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Saving Hard to Place Pets Editorial

By Rich Avanzino, 2008

Maddie's Fund is helping to create a no-kill nation where all healthy and treatable shelter dogs and cats are guaranteed a loving home. To achieve this goal, Maddie's® grant giving is focused in three areas: increasing adoptions and spay/neuter surgeries to reduce shelter deaths; gathering statistics to measure lifesaving progress; and encouraging private practice veterinarians and colleges of veterinary medicine to actively get involved in animal welfare.

In Fiscal Year 2007-2008, Maddie's Fund inaugurated a Marketing Competition to increase adoptions of hard to place pets. The Marketing Competition invited animal welfare organizations to submit successful marketing ideas for placing elderly, shy, disfigured or unattractive pets as well as cats and dogs requiring in-home medical or behavioral care - pets who are traditionally left behind in animal shelters, but who must be saved if we are to reach our no-kill nation goal.

Maddie's Fund invested heavily in this competition to accomplish several objectives:

  • Demonstrate that there is a market for "less than perfect" dogs and cats.
  • Focus national attention on adopting hard to place shelter pets.
  • Reward organizations that are doing it well.
  • Encourage shelters not placing difficult pets to invest their resources and increase their efforts in this area.
  • Provide "how-to" information for other shelters to utilize.

From the trends I see today, it won't be long until the supply of puppies, small dogs, and adorable, young "peak of health" pets are a very small fraction of homeless pet populations. That is the case already in many communities. And so we're faced with a choice. Do we euthanize the elderly dog with arthritis and import a puppy from another part of the country (or another country)? Or do we step up to the plate, proclaim that every homeless dog or cat is entitled to a second chance, and take on the challenge of finding homes for the tough cases?

If animal welfare leaders are serious about wanting to end the killing, every animal control agency, traditional shelter, and adoption guarantee organization is going to need to sharpen their marketing skills to get the hard to place animals adopted.