EXCLUSIVE The dark side of Australia's cost-of-living crisis exposed

Daily Mail​

15-07-2025

A dark side of Australia's cost-of-living crisis has emerged, with the stress of making ends meet linked to a rise in animal cruelty.
RSPCA NSW CEO Steve Coleman told Daily Mail Australia that financial pressures facing millions of Aussies were partly responsible for pets being abused or neglected by their stressed owners.
It comes as RSPCA NSW announced it would be temporarily closing its online cruelty reporting portal due to the high volume of complaints.
'Whenever things are tough on the economic front it generally results in an increase in cruelty complaints,' Mr Coleman said.
'In the last couple of years it (animal cruelty complaints) has definitely been related to tight budgets on the home front and people not being able to afford their vet bills.'
Mr Coleman, who joined the RSPCA in 1991, said the organisation also had to help victims of domestic violence by taking their pets and looking after them while they found safe accommodation.
'The number of people with pets who have become homeless has also increased. A lot of people with pets haven't been able to afford their mortgages,' Mr Coleman said.
'At the core of it, the economy definitely hasn't helped. There are a lot of social challenges at the moment. It's a tough economy.'
The Covid pandemic resulted in a huge demand for animal adoptions which left the RSPCA in NSW with empty shelters.
Now, close to 70 per cent of households have a pet and many are struggling to look after them.
Animal cruelty isn't limited to physical abuse, it also includes failing to take pets in need of medical assistance to a vet, often because of the costs involved.
Mr Coleman said there was currently around 800 animals sitting on a 'surrender' wait list, but the RSPCA doesn't have the capacity to take care of them.
'What we say to them is we can't take the animal right now, but what we can do is try and help you maintain your connection with your animal so you don't have to surrender it,' he said.
'That may be that we fund a vet bill for a couple of hundred dollars that they can't afford.'
Mr Coleman also said weather also played a role in the amount of animal cruelty cases reported to the RSPCA.
'Typically, if we go back a few years before the economy started to crunch we got more complaints during the summer months,' he said.
'In summer months when feedstocks dry out we'll get more livestock-related complaints around drought-related issues as well.'
The RSPCA NSW recently released a statement saying it was temporarily closing its online cruelty reporting portal.
'Like many organisations, we face significant challenges when supporting animals and their guardians, and while enforcing animal welfare laws with limited resources,' it said.
'Due to the high volume of cruelty complaints we are currently receiving, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily close our online cruelty reporting portal.
'This change will help us manage case intake more efficiently by ensuring that our team can effectively triage the animals who need us the most, through reducing lower-priority and duplicate reports.
'Animal cruelty reports can still be made, as they always have been, via our phone hotline, which remains operational and staffed.'