NEW ORLEANS — Sarah Lungwitz fretted over feeding not just her two teenage daughters with Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments disrupted, but her family’s cat and two dogs.
Help arrived for now, she said, after an Illinois nonprofit arranged for volunteers to give her a grocery gift card to buy food for herself and her pets. It’s among the growing efforts to help struggling pet owners stretch their dollars as SNAP payments go out late during a government shutdown that is the longest on record.
“I don’t even make enough money for all my bills let alone groceries,” said Lungwitz, 46, an auto parts store worker who worried she might have to surrender her cat, Bambi, and two dogs, Spike and Chloe.
The Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s emergency appeal to temporarily block a court order to fully fund SNAP food aid payments amid the government shutdown, even though residents in more than a half-dozen states already received the funds. The uncertainty is straining shelters.
Though SNAP can’t be used for pet food, the food assistance program helps low-income families free up money to purchase kibble. It’s also common for owners to supplement or entirely feed their animals human food purchased using SNAP, said Stephanie Hicks, executive director for Care for Pets, the Rockford, Illinois, nonprofit that helped Lungwitz and others. Some volunteers walked the grocery aisles with struggling pet owners.
The Humane World for Animals, formerly the Humane Society of the United States, estimates that more than 20 million pets live in poverty with families…