The home office employee's best companion
Consumption can satisfy many needs. But what about feelings of loneliness? The pandemic calls for reduced mobility and a retreat into one's own four walls, where home offices are less crowded. Figures from animal shelters document an increased interest in acquiring pets. The free newspaper 20 Minuten reported from a survey of some animal shelters that demand for dogs and cats rose sharply during the pandemic (20 Minuten). At the beginning of 2021, the NZZ confirmed this with registration figures from animal databases (NZZ). According to the article, the home-office recommendation is the cause of this higher demand.
Internet search queries allow a more differentiated look at the developments. Over the last five years, interest in the keywords tierheim (animal shelter), qualipet (a Swiss pet retailer) and meerschweinchen (guinea pig) clearly increased. March 2020 produced strong peaks for qualipet and meerschweinchen. This could indicate that the Swiss preferred pet shops over animal shelters, which makes sense, since the shelters had to close under the Covid-19 measures and could only serve the rising demand at the very start of the lockdown.
The NZZ reports concrete figures from the animal databases Amicus and Identitas. According to their numbers, the upward trend in animal registrations also showed a disproportionate jump in 2020. The trendEcon data below indicates that small animals such as guinea pigs were in particularly high demand during the first phase of the lockdown. The keywords hund kaufen (buy dog) and katze kaufen (buy cat) also became more popular, though less so than meerschweinchen. After a short drop in the summer, searches for all pets rebounded, with cats enjoying the greatest popularity.
How far pets are part of the new standard of living remains uncertain. Depending on federal and cantonal guidelines, the desire for a home-office dog could endure. If normality returns through vaccination, keeping a pet may become cumbersome and some employees might return their animals to the shelters. That, too, depends on whether home offices stay after the pandemic.