
When the run on shelters, pet stores, breeders and nonprofit rescue groups began with the pandemic back in March, many experts thought it might be a one-time surge. The opposite is turning out to be true. It’s now mid-August, and demand is not letting up. As this story explains, some experts now think there’s a second wave of buyers entering the market, those who are just now coming to terms with the fact that we’re all likely to be stuck at home for quite a while longer until a Covid-19 vaccine is found.
Perhaps most interesting is that nobody on the breeding or rescue sides of the dog industry can recall a similar phenomenon. There are buying surges each year at, say, Christmas, but they last a matter of weeks, not months.