A pet is for life, not just for Christmas

February 17, 2010Comments are closed.adoptions, attitude

I sometimes wonder if I should rename this blog to ‘the thing someone said at work today that made my head explode’.

Our valentine’s day promotion was a huge success. We broke the record for, wait for it, the single highest number of pets adopted in a weekend. 40 pets altogether. Great huh?

Except.

A meeting after the event revealed the troops weren’t happy. Why? Because we had promoted adopting pets at Valentine’s Day, but as ‘a pet is for life, not just for Christmas’… we actively tell people not to adopt at Christmas. Doesn’t that make us hypocrites?

FFS!

I’d like to point out that the ‘a pet is for life, not just for Christmas’ slogan came out in 1978. Or to put it another way, a full year before I was even born. Or to put it another, another way, the slogan came out when large-screen tvs looked like this;

Certainly, it was a snappy catchphrase back then. But the rationale behind it is just so goddamn outdated now, I actually can’t believe in 2010 I’m hearing people criticise our new promotion that saved just so many lives, in favour of the wisdom of a bumper sticker from 32 years ago.

So while my headsploded all over the office and I listened to the dusty thinking being bandied about through long epilogues of judgement and righteousness, I wondered; how do we ever get over this retro idea that promoting rescue pets during holidays and seasonal events is wrong somehow?

So this is my call; the banishment of the unhelpful cliché of ‘a pet is for life, not just for Christmas’ from our thinking forever.

A pet is for life, especially at Christmas when people are taking holidays and spending time with family.

Promotions at Valentine’s day are not only a great (and proven successful) way to increase awareness and adoptions, but an idea we should be expanding to include every single event into our arsenal, including Australia Day, Easter, Halloween and small local occasions.

There is absolutely no evidence that shunning holiday and event opportunities in any way protects pets.

There is absolutely no evidence that the ‘a pet is for life, not just for Christmas’ idea has ever kept anyone from buying a pet during the holidays. Nor should we want it to, as discouraging rescue pet adoption during the busy intake season is simply ludicrous.

We have to recognise that all of these internal debates are exactly that – internal debates. The only people who care about treating this slogan with any kind of reverance… are those people who work in rescue. The public couldn’t care less and get a pet, whenever it’s most convenient for them and overwhelmingly, go on to be perfectly capable pet owners.

It’s time to ditch once and for all, that dated, dreary old platitude, ‘a pet is for life, not just for Christmas’.