The real measure of a successful rescue

The March/April issue of Animal Sheltering Magazine, “What Happens After Happily Ever After” argues; that the real measure of a successful rescue isn’t the number of pets saved, but the number of successful placements.


So what defines a successful placement? If your client is happy with their pet; if the pet lives as family member, if any behavioural problems are managed to the client’s satisfaction and the pet has a lifetime home – that’s a successful adoption.


If the pet ends up back in rescue; if it is demoted to the backyard, if the person finds their pet unmanageable and vows to never buy another shelter pet again – obviously that’s a bad match.

 

But while adoptions will always involve a level of uncertainty, they need not be the end of a shelter’s relationship with pet owners. Ideally the day an animal goes home with a new family should be only one moment in an ongoing relationship between the organisation and the adopters.

Imagine how many anti-shelter animal messages could be produced by one frustrated adopter who, these days is likely to be chatting over lattes, text messaging her friends, sharing anecdotes with her workmates and blogging about her pet peeves on the web.

It seems pretty clear what you don’t know about your adoptions CAN hurt you.

So how many shelters actually know how well their placements are working? Do we acknowledge that we need to have happy customers in order to call ourselves effective? And what are we doing to check that our pet owners are indeed, happy?


By becoming more customer focussed, we’re not selling our pets short – we’re ensuring that they are ending up in a happy home for the long term.