Anyone who feels lonely and thinks of a dog as a companion, for example, will not receive any money from the job center for the purchase and keeping of what is supposedly “man’s best friend”. This was decided by the Baden-Württemberg State Social Court (LSG) in a decision. “The desire to keep animals does not justify a claim to higher benefits from the job center,” the court said. A dog is also not part of the subsistence level.
A long-term unemployed person from the Rems-Murr district had asked the job center for money to buy and keep a dog – for life. He needed a companion dog “as social support during and especially after the corona pandemic to compensate for the serious consequences of social and financial isolation,” he had argued, according to LSG. In addition, a dog ensures a fixed daily structure and serves him “as a family substitute”. The animal also makes it possible to establish social contacts.
According to the court, the plaintiff has received unemployment benefit II since 2005, which was formerly known as Hartz IV and is now called citizen benefit. For the purchase of the animal, he gave the sum of 2000 euros, for keeping it 200 euros a month. He had already failed with the claim before the social court in Stuttgart.
The attitude of a dog can offer a kind of social support or a family replacement, the LSG explained. But this alone justifies “no irrefutable, special need”, as it was said. Without your own dog, social contacts could still be made and maintained. The plaintiff is also not in an extraordinary life situation in which constitutionally protected goods would be endangered without a dog of his own. “A specific and immediate threat to the health of the plaintiff was also not recognizable,” it said.
