When Los Angeles resident Paulina Valdivia scrolls through Snapchat and Instagram, she sees both heartwarming and troublesome posts about dogs and cats.

“There’s a lot of people looking for pets or wanting to ditch their pets,” said Valdivia, who was dropping off stray kittens she’d found in her yard at the city’s Chesterfield Square animal shelter Thursday.

Fosters of shelter animals are way up, both in Los Angeles and nationwide, as people seek out companions to ease the isolation of the coronavirus outbreak.

At the same time, Los Angeles city officials are bracing for an influx of pets being dropped off at city animal shelters, predicting that people facing financial hardship after losing jobs or homes will have to surrender their animals.

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