As Victoria moves into an election year, Lort Smith is advocating for practical solutions that better support people and their pets when life becomes difficult.
Every day, we see the point where pet care and human hardship meet.
We see people facing financial pressure, housing instability, family violence, mental health challenges and other forms of crisis, while trying to care for a pet they love. We also see how often those issues are connected.
When a person cannot afford emergency treatment, cannot find safe care for their pet, or cannot access the right support in time, both human and animal wellbeing are affected.
That is why Lort Smith is putting forward a set of practical, community-focused proposals designed to strengthen support where it is needed most. These are not abstract ideas. They are grounded in the work we are already doing across emergency care, crisis response, community outreach and animal-assisted support.
Our ambition is simple: to keep more people and pets together, improve outcomes for vulnerable Victorians, and make sure the systems around them work better when crisis hits.
Victoria’s cost-of-living pressure is creating a pet affordability crisis at the point of emergency care. For people in genuine financial hardship, the cost of urgent treatment can be out of reach, even when a pet has a strong chance of recovery if treated quickly. In those moments, pet owners can be forced to make devastating decisions.
Pets are central to companionship, stability and emotional support, and the loss of a pet can deepen distress and instability for the person who relies on them.
Through a subsidy pool funded by benefactors, Lort Smith is already helping hundreds of pets each year to access urgent treatment when their owners would otherwise be unable to afford it. But limited funding, means we are only meeting a fraction of the demand.
Safeguarding Survival is about protecting and expanding that frontline response. In practical terms, it means Lort Smith can step in more often when cost is the only thing standing between a treatable pet and urgent care.
The impact is straightforward and measurable:
- more pets treated
- more households supported
- fewer cases where urgent treatment is forgone because of cost; and
- fewer families forced to lose a pet during an already difficult time.
For many people in acute hardship, concern for a pet’s welfare can become a barrier to seeking safety.
If a person doesn’t know where their pet will go, they may delay fleeing from family violence, decline crisis accommodation, postpone treatment or struggle to engage with support services. This issue is not just about pets. It’s about housing, health, family violence, mental health and crisis response.
We already run an Emergency Boarding Program through our Adoption Centre, using both on-site placements and trusted foster carers to provide short-term care for pets. But the current system is fragmented.
Human services often have to contact multiple providers separately to find a placement, with no central coordination point, no clear pathway and limited visibility over what options exist. At the same time, our own program is under pressure, with demand already exceeding what the current model can comfortably carry.
The Crisis Relief Pet Boarding Network is designed to create a more coordinated crisis-response network. The model would see Lort Smith receive referrals, assess need, arrange placements, liaise with partner services and manage the movement of pets through boarding and foster pathways.
The model would also strengthen foster care support and extend care where a person’s crisis does not resolve within the current short-term window.
The value of this program is twofold:
- It provides immediate, on-the-ground placements that can help people leave unsafe situations and engage with support.
- It builds a system that does not currently exist but is clearly needed, one that could improve response times, reduce duplication and provide a practical model for other providers across Victoria.
In many cases, veterinary clinics are not only treating pets, but they are also supporting people facing grief, financial hardship, personal crisis, social instability and the challenges of navigating complex forms, services or support systems.
With these non-clinical pressures falling onto veterinary staff, the result is a burden that sits beyond clinical care alone and affects staff wellbeing, job satisfaction, retention and the long-term sustainability of the profession.
Care Together is designed to bring social support and veterinary care together in one setting.
Under the pilot, a qualified social worker would sit alongside the clinical team and work directly with clients whose financial hardship, social instability or personal crisis is affecting the care of their pet.
This would shift a significant burden away from veterinary staff and onto a professional equipped to manage it, allowing vets to focus more clearly on veterinary care while clients receive more holistic support.
Lort Smith is already laying the groundwork, partnering with Monash University to host student social workers onsite two days per week. The pilot would build on that foundation and scale it into a more consistent, embedded model in a live veterinary care setting. If successful, Care Together could provide a blueprint for similar models across other veterinary settings in Victoria and beyond.
Young people in custody often respond best to rehabilitation tools that build trust, routine, responsibility and a sense of purpose through lived experience rather than abstract lessons alone.
At the same time, dogs in adoption pathways can benefit from regular positive interaction, structured handling and behavioural support that improves their readiness for a permanent home.
Pup Mates is built around that dual opportunity:
- Stronger rehabilitation pathways for young people; and
- Better outcomes for dogs.
Pup Mates would pair carefully selected adoption dogs with suitable young people in a structured, supervised custodial setting. Through caring for, handling and training a dog, young people can build confidence, self-esteem, emotional regulation and engagement. at the same time, dogs benefit from better behaviour, stronger routines and a clearer path to adoption.
Pup Mates would operate within a controlled youth justice environment with strong safeguards, careful participant assessment and clear behavioural expectations. Young people would need to earn access to the program, and anyone with a history of animal cruelty would be excluded. Lort Smith would oversee the program, drawing on its expertise in animal welfare, youth justice pet therapy and behaviour.
The program would incorporate clear measurement and evaluation from the outset, including tracking participation, engagement, behavioural indicators, confidence and emotional regulation outcomes for young people, as well as training, adoption outcomes and welfare measures for the dogs.
Pup Mates is a practical rehabilitation model designed to be tested, measured and refined so that its benefits for both young people and animals can be clearly demonstrated.
These proposals are connected by one underlying belief: better outcomes are possible when we recognise how closely human wellbeing and animal welfare are linked.
Lort Smith is not advocating for pets in isolation.
We are advocating for practical responses to the real pressures facing Victorian households and communities.
Whether it is helping someone keep a treatable pet alive, making it easier to leave crisis, supporting people more holistically in veterinary settings, or using pets to improve rehabilitation outcomes, the goal is the same, to build a safer, more compassionate and more responsive Victoria.
Stand with Lort Smith
If you believe people and pets should not be left to fall through the cracks, we invite you to stand with Lort Smith.
By following this work, sharing it, supporting it and speaking up for it, you can help strengthen the case for practical change that supports both pets and the people who love them.
