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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: November/December 2007

History & PetSmart Charities adoption data shows the value of doing holiday adoptions

 

RANCHO SANTE FE, Calif. -- Helen Woodward Animal Center president Mike Arms has been telling everyone who would listen for more than 40 years that the winter holiday season should be the peak season for shelter adoptions.

Arms demonstrated the potential for boosting adoptions during the winter holidays during 20 years as shelter manager for the North Shore Animal League, in Port Washington, New York, and then took his campaign global by founding the Home 4 the Holidays program at the Helen Woodward Center in 2000.

"I have always thought that the idea we shouldn't do adoptions during the holiday season was a plot by the puppy mill industry to protect their profits," Arms asserts.

The importance of the holiday season to dog breeders has been recognized by both breeders and humane societies for more than 70 years. Estimates of the numbers of puppies who would be presented as gifts at Christmas 1937 ran as high as one million--at a time when the total pet dog population of the U.S. was only about 10 million, according to the American Humane Association. The U.S. also had about 10 million street dogs, a population that gradually disappeared during the next few decades.

Already campaigning against puppy mills, the AHA in 1938 expressed skepticism that more than 100,000 pups actually were given at Christmas. The owned population of breeding bitches, the AHA believed, was about 750,000, producing an average of two surviving pups per litter after the remainder were culled by the dogs' keepers, then the prevailing method of controlling the population.

Then and through the 1960s, the AHA urged animal shelters to compete for holiday adoption market share. During the next 25 years, however, the advent of research into reasons for pet relinquishment to shelters and of computerized shelter record-keeping led to a trend in the opposite direction.

On the one hand, early shelter relinquishment surveys seemed to find that so-called "impulse adoption" was a factor in animals being returned to shelters within a short time of being placed.

On the other, shelters seemed to be receiving unusual influxes of animals just after the winter holidays each year.

The solution, from the 1970s into the 1990s, was widely believed to be to discourage "impulse adoption," especially around the winter holidays, to try to avoid the post-holiday surge in surrenders. More recent research has established that adoption failures result much less from ill-considered adoption than from adopters being inadequately prepared and counseled to deal with the behavioral problems that are often why animals land in shelters in the first place. Improved behavioral diagnostic and remedial procedures within shelters and improved adoption education and follow-up have cut the rate of failed adoptions from about one in five in the 1980s to fewer than one in 20 today.

The post-holiday influx of shelter surrenders meanwhile turned out to be chiefly due to shelters keeping shorter hours during the holiday season--exactly as Arms intuitively predicted.

By far the largest data base on seasonal adoption in existence has been compiled by PetSmart Charities. From 2000 through 2006, PetSmart Charities in-store adoption boutiques placed 748,957 dogs and 1,382,681 cats on behalf of humane societies, animal control shelters, and nonprofit rescue groups.

The peak of puppy and kitten availability is in summer, but the PetSmart Charities data shows that adoption demand is relatively steady throughout the year.

Among dogs placed through PetSmart, 27% of the annual total find homes in spring, and 24% in each of the other three seasons. Among cats placed through PetSmart, 20% find homes from February through April, when kitten availability is relatively low; 25% in May through July; 28% in August through October; and 27% from November through January.

The PetSmart data suggests that while placing kittens may boost adoptions in summer, placements of adult cats may peak during the winter holidays.