Shelter animals already face formidable obstacles to getting out alive: they can get sick in a shelter, customer service is often poor, a shelter’s location may be remote, adoption hours may be limited, policies may limit the number of days they are held, some may view the animals as “damaged†goods when the reason they ended up at the shelter often has nothing to do with the animal, and shelter directors often reject common-sense alternatives to killing. One-third to one-half of all dogs and upwards of 70 percent of cats are killed because of these obstacles. Since the animals already face enormous problems, including the constant threat of execution, shelters and rescue groups shouldn’t add arbitrary roadblocks. When kind hearted people come to help, they shouldn’t start out with a presumption that they can’t be trusted.
Good homes need not apply – Nathan Winograd
The biggest threat to the future of rescue animal adoption in Australia isn’t a lack of advertising, a lack of awareness, or a lack of willing adopters; but arbitrary rules that prevent normal people who have families, jobs and lives from adopting a pet.
I often see sarcastic pieces written by rescue groups ruminating on how ‘sick’ they are of the way people behave and how terrible their excuses; the dog doesn’t go with the new carpet, job or baby… Everyone – they say – is crap. There’s just too few good homes available.
But as a ‘central point’ for adopter’s feedback I’m seeing a completely different picture. I’m sick of answering the dozens of complaint emails daily sent by good people, who could provide a perfectly reasonable home to a rescue animal, but who’ve been given the shaft because of some new and whacky rule; a BARF only diet. Dogs that need to sleep in the owners bed. Needing to have one of the breed at home already. No working families. No one under 30.
Often, they’re being rejected based on stereotypes that it wouldn’t even be legal to air in the ‘real world’; no farmers, no elderly, no asians, no unmarried couples. WTF?
I’m sick of seeing good mainstream exposure opportunities wasted because we discard most of the new homes they generate. I’m sick of groups smugly criticising large, high volume adoption centres for giving out pets ‘to just anyone’; while keeping small white fluffies in care for months, refusing literally thousands of applicants and burning out our foster carers in the process. I’m sick of people incited to venom because their family, who’ve never had anything but long lived, loved pets, are being rejected time and time again for reasons so petty, I wonder what the right adopter would even look like. I mean, just how many young, independently wealthy retirees can there be?
Last year when we ran ‘1,000 homes for xmas’, we were met with howls of protest. We shouldn’t adopt to people during the holidays. People who adopt at xmas are irresponsible! When we started running advertisements in newspapers this year, we faced a similar criticism. We shouldn’t advertise our animals in newspapers. It might attract people who are irresponsible! After announcing that we were working with a pet shop chain to get rescue pets into stores, we were beginning to see a trend. We shouldn’t put pets in stores. People in pet stores are irresponsible!
So much talk of avoiding the irresponsible. People can’t be trusted and the pets are better off dead. But we are just so wrong. Each year our community spend over $4 billion on our animal friends. 91% of Australians report feeling ‘very close’ to their pet, so pets are family. And while a couple hundred thousand pets enter shelters each year, that’s only a tiny fraction of the 2.4 million cats and 3.7 million dogs living in homes. In fact, less than 5% of dogs and cats ever need the services of a pound or shelter.
I’m sick of ‘it’s hard to get a pet from me’ being worn as a badge of honor. It isn’t. It’s unhelpful and short sighted and subscribing to it absolutely and unequivocally is doing more harm to our industry than good.
When people decide to adopt from a shelter—despite having more convenient options such as buying from a pet store or responding to a newspaper ad—they should be rewarded. We are a nation of animal lovers, and we should be treated with gratitude, not suspicion. More importantly, the animals facing death deserve the second chance that many well intentioned people are eager to give them, but in too many cases, are senselessly prevented from doing so. ref
I thought what rescuers in Australia needed was better marketing, but our success won’t come from a flashy new campaign or website. Now I know for certain that what we actually need is better regard for the very people who take the time to consider a rescue. We need to fix our attitude. Love thy public. And if we can’t, we need to step aside and let others who aren’t so defeated lead the way.
