The Animal Welfare League Queensland has created a natty little internet meme addressing community feedback that a ‘free’ pet promotion might be a way to increase their adoption rates;
Why don’t you just make your animals FREE?
Many people believe that if we did not charge an adoption fee, and instead gave our animals away for free, then we would be able to save more lives. In fact, the opposite is true; and here’s why…
The rehoming process costs the AWLQ approximately, $500-$600 per animal.
This is for an average, healthy adult dog or cat, for an average stay of 2 weeks at our Gold Coast shelter.
Veterinary and animal-care costs increase for sick, injured, special-needs, young, elderly, newborn, pregnant animals and those that require time in foster-care.
Consider also, the basic utilities and services needed to maintain our shelters and high standard of animal care do not come for free.
There are costs that come with simply opening our doors each day.
Adoption fees cover only a fraction of all these costs.
Their argument in a nutshell, is that their adoption fees are what makes their rescue sustainable. With no way to recoup the expenses they’ve invested into each and every pet, they wouldn’t be able to keep rescuing – and that any extra profit made on bumped up prices for ‘desirable’ pets, simply pays for a loss made on less desirable/more costly ones.
And lots of people agreed with them. While not directly asserted by the original post, many supporters are ready and willing to champion the ‘a poor owner = an irresponsible owner’ line.
However, we now have multiple studies that now show pets adopted free, or for a reduced fee, are no less valued than those adopted for an arbitrary cost. While multiple fee-waived adoption events have found free adoption promotions “increase adoptions without compromising the quality of a pet’s life”, and hundreds of shelters are using the promotion both internationally and here in Australia successfully.
So if we know shelters can use free pet adoptions in their mix to increase their life saving without harming animal welfare, should shelters be relying on adoption fees to cover their daily expenses?
Christie Keith at Dogged Blog, blogged on the topic this week ‘Can animal rescue groups survive without adoption fees?’;
Most nonprofits outside the rescue world don’t have a fee-based revenue model. They raise money by cultivating relationships with individual and business supporters, with fundraising events, with retail operations such as thrift stores, and with development of grants, bequests, endowments, etc.
Of course, just thinking about that is exhausting for a small group made up of people who are mostly working in direct animal care rather than organizational work. In fact, we’ve created a culture where the less effort a nonprofit puts into anything other than direct services the more we praise them.
The problem is, that model is truly not sustainable. It leaves groups without a structure to rely on when market realities change.For example, the adoption fee model might really go away as more groups realize the huge marketing benefit of fee-waived adoption promotions. Then you’ll be competing with groups who adopt out pets for free or for “name your own fee” donations, and you’ll be forced to change overnight instead of doing it strategically.
It’s about mission alignment. If your mission is to ‘feed the hungry’, you seek out financial supporters for that goal and you give your food to those who need it.
You don’t open a restaurant.
(Restaurants are already a thing, and they evidently don’t meet your mission/goals. That is why you exist.)
If your mission is to ‘save homeless pets and place them in homes’ – then you seek out financial supporters to help you achieve that goal. Supporters should be covering the expenses of the work you do. This makes adoption fees no longer an operational requirement.
That’s not to say people can’t give you money when they adopt a pet – but this shouldn’t be a condition of the adoption. If that pet and that owner are a good match, then they should be united together.
Adoption fees are an obstacle to the goal of expanding the number of homes who choose rescue. They are the equivalent of a food charity charging like a restaurant.
The Animal Welfare League in Queensland prides itself on being a thought-leader in the animal sheltering space. So much so that it coaches other shelters in how to lower their euthanasia rates, through the ‘Getting 2 Zero’ (G2Z) program. Unfortunately, the G2Z program is yet to produce a single No Kill community. And until No Kill is reached, no tool or technique for getting pets out of shelters alive should be off the table.
The pernicious idea that adoption fees result in ‘better’ adoptive owners needs to be identified for the bullshit that it is. While in the future, shelters are almost certainly going to have to reduce or eliminate their reliance on adoption fees whether they do so because they recognise it as a useful tool aligned with their mission, or simply because the community pressure to do so can no longer be explained away with cute graphics.
See also: Our model of animal adoptions is broken
Is there an open admission “no kill” shelter currently successful in Australia?