‘Compassionate Relationship’ Seen as Helpful to Both : Human and Pet Strays Find One Another on the Streets

They eat out of the same dumpsters and bed down at night on the same cardboard mattresses. Alone, each would be just another anonymous stray. Together, they form a street household with a family profile of sorts.

There’s the homeless woman in Santa Monica who goes everywhere with her three shaggy dogs. The Fairfax woman who lives in doorways with a black cat that she keeps in a cardboard box. The Venice man who shares his old van with a 62-pound python.

The sight of a street person walking around with a dog on a rope leash or a bird perched on a shoulder is growing more common, say advocates for the homeless.

‘Compassionate Relationship’

“We see a lot of it,” said David Silva, who until recently worked at the Union of the Homeless. “There’s a compassionate relationship between people who have been tossed out and animals who have been tossed out.”

“I see a dozen (street people with pets) a day,” said Ken Carlson at the Clare Foundation’s daytime shelter in Santa Monica. “It’s all some of them have.”

However many indigent people and animals are wandering around Los Angeles--and no public or private agency keeps track of either--a fair number have formed attachments that belie the stereotype of the homeless as careless and irresponsible.

When street people who have enough trouble feeding themselves insist on adopting stray dogs and cats, they are seeking from animals what they don’t get from human beings: “A feeling of acceptance and importance,” said psychologist Janet Ruckert.

In fact, said Ruckert, author of “The Four-Footed Therapist,” it might not be a bad idea to enlist homeless people as aides in shelters for homeless animals.

“It would be wonderful if we could get them to volunteer,” Ruckert said. “We need a lot of help in the animal-care field--setting up adoptions, educating people about their pets.”

Nursing home residents, emotionally disturbed patients and prison inmates have shown marked improvement after spending time with animals, Ruckert said. Homeless people could likewise gain “a sense of responsibility and purpose,” she said.

“The homeless need a direction, and one way to get direction is to give it,” she said. “Also, a pet gives you instant acceptance, a feeling that you’re somebody important.”

Need for Affection

A lot of street people apparently have figured this out for themselves. Carlson and Silva said homeless people often adopt pets for protection (“The fellow with the python in the van is not going to get ripped off,” said Carlson), but their overriding need is for companionship and affection.

“Many homeless people have wanted for years to get out of being homeless,” Silva said, “and they try to live as normal a life style as possible on the streets.

“That includes having pets, grooming them, feeding them and being responsible for them. If these people had the chance, they would be doing the same thing in their own homes.”

In some cases, a group of street people will share custody of a stray animal, Silva said. The residents of one local shelter “adopted a dog and named him ‘Homeless,’ ” he recalled. “When they took him in, he was starving and very mistrustful of people. Now, he’s healthy, better groomed and much happier.”

Unfortunately, many street people have to choose between keeping a pet and getting help from local agencies with no-pet policies.

“A lot of missions won’t take people with animals, and that’s a real problem,” said Wendy Greuel, an aide to Grace Davis, Los Angeles’ deputy mayor for the homeless.

Called a Disservice

Ruckert thinks such policies are a disservice to the homeless. “Anything you can do to give a person a project, to connect them to something other than themselves, is therapeutic,” she said.

The psychologist even goes so far as to suggest that pet ownership might help wean homeless people from substance abuse “because drinking and drugs take your mind off your troubles and an animal can do the same thing.”

Carlson, a recovering alcoholic, disagreed with Ruckert on that score because alcoholism “is a disease,” he said.

But he thinks her proposal to put homeless people to work in shelters for homeless animals is on the right track.