My mother never purchased a dog or cat; she would just talk a neglectful owner into letting her have a skinny, malnourished animal that she would nurse back to health and then elevate to royalty in our house. She taught my sisters and me early on that animals who were adopted from shelters or taken in as strays were far more intelligent, loving, and grateful than any animal you could buy. And as ill-informed as I thought my mother was as a child, I’ve discovered that when it comes to companion animals and friends and family and husbands, my mother is a genius! (She wept when I announced my engagement to my first husband. I should have taken her sage advice about him and the dog I purchased!)

I’ve since learned for myself what she’d been trying to tell me all those years. A successful adoption brings joy to multiple hearts: the new family who revels in the antics of the adopted animal, the dog or cat who gets a second (or third) chance at a lifelong home with a caring family, and the shelter staff who have cared for the animal after his original family found him to be too much trouble or too costly or too unruly to fit into their life any longer. Adoptions are what make working in an animal shelter palatable on the days when there are three times the number of animals coming in the door than going out of it. Placing an animal with the widow who wants to feel the warmth of a cat and hear the sound of her purr helps to displace the anger a shelter worker feels when the humane officer brings in a severely abused animal. Adoptions are the sugar coating of the often bitter pill of running an animal shelter and dealing with broken human/animal bonds.

Of late, however, many agencies seem to have become obsessed with “quantity” over “quality” when it comes to adoption statistics. More than one shelter director has said that his or her mission is to “get them out the front door alive.” In some cases, shelter staff have even been told that their job performance will be evaluated by the number of animals they adopt each month. Many shelters measure the success of their programs by proclaiming the adoption of 100 percent of their “adoptable” animals.

Adopting an animal into a new home is a great feeling and can be a great achievement for the shelter and the animal. But simply placing animals in any new home is not a measure of success. If we are not ensuring that the home is an appropriate one with humans who are committed to caring for and loving the animal for the length of his life, it is a hollow victory. If we place animals with individuals of dubious character or intentions so we don’t have to make decisions regarding euthanasia, we may be dooming them to a fate worse than death.

Ending euthanasia in our community means more than placing every animal. It means conducting quality adoptions. It means providing support to the new adopter to ensure that behavior problems that may have landed the animal in the shelter in the first place are addressed. It means helping families deal with “bond breakers” and “bond barriers,” such as a lack of animal-friendly housing in the community, before they decide to relinquish a pet.

The final article of our series, “What Would It Take,” looks at shelters that have put quality adoptions ahead of the numbers and that gauge their success by how well they’ve reached the goal of ensuring that pets are valued, beloved family members. In Part 6, Animal Sheltering also highlights more programs that are positioning shelters as the resource centers for everything pets—and encouraging more members of the community to heed my mother’s advice to adopt a homeless animal.

If you’d like, I’ll give you my mother’s phone number so you can tell her that I do listen to her advice ... particularly when it comes to animals.

Martha C. Armstrong
HSUS Senior Vice President for
Companion Animals and Equine Protection