Society Regenerated 2.0 – Follow the Money

In the U.S., we spend roughly $140–$150 billion every year on pets. And yet euthanasia is still a daily reality for thousands of rescue animals.

So the question is: Where does all that money go?

In this episode, Stacie continues the Impact Spending series by following the money through the pet industry and animal‑welfare world — from corporate pet brands and philanthropy to the leaky buckets that keep shelters and rescues barely afloat.

You’ll hear about:

• How much money actually moves through the pet industry — and how little reaches rescue and shelter work
• Why charity so often functions as a tip jar instead of creating structural change
• The “four leaky buckets” propping up rescue and shelter funding
• How corporate impact, foundations, and consumer spending intersect in animal welfare
• What it would mean to treat impact spending as part of public health for both humans and dogs

Stacie answers these questions drawing from financial activists like Jasmine Rashid and Morgan Simon, along with hard numbers traced from corporate reports of major beneficiaries, including:

• Mars (Pedigree, Royal Canin, Banfield, VCA, BluePearl)
• Nestlé (Purina)
• General Mills (Blue Buffalo)
• Colgate (Hill’s)

Every dollar we spend reinforces something — not just in the market, but in which dogs get saved, which humans get support, and which communities are left behind.

Sources for this episode:

• Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change – Morgan Simon
• The Financial Activist Playbook – Jasmine Rashid
• American Pet Products Association (APPA) – U.S. Pet Industry Expenditure Reports
• Shelter Animals Count – U.S. shelter data
• Analyses of U.S. shelter & rescue funding
• CDC provisional drug overdose data (2022–2024)
• “Fame and Fentanyl” (A&E documentary special, hosted by Ice‑T)
• Economic Policy Institute – CEO pay reports
• National Academy for Social Prescribing – International Programme

The Human–Canine Alliance is a patent-pending platform that matches people in need with rescue dogs in need using AI-powered compatibility matching and personalized training prescriptions to improve loneliness and isolation and reduce dog euthanasia.

🌐 Subscribe to The Alliance Insider: JOIN OUR PACK!

Transcript

Society Regenerated 2.0 – Follow the Money

 [00:00:00] "Ignorance is bliss." Sounds harmless, until you understand what it looks like in real life.

In the US, we spend roughly $140 to $150 billion a year on pets.

And about 750,000 dogs and cats are euthanized every year.

And these two facts live in the same economy at the same time.

Picture your own dog for a second. Their fluffy bed, their favorite chews the perfect food, daycare, dog walker, play dates.

Now, let's zoom out for a second. Where does all that money go?

Who really benefits from the billions of dollars we are pouring into our pets?

 How can animal rescue be one of the most underfunded industries in America if pets bring in [00:01:00] $150 billion every year?

/

 Hey everyone, it's Stacie and welcome back to The Human-Canine Alliance podcast. This is part two in our series on impact spending, which we kicked off a few weeks ago with "Your Dollar, Your Vote."

 If you didn't listen to that, I highly recommend pausing, going back one episode and starting there.

 That episode will help you understand what I mean by impact spending.

This episode is going to illustrate why it matters in a very realistic way.

Because today we are connecting dots between the dollars we spend as consumers in the pet industry and where those dollars go, and here's why.

Morgan Simon, financial activist, author of Real Impact, makes this brutal point, and I could not let go of [00:02:00] it once I learned it.

In our version of capitalism, profit and personal wealth sit on the throne, and the people in the places that created that wealth get pushed to the bottom and relabeled, as you guys get this charity.

Charity isn't the plan, it's the afterthought. A tiny corrective tacked onto the end of the supply chain. How tiny you might ask. In a global economy moving around $196 trillion a year, US foundations give away about $46 billion.

And I know that sounds like a lot of money 'cause it definitely does to me. But you wanna know what the math is on that. That's about two hundredths of 1%.

That's not a safety net. That's a tip jar.

And most of us tip better than that for coffee.

I mean, Can you imagine if you were giving two hundreths of 1% as a [00:03:00] tip for even just coffee.

/

So this is where it gets real people for you and for me. Oh, I have been burning up as I have been building this map.

Let's just start with us, the consumers.

Pet food and treats. We spend approximately $60 billion a year on that.

Vet care and related products. $35 billion.

Random pet supplies, accessories through retail. Things that they market to us and we're like, oh, my pet needs that or should have that because they're my family member and I totally get it. 'Cause I always buy into it too. $25 billion we're spending on that.

Services. Grooming, boarding, training, daycare. $15 billion.

/

 So now let's follow that money. Where does it go?

 There's four major beneficiaries.

They are Mars, who is the owner of Pedigree, Royal Cannon, Banfield.

Nestle, who is Purina in the pet world. Chocolate everywhere else, as we [00:04:00] all know.

General Mills, Blue Buffalo. Okay. We know General Mills as cereal everywhere else.

And Colgate. That's Hills food.

then we have vet care and products.

Banfield Pet Hospital, VCA, and Blue Pearl have thousands of clinics and hospitals across the U.S.. All owned by Mars.

National Veterinary Associates roughly have 1400 clinics in the US and Canada. Corporate groups already control about a third of the US vet clinics and are on track to capturing half of all vet visits.

And then there are the big animal health, pharma and diagnostic players, Zoetis, Elanco, and Idexx. 

Then we have toys and supplies, accessories, retail. That is Petco, Chewy, Amazon pet categories. Um, boutique brands.

Then we have our services, our groomers, trainers, boarding facilities. Those are our daycares, our walkers, our behavioral consultants. Now, I would love to say that those are [00:05:00] mostly our local groomers and that is where a percentage of them are.

However, who does not use their local PetSmart or Petco for grooming or bathing? Even if it's just once in a while when they run a special, I know I do. I mean, I try to go to my local people, but who's got the better deal? It's gonna be the corporate people.

You guys, that is not an accident. Their financial people realized how much money was in pet services and they weren't gonna let the locals have all of it.

Doesn't that piss you off?

/

So now we have an idea of who is taking in the money.

Next question. how much of that money results in helping rescue animals who haven't been lucky enough to become a pet yet? Don't worry, I have those numbers too.

First of all, an average PET can generate $15,000 to $30,000 or more in the lifetime for the [00:06:00] US economy based on its family spending.

Rescue receives an average of $150 to $500 per animal in one time adoption fees, and occasional donations.

So where do the billions go, guys?

Well, let's start by remembering a fact. We learned in our first episode of this series that, in the United States, foundations are only legally required to give away a minimum of 5% of their assets every year.

5%.

That means 95% of their capital can be invested anywhere, even in ways that contradict their mission as long as it generates returns.

/

So who is really capturing almost all of that US pet spending that is in the billions.

The biggest [00:07:00] beneficiaries are the large consumer packaged goods corporations like Mars, Nestle, General Mills, Colgate-Palmolive, and private equity backed veterinary chains such as Mission Pet Health, pet vet care centers.

Retail subscription platforms like Chewy, Amazon, Petco, and

pet insurance giants, including Trupanion, Nationwide, and Independence American.

 I didn't say shelters, rescue nonprofits, not other dogs, not other cats.

Corporations don't actually have our animal's best interest in mind.

I mean, it never really occurred to me until I was building this episode, but when you hear companies say, we donate proceeds back to rescue, that's actually a really big deal.

Because the companies we're spending the most money on our pets are not, they're not putting it back to [00:08:00] rescue.

We are left to pick up the thousands of animals being kicked to the curb because they're not called a pet.

But the pets create billions of dollars!

I really do wanna be honest and fair here and super transparent. So let's talk about who's giving back and who isn't.

Because when you dig through corporate reports, you will see big pet brands talking about giving back, and some of it is real.

For example, Purina, which we just learned is Nestle, reports tens of millions of dollars a year in cash grants, sponsorships, and donated food and litter to community and pet related causes.

Hills, who we just learned is Colgate, talks about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of food donated to shelters over the last couple of decades.

That sounds huge until you remember their revenues and profits are measured in billions.

And here's the kicker, [00:09:00] not one of the big guys, Mars, Nestle, General Mills, Colgate, provides simple, consistent info on what percentage of their profits actually goes back to rescue.

The feel good campaigns are front and center. The actual math is a mystery.

Which makes me feel like the math is not much to be proud of.

On paper, foundations only have to give away 5% a year in order to redeem full credit for being charitable. Did you know that? I didn't know that. I didn't know a lot of this stuff, but man, did that hit home.

Because when you see that a company is charitable, don't you feel like that means they have to give back more than 5%?

Again, I go back to tipping; our average tip is definitely higher than [00:10:00] 5%. On the consumer end. So how come it's not on the corporate end?

But even that tiny number would look generous if it were anywhere near what the biggest pet companies give back to Rescue.

Take one of the giants, Purina reports a little over $37 million in donations in a recent year.

It sounds huge until you put it next to pet care revenue, roughly $22 billion for Purina. Once you do the math, that works out to about 0.2 back to our two hundredths of a percent.

Hills has donated more than $300 million worth of food to shelters since 2002, which averages out to around $13 million a year.

That's still only around a quarter to [00:11:00] 0.35% of revenue going back out to shelter support. Again, we're not even at 1%. We're not even at half a percent.

 So don't worry, companies aren't using anywhere close to their 5% of their pet money on rescue.

For the biggest brands, what we can actually see in their own reports lands somewhere between a few hundredths of a percent, which is less than half of 1%. Guys, literally.

 And you don't have to take my word for it. You can pull these same numbers from their public reports and do the math yourself. I mean, I'm literally just pulling this information off the internet and sharing it with you because it is so shocking to me, and I don't understand how these numbers are real.

I really don't. I want people to come prove me wrong, but it doesn't seem to be happening.

I mean, there's so many industries this applies to, it's not even funny. It's literally like our economy is [00:12:00] designed to fail for consumers and succeed in the billions for the people who have gotten the memo.

 So, where is rescue? Where are all the nonprofits working their asses off to turn more lost animals into pets? Where do the other animals fit in this supply chain?

The animals are the reason for the billion dollar industry in the first place.

Okay, you guys, obviously I'm a little heated. I hope I got you a little heated.

I'm gonna give you a little break, let our emotions calm down, give myself a little bit of a water break, and see you back here in a few.

/

 [00:13:00] [00:14:00] [00:15:00] [00:16:00] [00:17:00] [00:18:00] [00:19:00] Welcome back to The Human-Canine Alliance. I am Stacie, Let's get right into it. 

 I have so much more data to share and it's all true and I'm not about to lie to you here on my podcast. And at this point, it's like, Why is the math not mathing, and so many people know it and we're still just doing it?

Let's take a look at where shelter and rescue funding actually comes from right now in our current 2026 U.S. economy.

Most shelters and rescues are surviving off of four leaky buckets.

Bucket number one [00:20:00] is the local government money, also known as our taxpayer dollars. City and county shelters are fighting for scraps out of the same pot as police, fire, public works and schools. In a lot of places, that means they're trying to care for thousands of animals a year on budgets that look more like that two hundredths of one percent numbers we were just talking about a few minutes ago, obviously not a priority to our economy.

Bucket number two is private giving. The 501C3 humane societies and rescues that you follow online and are hustling for individual donations, grant cycles, fundraiser nights, just to cover basics. A few big names can raise millions, but most rescues are being held together by foster networks, volunteer labor, community, our local communities, us.

And, and whoever responds to that latest urgent Facebook post.

Bucket number three is [00:21:00] adoption fees, one time adoption fees. The $50 to $500 you might pay to bring a dog home. That's it. That money matters, but it almost never covers the real cost of the animal's vaccines, whether they were spayed or neutered medical care, food, staff time, and I mean, think about how long a lot of these dogs are sitting in these shelters.

 Bucket number four is grants and philanthropy organizations like Petco Love, Best Friends, ASPCA and regional foundations step in with funding for spay and neuter, transport flights, and innovation pilots that literally saves lives, but it doesn't usually pay electric bills, staff salaries, daily triage that keep the doors open so these animals have somewhere to go and have people to care for them so that they're ready to become pets into our billion dollar industry.

/

 [00:22:00] While pulling together this episode, I saw an A&E doc called Fame and Fentanyl hosted, executive produced and released in 2025 by Ice T. And it struck me because it was focused on the families of victims, neighbors, advocates of fentanyl victims who had refused to be quiet or look away.

For years, the overdose crisis in the US only went in one direction: up. They had pushed, organized, demanded better. And in 2022 we were losing roughly 111,000 people a year, more than entire packed football stadium of parents and kids and neighbors.

So in 2023, overdose deaths dipped to about 107,000. And in 2024, CDC data shows they fell to roughly 80,000 [00:23:00] per year. You guys, that's like 30,000 people that are still here today. That's across the country and is because of what these families and friends and neighbors did for their loved one who was lost to Fentanyl.

And they said, this didn't exist before in our society. Why does it exist now? And why is there not better support for it? And so they went after the bigger system and they have made a huge change. 30,000 people in two years. That's a huge change.

That didn't happen because the system suddenly grew a conscience. It is a direct result of the people who refuse to look away or back down without change. These friends, family, neighbors realized ignorance isn't [00:24:00] bliss.

In this case, ignorance was watching their family or friend suffer and ultimately die.

/

So with that in mind, we come to the final layer in our map: Human Health and Wellness.

Right now in the US we spend around $147 billion a year on pets. We spend more than $4 trillion a year on healthcare.

Do you know what that adds up to? Yeah, me neither.

But I do know that is a hell of a lot of money to somehow not make it back to the people and the animals funding those industries in the first place.

Loneliness, depression, social anxiety are at the height in American society.

Loneliness has literally been declared a public health crisis. Euthanasia is a regular occurrence for thousands of dogs across our country daily.

Meanwhile, [00:25:00] dogs have proven natural abilities to curb and relieve loneliness, depression, and social anxiety.

There is so much money being spent in the health and pet industries, I can't even count it, but somehow the people at the top haven't found a solution to these problems yet.

 Hmm. Are you thinking what I'm thinking guys? We're being played. All of these dots have been disconnected on purpose.

It is time we start connecting them.

/ 

Jasmine Rashid shares an incredible story from 2008 in her book, something that honestly many of us will never forget as soon as I say this. Images of children in cages in private immigration and detention facilities, kids sleeping under foil blankets on concrete floors, families torn apart and warehoused for profit.

 [00:26:00] They started asking a question: who is getting paid to keep these cages full. And when they followed the money, they found a trail from everyday checking accounts and retirement funds into the real estate trusts and corporations behind private prisons like CoreCivic and GEO Group.

 So Jasmine describes how they wrote, what they call love letters directly to bank customers because those checking accounts are us, like you and I, retirement accounts, you and I.

 And so they sent these letters, these love letters directly to bank customers and shareholders and communities. And they said, if you keep your money here, this is what you're funding, and if you move it, this is what could change.

Over time, the pressure forced at least eight major US banks, names you will recognize and probably bank with right now, 'cause I know I do, to step back.

 JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, [00:27:00] PNC, Fifth Third, Barclays. Together, those eight banks represented about $2.35 billion in credit lines and term loans. Roughly 87% of the bank financing those companies depended on.

 Billions of dollars that everyday people helped shut off. Everyday people signed a petition and said, we're not gonna bank with you anymore if you're still doing this.

And so these big names finally said, okay, fine. We won't send this money over to the private prisons anymore if you'll still bank with us. Because it was a lot of people, it was like 500,000 people.

And that pressure, it didn't just make headlines. I mean it changed math and domino effect math.

Credit agencies downgraded CoreCivics rating to trash stock is the way that Jasmine put it in her book and it reported roughly a $240 million drop [00:28:00] in revenue that year.

This was not one billionaire writing that check. This was thousands of people with regular checking accounts threatening to take their money on purpose somewhere else, unless these companies did something better with their money, and it worked.

So what I'm trying to say here is it is time we stop ignorantly tipping rescue for providing our economy with a multi-billion dollar industry.

And it's time we start paying attention to where that money goes and who is really benefiting from it.

They do not let us think we have power. We have so much more power. 

Writer and activist, Alice Walker has this line that describes us perfectly. "The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any." Isn't that so good.

/

 so now that we all know who is [00:29:00] profiting exponentially off the relationship we have with our pets, and believe me, I'm learning this too, I need to go cancel a few subscriptions. For real. Not kidding.

We've also been Sold this quiet myth that only rich people and elected officials get to decide where money flows; that unless you sit on a foundation board or in Congress, you're just along for the ride, you're really just trying to make it to the top of the food chain.

Impact spending, financial activism, says actually the way you use money is one of your sharpest tools.

It's certainly not the only tool, but as Jasmine Rashid says, it's the salt on the fries. And who wants fries without salt? 'cause I certainly don't.

If we change even a sliver of our spending, saving, giving. We can change what actually is getting built and what goes away.

 If we don't demand it, it doesn't get supplied. Back to [00:30:00] supply and demand. That's how it works.

There's another myth underneath all of it. That we live in a system where one person's gain has to mean someone else's loss.

That is not a law of physics. That's a design choice.

We have built an economy that rewards extraction, self-worth instead of contribution.

What if financial success wasn't defined by how much one person can stockpile and sit on, but by how much value they can spread, how much they can change the world before they die?

What if all of us felt like it was super cool to leave the world a better place because we're all gonna die?

It doesn't matter how much money you have, you might be able to fake your death plenty of times based on how much money you have and what kind of connections you have.

Sure. But you're not gonna escape death completely. [00:31:00] Everybody dies.

What if we saw wealth as a tool to leave the world a better place than we found it? Instead of a scorecard you take to the grave.

/

Let me be clear. I'm not pretending like we're all starting from the same place, and let me prove it to you. The richest 1% of people own roughly half of the world's wealth in the us. About one in seven white families is a millionaire.

While for black and Hispanic families, it's closer to two out of a hundred.

Same economy. Wildly different starting lines.

And that's not just a story about luck.

Back to design.

It's the big three Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street.

They quietly sit on huge chunks of almost every major corporation you've ever heard of. They don't create wealth so much as they extract it.

CEO pay is up more than [00:32:00] 1400% over the last 50 years. While the average worker wages, I mean, you guys, what's our minimum pay? What's your minimum pay in your state? I'm sure you're laughing right now.

Has it gone up 1400% in the last 50 years?

Mm-hmm. Not one of our state's average worker wages has gone up 1400% in the last 50 years, but you know whose has. The CEOs.

It doesn't have to be this way. The solutions are in front of us.

/

So let's go back to the concept that Morgan Simon introduced me to, that charity is an afterthought.

The people and places that are creating the wealth are getting pushed to the very bottom of the supply chain and relabeled as charity. The system wasn't built to treat people right from the start. It was built to reward extraction, and then handout tiny tip jars at the end.

So when I talk about moving [00:33:00] money on purpose, I'm saying that wherever we start from, we have more power.

We are already participating, whether we mean to or not, or whether we have a choice to or not.

There's plenty of people living paycheck to paycheck. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you can only afford whatever you have figured out that fits in your budget.

And I a hundred percent get that. And that if that means it's being spent at the biggest corporate box office because they have the cheapest macaroni box.

I get it. I have lived on that budget, on that shoestring budget, on and off my entire life.

When you do not have a choice to pick a local product over a corporate product, that is by design, you guys.

Those of us who have a choice need to start making better choices for the ones who don't have a choice.

So that over time the options are better for everyone [00:34:00] and everyone is getting more of a chance in society.

Not just the 1%. Not just the people at the top of the food chain.

I wanna tie this a little bit to the mantra trend where people are saying mantras over each other and over their children and over their families, you know, things like, I am strong, I am worthy, and I love all of that, you guys, positive talk, therapy, all of that has really helped me in my life.

But I wanna add to that based on new learnings. Here's what I'm proposing. 

My choices don't just affect me. My choices create power for my community or for the 1%.

Because every time. You spend a dollar, you're already influencing what growth and what withers.

That makes me think of an analogy that Jasmine Rasheed used in her book, which was, that when you have a forest, the [00:35:00] trees feed off of each other through their natural root system under the ground.

And the largest tree, as the rain pours down, it could hoard all of the rain, all of the water. And become bigger and better and the largest tree in the land, but then it wouldn't live as long, right?

And so instead it filters down the water and the sun and all the nutrients that it receives first into its root system. And it goes into all these other trees, and then you have a forest.

And it struck me because it's like, duh. Nature. Nature has it figured out.

Nature has the community thing figured out. You. You cannot succeed to your full potential as a society by yourself individually, [00:36:00] everybody out for themselves. It just doesn't work.

We become destructive as we are proving to the world just how destructive we can be.

And so if what we have been doing for the last at least 50 years isn't working. Why don't we try something else?

/

Also, by the way, exciting news. Literally in the last week, have started actively building the beta for the THCA app. Partnered with a real rescue, with real rescue dogs. And we'll be inviting you real humans to test alongside them. Obviously no pressure, no big promises.

So, ha, super exciting. I'll definitely be hopping on here, um, in the next few weeks to give you updates on that because the beta for the app. It looks so good already. Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to actually see a visual and to see this start to come to fruition because I can feel the domino effects [00:37:00] it can have, and it will have.

/

Thank you so much for listening to the Human-Canine Alliance podcast. Please be sure to follow the podcast from wherever you're listening right now. If you're not already, please get plugged in on our Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn.

And our email. If you are listening to the podcast, you should definitely be following the Alliance Insider email.

The people on the email list are the ones who get to find out what's going on first, and then the podcast people of course. But, email goes out more often than the podcast.

So just go to my website, HumanCanineAlliance.com, it's at the bottom of the homepage. There's a subscribe; that's all you gotta do. Is just your email. I don't need your name, I don't need your phone number. I don't need your address. I just need your email.

Let's get it together, people. Let's stop giving the 1% all the power, all the money. Let's start taking it back. Let's just start taking it back.

Thank you so much for listening to The Human-Canine Alliance podcast. I am Stacie, your host. I hope you [00:38:00] continue to listen and watch.