This Sound of Us series features neighbors helping each other in Wayne & Medina counties, produced in partnership with Community Action of Wayne and Medina.
It's not uncommon to find a line of people out the door at St. James Episcopal Church on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month.
The Downtown Wooster church hosts a food pantry on those days, but you won't find cans of soup or bags of produce. This pantry offers free pet food.
It started about two years ago in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many other churches were running soup kitchens and produce pickups, Rev. Meghan Carlson said the St. James congregation decided animals and their owners needed support, too.
“This is a congregation that loves animals very much," Carlson said. "There's a lot of pets. Sometimes, dogs come to church here. We’ve become aware that pet ownership and financial difficulty has become more and more of a problem in recent years.”
Like most things, pet food prices have spiked amid inflation. A recent study found that prices for popular dog food brands on Amazon have risen more than 45% since 2020. That's an annual increase of about 15% per year since 2020, or three times higher than the usual annual price increase of 5% on average, according to TotalVet.
Pet owners nationwide have had to make price-based adjustments. A recent survey of 1,000 pet owners found that 34% have had to shop for cheaper alternatives to their usual pet food. Nearly a quarter of respondents said they've considered rehoming their pet or surrendering it to a shelter or rescue due to financial hardships.
The Wooster pantry tries to alleviate those anxieties. In an upper-floor room set up with shelves of bags of dog and cat food sorted by size, resident Tammy Null expressed her gratitude to the pantry volunteers. Null started visiting the pantry about seven months ago. Without it, she said she wouldn't be able to keep her puppy and four cats.
“It’s actually a decision of keeping your pets or not. The prices… I think everyone’s struggling," she said.
Another regular, Jerica Robison, adopted her Jack Russell-Beagle mix named Mickey for emotional support when her fiancé was killed in a car crash. She’s also a single mom to two boys, so finances are tough, but giving up Mickey is not an option.
“I can't give him up. After what he has done for me and what we've been through together, I just couldn't imagine giving him up. I couldn’t. It’d devastate me," Robison said.
A consistent diet
Pet owners can receive food for up to five pets — dogs or cats — and the pantry also provides kitten and puppy food. All of the food is Purina brand so pets can maintain a consistent diet, and it’s all paid for with donations and a grant through Episcopal Community Services, part of the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio.
Volunteers keep the pantry running smoothly by repackaging the food and labeling the bags for easy distribution.
"We know of people that were feeding their animals instead of themselves, and they count on this to make ends meet a lot of times," said Mary-Marie Deauclaire, who has volunteered with the pantry since July 2022.
Carlson is a cat owner herself, so she understands the emotional bond between pets and their owners.
“Caring for an animal helps you to care for something outside yourself," she said. "That definitely helps people who are having trouble taking care of themselves and gives you a reason to wake up in the morning."
A mental health boost
The responsibilities associated with caring for a pet serve a purpose in supporting mental health, according to Dr. Robert Chester, a University Hospitals clinical psychologist.
“It can increase structure in someone's life, give them more responsibility if that's something they need. And a lot of times the structure itself can help with things like ADHD and depression," Chester said.
The pantry has helped about 5,000 animals to date, but the need for assistance has grown, as well as the number of similar pantries in Northeast Ohio.
“Sometimes when people come here, everything's all kind of piled up at once. Like they've run out of money for rent and there's a bill due and 'Oh yeah, I have to get dog food.' We help meet that gap where people are feeling overwhelmed.”
Chester said research shows parting with a pet can be as emotionally difficult as saying goodbye to a human.
"You get unconditional love from pets. They don't talk back either, which is great. That's the biggest benefit, I think, forming a close relationship like that," he said.
Despite the hardships and burdens that people are enduring, Carlson said gratitude is a constant on pantry days. She and her team of volunteers see a fair share of familiar faces every other week, but the number of new faces continues to grow as word spreads and need continues.
“Every time we do this, people are just saying thank you, we don't know what we’d do without this," Carlson said. "There’s a lot of just kind of feeling of overwhelm and we kind of do what we can to help them know that there are people out there who care.”
