Nearly Half of Abuse Survivors Stay Because of a Pet. These Groups Exist to End That Trap.

The question people ask survivors of domestic violence, usually without meaning to wound, is some version of “Why didn’t you just leave?” The answers are many and complicated. But one of them is startlingly concrete, and it rarely occurs to anyone who hasn’t lived it: the pet.

For millions of people, an animal is family, and leaving an abuser can mean abandoning that family member to someone who has already shown a willingness to hurt. Research compiled by Safe Havens for Pets indicates that as many as 48 percent of survivors put off escaping a dangerous home specifically because they have no safe plan for the animal. A joint survey of 2,500 survivors by the National Domestic Violence Hotline and the Urban Resource Institute found that 97 percent said keeping their pets with them was an important factor in whether to seek shelter. And yet only about 12 percent of domestic violence programs can accommodate pets at all.

Put those numbers together and you get a trap: the animal that makes home feel survivable is also the reason someone stays in a home that isn’t safe. The link runs the other way, too. Multiple studies have found that between roughly 49 and 86 percent of survivors reported an abuser threatening, harming, or killing a pet as a tool of control. Leaving is often not just about protecting a person. It is about protecting the animal the abuser has already targeted.

The organizations below exist specifically to break that bind. They are the practical infrastructure that turns “I can’t leave without my dog” into “I don’t have to.”

The national safety nets

Safe Havens Mapping Project

Founded in 2011 by the Animal Welfare Institute, the Safe Havens Mapping Project is a searchable national database of services that help survivors place their pets out of harm’s way. It holds roughly 1,200 entries across all 50 states, searchable by zip code. The listings vary: some provide pet sheltering directly, some partner with a group that does, and some make referrals. The value is speed. In a crisis, a person can find the nearest option without having to cold-call a dozen shelters first. The Institute is also analyzing safe-haven “deserts,” the regions with no local resources at all, so funders can direct money where the gap is widest.

RedRover Relief

RedRover’s mission is to bring animals out of crisis and strengthen the bond between people and animals, and it does much of that work through grants. Its safe housing grants, worth up to $60,000, go to nonprofit domestic violence and animal organizations across the country to help them build or expand pet-friendly capacity. Its safe escape grants help individual families cover the cost of temporarily boarding a pet while a survivor is in a shelter that can’t take animals. The through-line is removing a specific, solvable barrier to safety.

Local programs doing the hands-on work

National databases matter, but the actual sheltering usually happens locally. A handful of programs have become models for what this looks like on the ground.

In New York City, the Urban Resource Institute launched the country’s first initiative to shelter survivors alongside their pets back in 2013. Its People and Animals Living Safely program, or PALS, offers pet-ready apartments across three boroughs. PALS Place, its flagship, is the first domestic violence shelter in the nation designed so that every single apartment unit can house pets with their families rather than farming the animals out to boarding elsewhere. Keeping the family intact under one roof is the whole point, because separation is exactly what many survivors are trying to avoid.

North of the city, in Rockland County, the Center for Safety & Change runs Paws for Safety, established in 2011 with support from the Hudson Valley Humane Society. It confidentially houses the pets of people in its residential and non-residential programs for free, with the goal of eventual reunion. In Snellville, Georgia, Praline’s Backyard provides cage-free housing, food, and veterinary care for the dogs of survivors in housing transitions.

Also in Georgia is one of the most comprehensive local efforts in the country. Ahimsa House was founded in 2004 by Emily Christie after she lost her own pet to domestic violence, and it was the first organization built to help human and animal survivors together. What began in Atlanta now serves the whole state. Ahimsa works with veterinarians and boarding homes to keep survivors’ pets safe while their people find secure housing, and while the animals are in its care, everything from surgeries to vaccinations to behavioral rehabilitation is covered. It also runs a 24-hour statewide crisis line, transports pets, and offers legal advocacy. As of mid-2022 it had provided more than 150,000 nights of confidential shelter for pets in need.

And in New Jersey, Shelter Our Pets places survivors’ animals in foster homes or nearby kennels until families can be reunited. Survivors can reach out directly, though the process moves faster when they come referred through a domestic violence agency or shelter.

Where the law still lags

As vital as these organizations are, the legal scaffolding around them remains incomplete, and that is where change could reach the most people at once.

The federal Pet and Women Safety Act, signed into law in 2018, was the watershed. It widened what legally counts as stalking to cover threats that make someone reasonably fear their pet could be killed or seriously hurt, and it stood up a federal grant program, formally the Emergency and Transitional Pet Shelter and Housing Assistance Grant Program, to help shelters accommodate animals. The catch is that a grant program is only as strong as its annual funding, and that funding has been a yearly fight rather than a settled fact.

There is still work to be done at the state level, too. As of the most recent tallies, more than a dozen states have not amended their laws to explicitly allow pets to be named on protective orders, or to fold harming, killing, or threatening a companion animal into their legal definition of domestic violence. Those gaps mean the animal an abuser weaponizes may not be recognized by the very orders meant to protect the household.

What’s new since this was written

The federal money behind the PAWS Act has actually grown and stabilized in recent years, which matters because funding is what turns the law from a symbol into shelter beds. Congress appropriated roughly $3.3 million for the pet-shelter grant program in 2023 and secured about $3 million for fiscal year 2024. More significant than any single year, lawmakers led by Senator Gary Peters moved to reauthorize the program at $3 million a year for five years beginning in fiscal year 2025, trading the annual scramble for something closer to predictable support.

That predictability is the quiet breakthrough. Shelters can only build pet-ready units and hire the staff to run them if they can count on the money being there next year. Recent grant cycles have also widened what the funds can cover, including transportation and help finding safe housing that accepts pets, not just the boarding itself. The list of what a survivor can be helped to keep is getting longer, which is exactly the direction it should go.

If you or someone you know is weighing whether to leave and the pet is part of the calculation, the resources above are built for exactly that moment. The animal does not have to be the reason to stay.

This is a sensitive subject. If you are in danger, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) can help you build a safety plan that includes your pets.

References

• Safe Havens for Pets. Statistics on survivors delaying departure over pet safety. Animal Welfare Institute.
• National Domestic Violence Hotline and Urban Resource Institute. Survey of survivors on pets and sheltering decisions.
• U.S. Congress. Pet and Women Safety (PAWS) Act of 2018, H.R. 909, 115th Congress.
• Office for Victims of Crime. Emergency and Transitional Pet Shelter and Housing Assistance Grant Program, FY2024.
• Office of U.S. Senator Gary Peters. Reauthorization of PAWS Act grant funding, fiscal year 2025.
• RedRover Relief. Safe housing and safe escape grant programs.