© Cris Kelly

People on the street flinch when they see him: the untagged, unneutered shepherd mix wandering dangerously close to traffic. Maybe he was once loved, but now he’s a bit ragged, and when he finally does show up in the place where nobody knows his name but everybody can’t wait to give him one, his uncertainty among his newfound friends indicates he may have seen too much of this world already. He wags his tail tenuously when the woman behind the counter addresses him; he is guarded and hard to gauge.

Soon, however, the young dog finds he has come to the right place. Here, instead of being ignored, his presence is embraced. Without a second thought, the employee in receiving does what she knows how to do best, what she’s been trained to do, what she sees as a fundamental part of her job: she comes around the counter and tries to make a connection, first crouching down on the floor so she’s at wet-nose level and then slowly offering her hand for a scent census. All the while, she searches for cues from her canine charge and adjusts her approach based on those signals. She’s mindful not to commit any violations of long-studied interspecies etiquette, refraining from staring too long or moving too quickly or—most importantly—making too many assumptions. Each animal, she knows, is an individual. Each has his own history, his own tales to tell.

Long after the hesitation has melted and the dog has finished up the encounter with expectant leaps onto the woman’s smock, he’ll still be surrounded by strange blathering beings trying to assess his personality and attend to his needs: Does he have separation anxiety? they will ask. Is he threatened by loud noises? What will he be like around children? Other dogs? Cats? His own food bowl? Is he treatable, trainable, and, ultimately, adoptable?

If the dog could talk, he might sensibly detail his likes and dislikes, beginning first, of course, with favorite treats. But since he can make himself understood only through wags, barks, rump-in-the-air bows, and other manifestations of canine sign language, the employees are left to guess why he’s passed his initial temperament screening but still seems edgy. Maybe he is just shy, they say. Maybe he had a bad puppyhood. Maybe someone yelled at him too much, or Maybe he got hit. Maybe he just doesn’t like all the smells in here.

They may never know the reason, but it’s not the knowing that’s important so much as the attempt to understand. This is why his caretakers are here, to empathize and to care and to show the animals, in whatever way possible, that they matter. As in so many other situations, the dog in this scenario has a lesson to teach his fewer-footed counterparts, and it has something to do with forgiveness and redemption. The dog is not “perfect,” yet instead of banishing him for whatever transgressions he may commit, the shelter workers attempt to help him—with temperament evaluations, behavior training, environmental enrichment programs, and, most of all, compassion.

The success of that approach in helping furry critters has prompted some organizations to extend it to the most complicated beast of them all: the human animal. As both public and private agencies increasingly incorporate routines and services that seek to identify and address the individual needs of the dogs and cats in their care, a parallel phenomenon is occurring: more concerted efforts among shelter employees and other animal caretakers to understand and better assist their own species. Pre-adoption classes and counseling as well as post-adoption follow-ups and support services have begun to take hold in communities across the country, alongside ongoing discussions and debates among shelter workers as to how best to provide people with the tools they need to care for their pets in the long term.

Some have labeled the evolving process of counseling sessions “open adoptions.” Others are more comfortable thinking of it as a transformation from an “interrogation” to a “conversation.” But whatever the phrasing, the essence of the shifting philosophies toward both adoptions and intervention programs is perhaps best illustrated by these questions: What if we treated each person with the same tenderness and neutrality we reserve for our animals? What if we acknowledged that each person carries with him a trunkload of baggage—that each one has a different story, a hidden set of circumstances, a vulnerability unknown to us?

What if we approached people who are less aware of the principles of good pet ownership the same way we approach untrained dogs or frightened cats? What if we asked ourselves simply, Is he trainable, treatable, or—maybe more appropriately—“educatable”?

In the last of our six-part series on what it would really take to end the need for euthanasia of healthy, behaviorally sound cats and dogs, Animal Sheltering takes on an age-old problem: what to do about that wackiest of species, Homo sapiens. If it weren’t for humans, there wouldn’t be any homeless animal problem, but if it weren’t for humans, there wouldn’t be any solutions either. Through better counseling up front and more safety nets post-adoption, many organizations are finding that most people do want to have successful relationships with their companion animals—sometimes they just need someone to teach them how. Questions about what works and what doesn’t during the adoption process still yield a wide range of responses, but the best answers all start with the same premise: that pet owners are generally teachable if given the chance to learn. If you missed Parts 1 through 5 of “What Would It Take?” visit the Back Issues section of our website to find all the articles in their entirety; for hard copies of the magazines, contact us at asm@hsus.org or 202-452-1100. And keep reading Animal Sheltering—this series is only one step in our continued quest to help shelters and other organizations working on behalf of homeless animals.

Mission: Adoptions ... ?

Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, people are surely the strangest. Whole fields are devoted to trying to understand them. Manuals on how to communicate with them take up long shelves in the bookstores. It sometimes requires the patience of psychologists, priests, and Job himself to work with them.

But that’s all the more reason their role cannot be ignored in the quest to find solutions to the homeless animal problem. Adoptions are a piece of the puzzle, certainly, but they are a piece likely to come unglued if pursued in isolation, without the attendant support programs so many pet owners clearly need in their attempts to get along with other species. If nearly 23 percent of relinquished dogs and 14 percent of relinquished cats come from shelters in the first place, as figures from the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy suggest, there is still much work to be done in educating adopters before and after they bring their animals home.

“Adoptions are great, but if we’re not doing the other programs that we’re doing—and trying to do them better—it doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot,” says Aileen Gabbey, executive director of the Maryland SPCA in Baltimore. “Because if you don’t have those resources and support, the animals will come back or they’ll be passed around.”

Yet in recent years emphasis has been increasingly placed on adoption numbers, often to the exclusion of other considerations. Executive directors feel the pressure from boards of directors, who feel the pressure from grantmaking foundations, which take their cue from the public, who get their information from the media, which has a tendency to oversimplify the problem by reporting adoption and euthanasia rates as the ultimate benchmarks of success. This reductive approach is missing the point: Even if all the animals in all the shelters in the country were placed in new homes tomorrow, a whole slew would come in the next day—cats and dogs obtained from all kinds of sources and relinquished for reasons ranging from the mundane to the maddening. If an average of 18 percent of surrenders involve animals obtained from shelters, that leaves 82 percent whose owners had no previous connection to the organization prior to relinquishment. A sole focus on adoptions will never be able to stem that tide or reach those people who need guidance in responsible pet care before they hit the point of surrender.

“We could easily do 10,000 adoptions if we didn’t do any counseling and just let everybody take a dog or a cat out of here,” says Dave Carbaugh, vice president and chief operating officer of the Nebraska Humane Society. “But if that dog ends up on a chain in the backyard of somebody’s house, or a cat has to sleep up in somebody’s engine compartment in the winter to get warm, how good is that animal placement?”

© Marianne Skoczek The essence of the shifting philosophies toward adoption and intervention programs is best illustrated by the question: What if we treated each person with the same tenderness and neutrality we reserve for our animals?

“The problem I have with it is that they’re doing such limited counseling,” says Messick, who points to high return rates as evidence of the need for more adoption support. “I’m seeing a lot of humane organizations and a lot of municipal shelters ... going in and hiring people who may not have the background in animal care and control—MBAs who say, ‘Okay, we’ve got to crunch numbers. To make the shelter look good ... let’s get more adoptions and let’s do more, more, more, more.’ What I see when that happens is we do begin to sacrifice a lot of things—like ... telling the people honestly what you know about the animal.”

Research by the National Council has revealed that there is a small window of time during which pet owners can still be reached before they no longer have the willingness or ability to listen: people relinquishing dogs for behavior problems are likely to have owned them for less than three months; those relinquishing cats have been with their animals for an average of only one to two years. Those statistics offer convincing evidence of the need for programs that weave a safety net of assistance for pet owners—and of the need to temper high quantities of adoptions with higher-quality placements that emphasize counseling and support services as their cornerstones.

Shelters exploring new adoption methods have often learned this the hard way. After evaluating their adoption processes and finding they were too exclusionary, staff at the Humane Society of Indianapolis set out to modernize their procedures with the goal of making them more reasonable. But something got lost in the shuffle, and employees watched return rates soar. “It was kind of like we needed to find a balance,” says development coordinator Audrey Lenz. “Maybe we weren’t giving people the tools they needed. Then after that I think everyone got on a kick where education was the first thing people wanted to do—that was something that had to come into place.”

Great Expectations: Have Shelters Been Unrealistic, Too?

© Mike McFarland/MoxieCreations Not long ago, guidelines at many shelters prohibited families with young children from adopting puppies and kittens—a restriction that sent people straight to the pet store, says Maryland SPCA executive director Aileen Gabbey. In 2001, Gabbey rescinded the SPCA’s age limits and replaced them with a more helpful requirement: that families with little ones attend a “Pet Basics” class before bringing a baby animal home.

Gradually, as rules were introduced, the pendulum swung so far the other way that, in many cases, seemingly no one was good enough to adopt a pet. In 1999, when the American Humane Association presented the results of its “Adoption Forum”—a panel of shelter directors convened to discuss new approaches—the organization shed some eye-opening light on an embarrassing phenomenon: Some top leaders in the sheltering field had discovered even they would not qualify to adopt animals from sister facilities in other parts of the country.

It was as if shelters had been making arbitrary assumptions about people based on their circumstances in much the same way that people tend to make false assumptions about dogs and cats based on breed or size or age. A person with children often couldn’t adopt puppies or kittens. Someone without a fenced-in yard couldn’t adopt a big dog. Anyone who walked in saying they’d let their cat outside or remove his claws was automatically assumed to be inhumane and turned away.

By the end of the 1990s, “unrealistic expectations” had become the catch phrase of the decade, as shelters explored new ways to help people understand that animals are all different and don’t come with guarantees. But the findings of the Adoption Forum and of other studies on the process began to turn that phrase inside out. The question now had to be asked: Did shelters have unrealistic expectations, too?

For people like the woman in Maryland who was denied the chance to adopt an animal simply because she’d tried to help the strays in her community, the answer was yes. The woman had heard the proverbial good news: that the shelter was a refuge for homeless animals. And so over the course of a few years, the cat lover had dutifully delivered lost felines to her local shelter after finding them in the street and trying unsuccessfully to locate their owners. But when she wanted to adopt a cat of her own, instead of being thanked for her compassion and citizenship, the good Samaritan was turned down in an adoption interview. To the adoption counselor, her kindness was made suspect by the irresponsibility of others who bring in their own cats: “Lots of people lie and just say they’re strays,” the woman was told.

To anyone who has worked in the field for more than a day, such skepticism, though misplaced in this case, is understandable. From the counselor’s perspective, why should she trust someone claiming to love cats, when she’s seen so many surrendered because their owners played too roughly with them or subjected them to a house full of other cats or rarely cleaned their litter boxes, or, even more frustrating, moved to a place where the “landlord won’t allow”?

Certainly there are people who aren’t trustworthy or who will never be reachable—those whose chances of being good pet owners are about as likely as a feral cat’s chances of being a suitable household companion. The man who told Paulette Dean at the Danville Area Humane Society in Virginia that the crawl space under his home would make a perfectly good fenced-in yard for a dog may just be ignorant, but he also probably doesn’t care enough. The woman who drove around with a kitten in her hot trunk until he was nearly dead and then tried to blame it on the shelter definitely isn’t sane enough. The parents who behave abusively toward the children right in front of an adoption counselor are certainly, as far as a shelter’s purposes are concerned, a lost cause.

But for every one of those stories, there are many more tales of people who do care and are reachable but have been lost in a system of rules that doesn’t recognize their individual needs, their disparate histories, their human frailties. In the strict world of the yes-no/approved-denied adoption interview, there is no margin of error, no place for generosity toward nonhuman animals who may just need a little nurturing.

There was no room for discussion when a man in New York wanted a puppy from his local shelter but worked long days; it didn’t matter that his retired father was willing to walk the dog at lunch every day—the wannabe adopter was still denied and, two years later, still recounts the story incredulously to anyone who’ll listen. Like many people, he found another way to get what he wanted, tracking down a large breeding facility and purchasing a nine-month-old Lab who now accompanies him in his travels and, as promised, gets luxurious midday strolls. A mellow, sweet-tempered animal, the dog has unwittingly solidified his owner’s opinion, often repeated to whoever will listen, that “going to a breeder and paying $1,000 is the best way to get a dog.”

Similarly, there wasn’t any leeway given the vet tech in suburban Washington, D.C., who tried to adopt a rottweiler from her local shelter but was berated by the adoption counselor for working at a pet store during high school. Even though it was now years later and she’d been working in an emergency vet clinic in the interim, she was given a lecture on puppy mills and chided for her teenage indiscretion. “I felt like a criminal,” she says, “as if I were some registered pedophile. ... And then I never heard from them. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I should be any humane society’s dream. I work for two vets. I groom for fun.’ ” Like the man in New York who was denied a puppy, she ended up paying a hefty price—$700—for a dog she would have loved just as much if she’d paid $70, she says.

Good Intentions Gone Bad

But the shelters in these instances may have paid an infinitely bigger price, sending messages to potential supporters that could cost them dearly in the future—in the form of untold numbers of community members too discouraged by rumors of bad experiences to ever consider setting foot in a shelter themselves. Even the best intentions can go awry to the point of potentially alienating a community and actually turning away great pet owners, says Carbaugh, who watched his organization undergo a miniature version of the sheltering movement’s decades-long evolution. In just six years, the Nebraska Humane Society cycled in Goldilocks fashion through a host of philosophies that took the shelter from no adoption screening at all to screening that was far too strict to a form of adoption counseling that strives to evenly straddle a balanced middle ground.

Though the path to finding that peaceful clearing in the tangled woods was a rocky one, a funny thing happened on the way to more careful placements: As soon as the shelter began denying people based on new established policies, its image in the community improved. “People saw, ‘Yes, you are humanitarians now; you’re not just a doggie warehouse.’ It was great,” says Carbaugh. “But it got out of hand.”

The first wake-up call that something was drastically askew came in the form of a phone call from a man who’d been denied the chance to adopt a greyhound from the shelter because he lived in a condo. An avid runner, the caller said he’d wanted a companion who would go everywhere with him—even on his jogs. “I think he worked out of his home, too, so this guy was going to be with his dog all day,” says Carbaugh. “If you could write up the best adoption you could imagine, this guy was pretty much it. He was a great guy.”

But because the shelter had a policy against adopting dogs to people without fences, the man had been automatically denied by a counselor, no questions asked. “So I got to talking to him and I said, ‘You know, when can you be back to get your new dog? If I could mold a thousand people like you, I’d be doing it in a second,’ ” Carbaugh recalls. “So that’s when it hit me that we really had to stop and take a look at this and make sure that everybody understood the gray area. ... Every adoption is unique, and every circumstance is unique, and you can’t just open to page 32 and say, ‘Okay, here’s how you handle this situation.’ ”

That lack of absolutes is in many ways unfortunate, because the daily routine of operating an animal shelter is already saddled with unpredictability and, by necessity, elaborate guesswork. Shelter employees must play so many roles simultaneously: animal caregiver, human therapist, customer service expert, and seemingly in some cases, magician and mind-reader. In such a demanding environment, it may at first seem easier to create black and white categories that carve a sense of order out of all the chaos. But in the long run, inflexibility threatens to undermine the mission and contradict a shelter’s goals by turning away those most ripe for education—people who love animals but just need help in learning how to care for them.

As Carbaugh points out, some policies that still exist today would exclude a family with a sweet-tempered and respectful 5-year-old girl from a puppy adoption while inexplicably allowing the placement to the neighbors next door whose 10-year-old boy treats animals as toys. Until recently, the Maryland SPCA in Baltimore had one of those exclusionary rules in place: families with young children were not allowed to adopt puppies and kittens—a restriction that sent people away from the shelter in droves.

“When someone would come in with kids, we’d tell them the policy and they would just turn around and leave,” says Gabbey. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, we just lost such a great opportunity to educate.’ ... It just made me want to cry whenever I saw somebody say, ‘Well, I’m just going to the pet store.’ ”

Over the course of a few years, the age limits were adjusted and readjusted until finally in 2001, the SPCA eliminated them. Now, instead of alienating potential adopters or pushing away community members who might actually be perfect pet owners, the shelter requires families with small children to attend a “Pet Basics” class before adopting a young animal; offered twice a week, the class is an accessible and informative introduction to responsible pet care. “We thought, since they’re going to get a puppy anyway, if we bring them in through us and we give them all of our resources, that’s going to be a more successful adoption for everybody,” says Gabbey.

Signs hung around the Maryland SPCA facility remind staff, adopters, and visitors of the mission: “We’re here to help animals and people.” Gabbey also distributes an adoption philosophy to office staff that emphasizes the importance of treating people well. “One of the biggest things in it is we’re not judging,” she says. “That’s not our job. Our job is to make a good match that’s safe for everybody and positive for everybody. ... I don’t want us shaking our finger at people. Even if we don’t agree, that doesn’t help anybody. That just makes somebody upset and feel that they’ve been condescended to.”

Exploring the Personal Dark Side

While replacing the robes of a judge with those of a priest-like figure may sound like a level of enlightenment only Buddha himself could attain, the good news is that the fine art of gentle diplomacy is usually a learned skill. The “temperamentally gifted are more often made than born,” writes sociologist Leslie Irvine in “Animal Problems/People Skills: Emotional and Interactional Strategies in Humane Education” (Society & Animals, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter 2002). “In short,” she writes, “organizations can, and should, train their employees in emotion management in much the same way they train them to care for animals or use computers.”

The Dumb Friends League in Denver, Colorado, has institutionalized this message. As the home of The HSUS Pets for Life National Training Center—which teaches shelter employees from around the country how to implement behavior training classes, helplines, and other bond-preserving programs and services—the League has been a leader in the development of enrichment programs for animals.

But the shelter’s longtime president, Bob Rohde, has also been a visionary in recognizing that it’s not possible to help the animals without helping the people. In addition to launching a regional behavior helpline for pet owners, the Dumb Friends League has implemented a six-hour “People Care” class that teaches staff how to tap into the feelings of the average pet owner.

Empathy for potential adopters might be hard to conjure in some cases, but associate director of operations Tara Hall has developed a technique for pushing the issue: She asks class participants to confront the dark side of their own pet histories. “Take a sheet of paper, and I want you to be honest,” she tells the employees. “You’re not going to have to show this to anybody, but I want you to write down some terribly stupid thing that you’ve done to a pet in your home previous to working here. Now fold it up and put it in your pocket.”

As the day wears on, those little confessional scraps prove useful reminders to attendees who become self-righteous when presented with theoretical customer service scenarios. “When people start going, ‘Why would they want a husky in the first place?’ ... we kind of rein it back in by saying, ‘Remember your sheet,’ ” says Hall.

Some of the tales on those sheets, while not sordid, would indeed be enough to cast doubt on the storyteller’s worthiness as a pet caretaker in the eyes of an unforgiving counselor. “We’ve all done something stupid,” says Hall, recalling her childhood pet-owning days. “I had an outside-only dog that was unspayed and had puppies right there in our backyard. Didn’t even know she was pregnant. That doesn’t make me a bad person—it just means I was uneducated.”

It’s hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when so many of them seem only to confirm that doubt. But assuming the worst about someone only lands a shelter right back where it started—and can quickly evolve into a self-fulfilling prophecy. “You cannot educate somebody that you’ve shut out,” says Hall. “Nobody has been educated if we haven’t tried to create a win-win situation for that individual animal and that individual who at least had the compassion to come to a shelter in the first place. Because that’s what we keep asking people to do: ‘Come to a shelter, come to a shelter! Adopt from us, adopt from us!’ And then when we shut the door in their face, well, why the heck should they ever come back, and why should they ask their friends to come back?

“We continue to ask people to come to us—we need to make sure that we’re giving them a reason to come to us.”

© Allison Miller/FWACC The sensory stimuli of an animal shelter can make it a frightening place to those who have never been there before. “Greeter dogs” and volunteer “welcomers” like Merilee Schmidt (pictured in center) help curb anxieties and let visitors to Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control know they’ve come to the right place—one that shares their love of animals.

Pleased to Greet You

An animal shelter is often a frightening environment to those who have never been there before. In thinking about how the nonhuman animal behaves upon arrival—often anxious, always overloaded by the sensory stimuli—it’s easy to forget that members of our own species might be feeling similarly overwhelmed: It’s loud in here. Everyone’s so busy. Where do I go? All these animals and I’m just one person. How do I choose? What does DSH mean? How can they stand the smell? I wonder if I could meet one of these cats. Why does it say, “Do not touch”? Do they bite? Oh well, maybe we’ll come back another time.

Maybe they will and maybe they won’t, but in cases like this, the chance to make a connection with people who cared enough to show up in the first place may have disappeared through the front door for good. And that’s a monumental loss for an organization that exists because of people in the community and relies on those same people to help effect change. The path to an animal shelter is already fraught with hurdles—myths and misperceptions formidable enough to send large segments of society running in the other direction toward “easy” outlets that don’t care who takes their animals as long as they make a profit. Many of those people who take the road less traveled, therefore, have already overcome some of those roadblocks and heard at least one critical message: Adopt a Homeless Animal, perhaps, or Find a Pet for Life.

Whether they find that lifelong friend on their visit or not, what matters most is that they find the shelter itself to be a place they want to return to. That’s a tall order for any private humane society or animal care and control agency, both of which are already expected to be all things to all animals and all people all at once: What the public often doesn’t understand is that a shelter is more than just a boarding kennel for homeless animals; it is also a treatment facility, a rescue operation, a placement agency, an educational organization, a pet care resource center, and the final resting place for pets both loved and unloved.

To those already in the field, the reasons to come to a shelter, stay in a shelter, and listen to what the shelter has to say are painfully obvious—and the reasons people choose to stay away seem petty and unforgiving. Why wouldn’t someone understand that employees are busy because there aren’t enough of them to go around, that the kennels smell like wet dog hair because they’ve just been cleaned, that there are dozens and dozens and dozens of cats to choose from because people let them outside and lose them?

While easy to recite with the hindsight of experience, the answers far surpass the knowledge of most members of the public, as the spokeswoman for a large open-admission organization in Wichita points out when recalling the bumpy road she first took to an animal shelter. “I was thinking that I needed a dog, and one of my coworkers volunteered down here, and I talked to her about it,” says Kansas Humane Society communications director Jennifer Campbell, whose shelter takes in more than 11,000 animals a year. “[At the time] I thought shelters smelled bad and it was where dogs go to die. And she brought me down with her and we walked through the shelter. It was a really good experience for me because now I understand the trepidation that people have in thinking the humane society is a sad place.”

People are sophisticated animals, hidden behind intricate and tangled layers of memory and experience that have taught them to shield what’s closest to their hearts and shape their actions accordingly. If they walk into a shelter knowing very little about its role in the community, they are likely to fill in gaps of knowledge with their own perceptions and tidbits they’ve heard elsewhere—perpetuating a cycle of misinformation. But if they walk into an animal shelter and are met at the door with open arms and programs that extend to humans the kind of compassion given to nonhuman guests, they are likely to leave with a sense of connectedness, a feeling of having been helped and taken care of.

No one knows this better than staff and volunteers at Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control, who witnessed a transformation in public attitudes after putting out a living welcome mat for humankind a couple of years ago. During visiting hours, volunteers bring one of the agency’s priceless assets—a dog in need of a home—to the front lobby to greet visitors. Anyone who walks through the door is smiled at by a volunteer or wagged at by a dog or both. Often the first image people see is not a rushed person behind the counter but rather a shelter dog getting brushed, eating treats, learning to sit, or just lying on his little bed. And the first sound they hear is that of the dog’s handler saying, “Welcome to the shelter ...”

“I just can’t express enough what a good rapport that builds with people,” says Allison Miller, the agency’s adoption program supervisor. “Even though the building we have is incredible, I still think that when people walk in the door, they’re expecting it to be sad and dreary on the inside. And so we’ve kind of nipped that. When people walk in, if they don’t smile at us, they’re going to get a big smile from us, and eventually they’re going to put a smile on their face, too. Most of them are really surprised.”

The greeter dog program does more than any brochure could do—it’s a walking furry advertisement that relies on the “show, don’t tell” method of persuasion. The messages sent to visitors are powerful: We give our animals personalized attention. We give you personalized attention. We care. “It’s just like magic,” says Miller. “Almost anyone who walks in that door immediately bonds with that animal. And whether they decide to adopt him or not, they just had a pleasant experience the moment they walked in the door.”

In the face of smiling happy people and dogs, visitors are more likely to be forgiving of the hair flying all over the lobby or the other sights and sounds that come with the territory of an animal shelter, says Miller. Even better, they receive instant validation that they’ve come to the right place, and the critical first step in the adoption process—perception of the shelter as a trusted resource—has been seeded.

As Irvine points out in her Society & Animals article, psychological research shows that people are more easily persuaded or more receptive to the viewpoints of others when those viewpoints are closely related to their own opinions. Though not surprising, that’s a meaningful finding for shelters in the sense that there’s a wonderful chance to connect with those people who even consider adoption. When someone journeys to the Fort Wayne facility because she’s heard the message “Adopt a Homeless Animal,” greeting her at the doorstep with one of those homeless animals creates a shared sense of purpose, establishing a common ground of mutual interest between the potential adopter and representatives of the shelter.

If the stage has been set in this way and all the players are in agreement on the most basic tenet—we care—it’s easier to turn the process of adoption into a partnership: one that’s designed to determine the best choices for the animal, the adopter, and the shelter.

“We’re here to answer any of your questions,” the volunteer welcomer tells the visitor as she bonds with her canine host. The ensuing exchange is a model for good customer service strategy: Potential adopters are made to feel special, answering questions about whether they’ve been to the facility before, detailing to the welcomer what kinds of animals they’re interested in adopting, and signing into a guest book. When they venture back into the adoption areas, they’re often met by more volunteers waiting to help them in their search.

I'm a Single Black Lab, Looking for a Couch Potato

© Mike McFarland/MoxieCreations While those who work in a shelter become accustomed to its sights, sounds, and tactile sensations, many visitors are often experiencing for the first time what it’s like to have dozens of animals begging for their attention.

In some ways, sending seekers of new furry friends back into the kennels and cat cages without this kind of assistance—volunteer or otherwise—would be like bringing a shy animal into a loud and crowded carnival. The noises, smells, and images can be disorienting, often resulting in a visitor’s loudly expressed desire to “take them all home” even as she leaves the shelter empty-handed. While that sentiment can be frustrating to staff who have to suppress similar longings every day, recalling its origins can help them relate better to new visitors—who, after all, are experiencing for the first time what it’s like to see 100 expressive faces watching their every move and dozens of beseeching paws craving their attention.

As much as animal protectionists dislike analogies to the retail world, people are a product of their culture. “Consumers” expect some measure of help and salesmanship with any purchase they make—including the “purchase,” or adoption, of an animal. At the mall, in the computer store, at the hospital, and in most other public settings, people are used to being queried, advised, and assisted before and after they make a selection or decision. In the public’s subconscious mind, then, giving animals to people without explanation and without tools to teach and work with their new pets is like selling computers without operating systems or appliances without manuals. People arrive home and have no idea what to do when things go wrong.

In a recent study in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science (JAAWS), researchers analyzing retention rates of animals adopted from shelters and off-site locations discovered that people actually go into the adoption process hoping for advice and assistance. “Adopters, particularly dog adopters, want better information about the health and behaviors/personalities of prospective adoptees,” write Laura Neidhart and Renee Boyd, the authors of “Companion Animal Adoption Study” (Vol. 5, No. 3). “They also want advice as to which companion animal is best suited for them. Improvement in these areas, regardless of the type of companion animal adopted, might lead to improved retention.”

A new program at the Kansas Humane Society backs up the theory that people’s penchant for using dating services extends beyond their quest for a human partner—and shows how well they respond to canine marriage counseling. Called “Matchmaker,” the system has reduced returns of adult dogs by half in just nine months—from 15 to 7 percent, says Campbell.

In developing the program for the shelter, animal behaviorist Emily Weiss examined the reasons for returns and found that most derived from the same problem: a failure to bond with the animal. “So if we could figure out a way to have the owner go home with what they expected, what they wanted the dog to be, then we’re more likely to get a bond,” Weiss says. “And if we’re more likely to get a bond, then they’re more likely to keep that pet.”

The program works almost like a canine Love Connection, putting both animals and potential adopters through some initial screening tests before the two species even get the chance to meet. But unlike Chuck Woolery and his modern-day cohorts, shelter staff don’t show visuals of the animals first. In fact, Weiss designed Matchmaker so that adopters actually avoid selecting dogs on the basis of their appearance or breed, turning adopters’ decision-making processes into more conscious and reasoned affairs that put greater weight on human lifestyle issues and animal personalities. “People usually come in and they just look at a pair of brown eyes, and that’s what they make their decision on,” says Weiss. “We limit the brown eyes that they tend to look at. That has definitely helped.”

The color-coded system divides dogs into three different categories: from the laid-back pooches who want to nestle on the couch all evening to the excitable dogs who just need some direction in their lives to the wild things who are more curious than George and require the intensive commitment of an experienced dog owner willing to put some effort into training. Privately, the shelter refers to these animals as “easy-keep,” “medium-keep,” and “hard-keep” dogs, but the public face of the program assigns purple cards to “easy” dogs, orange cards to “medium” dogs, and green cards to “hard” dogs. Within each color scheme are three subcategories: an easy-keep dog could end up being described as a constant companion, a couch potato, or a teacher’s pet; medium-keeps are goofballs, busy bees, or wallflowers; and hard-keeps are go-getters, free spirits, or lives of the party.

Before potential adopters even make the acquaintance of the Kansas Humane Society’s canine guests, they fill out a questionnaire that matches them to one of three color-coded categories. The dogs themselves are assigned a color and a cage card based on the results of their “personality profile”—a sort of canine Myers-Briggs exam that decides whether they are “couch potatoes,” “go-getters,” or somewhere in between.

As part of a series of tests designed to assess adoptability, dogs are administered a kind of Myers-Briggs exam of Doggiedom. Developed by Weiss, the test involves putting a dog in a room outfitted with a bench, a garbage can, and a countertop; a videocamera attached to a monitor allows employees to watch his every move from another room. A couch potato would be a dog who just sniffs a few things and lies down; a pooch of perpetual motion who’s jumping up on the counter and getting into the trash can and tearing around the room would probably end up in the opposite category: go-getter.

“The staff just goes down a checklist,” says Campbell, “and asks, ‘Does the dog move constantly around the room? Does the dog act interested in outside noises? Does it lie down immediately? Is it whiny? What is it doing while it’s on its own?’ And it sounds very, very simple, but it’s incredibly accurate.”

The test itself was put through a battery of tests on a large population of owned dogs; Weiss honed the checklist until she was confident in its ability to predict characteristics of dogs six months and older. And while the personality profile is separate from the shelter’s temperament evaluation, it helps gauge potential problems as well, Weiss says. “If we put a dog alone in that room and ... we see that they start to shake and pant and continuously bark and whine, then we know we might have a separation anxiety issue,” she says. “And that’s definitely something we want to be extra careful with.”

Helping to round out the picture are other exercises conducted in person; for instance, one involves using a treat to teach the dog to sit if he’s not already aware of the command. “And we look for persistence,” says Weiss. “A ‘couch potato’ is like, ‘OK, alright, I’ll take the treat, but not if it takes a lot of work,’ and they might try once or twice, and they might get one or two treats, but then they maybe just collapse on the floor and relax. ... And a ‘go-getter’ gets that sit [mastered] in two seconds flat, and then [goes] sit, up, sit, up, sit, up.”

Initial screening of potential adopters uncovers “red flags” that might preclude an adoption and require further probing during the formal counseling session—issues such as the desire for a guard dog or the plan to let animals roam. But the matchmaking questions also reveal individual visions of the ideal companion; the program is designed to assess whether people are looking for dogs who are playful or mellow, trained or unmannered, independent or clingy.

© Inside WSU In the first nine months following the launch of the Matchmaker program, returns of adult dogs to the Kansas Humane Society dropped by half. The success of Matchmaker stems partly from its ability to curb the “brown eyes” phenomenon—or the propensity of adopters to choose an animal based on appearance rather than personality, says animal behaviorist and Matchmaker creator Emily Weiss (pictured at right).

The societal myths about breeds and sizes, therefore, are stripped away as soon as the process begins: Those who come to the shelter assuming that a Jack Russell would make the perfect lapdog or that a Lab pointer mix is inherently intrusive because of her size begin to shed their assumptions at the kennel doors, especially when they see a formidable-looking dog attached to a personal-ad cage card like this one: Shy yet charming canine searching for patient owner with relaxed lifestyle. Looking for gentle guidance to help me come out of my shell. Treat me sweet and kind and I’ll blossom.

“The dogs that may not have gotten a second look are your ‘Wallflower’ dogs,” says Campbell. “That’s the dog who’s just sitting in the corner going, ‘I don’t like this at all. I’d rather be home where it’s nice and quiet.’ With someone who might interpret it as a negative behavior or fearfulness or who might think the dog’s not going to be a good dog—all of a sudden they’re learning that, ‘Oh, well, they’re just a wallflower! Then they’re not so bad then—they’re just kind of shy.’ ”

Though the shelter encourages people to stay within their color assignment, it’s not a requirement. Still, most people treat the system as serious business, says Campbell. “It’s completely amazing,” she says. “The kids are all running around saying, ‘Oh, I want this, I want that.’ And the mom or dad says, ‘Okay, no, we need to go find the purple dogs. You can have a purple or an orange dog.’ ”

Making people feel special—as if there is an animal out there just for them—is a significant factor in the success of Matchmaker. “One of the things that this was designed to do was to make adopters not our adversaries, which I think was happening a lot,” says Weiss. “I think we have a tendency to protect our dogs so much that ... it becomes a very unpleasant experience for whomever is coming in to adopt a dog.”

Walking the Fine Line, Feline-Style

Making the adoption process a pleasant one for people while also ensuring the security of animals is a delicate line to walk, requiring almost catlike precision to avoid stumbling into the breakable artifacts of a person’s psyche. Sometimes the best match is no match at all, and a denial may ultimately lead to a better life for both the animal and his would-be adopter. Nationwide, as some organizations have succumbed to the pressure to get animals out the door as quickly as possible under the false assumption that higher adoptions equal success, others like Fort Wayne Animal Care and Control have discovered that saying “no”—for the right reasons—actually helps build support in the community.

When a man walked into the Indiana agency searching for a companion for the husky mix he’d adopted eight months before, he ended up leaving empty-handed but grateful to the shelter for talking him out of his desire for a second animal. Since the adoption of his first dog, the man’s work hours had intensified—he’d lost his old job and taken on two new ones to support himself—and he’d also gotten a divorce. “He was afraid that his dog was going to be lonely,” says Miller. “That was so sweet of him, and actually his dog was very wonderful, but he had put a lot of work and a lot of effort into that dog.”

By acknowledging the man’s kindness in trying to do the right thing, Miller became his partner in helping him make the right choice. Discussions about how much time he had spent in training and acclimating his first dog, along with successive meetings with other dogs in the shelter, led the husky owner to the conclusion Miller had been hoping for: that one was still a handful and two may have been more than he could keep at that point in his life. It was a revelation for him. “He was so receptive,” Miller says. “He said, ‘Thank you so much. I never would have thought of it. I never would have considered it that way, but you’re right. I may have had to bring that dog back.’ ”

To Miller, the opportunity to educate meant much more than the opportunity to make a placement, which, after all, would probably have ended up ultimately in displacement and surrender. “I don’t see it as that dog losing its chance for adoption because it’s still in the adoption program, and it’s a wonderful dog, and as a matter of fact, it’s on hold right now to go home with someone else,” she says. “It was just a matter of finding the right dog for him at the appropriate time.”

Miller’s approach allowed the man to preserve his image of himself as a good person trying to do the right thing—a critical aspect of ensuring his receptiveness to her advice. If she’d said something that had cast the husky owner as uncaring or less than humane, the response probably would have been what Irvine describes in her article as one of a variety of “dissonance-reducing techniques that people use ... to rescue the ego.”

Recounting her experiences as a volunteer for a shelter mobile adoption vehicle, Irvine cites a pet owner who felt backed into a corner after being questioned about a restraint device. The woman had shown up at a dog wash fundraiser and had passed along high praise for the shelter and its philosophies, all the while standing next to a pooch in a prong collar. In trying to address the issue, Irvine went too far with her line of questioning, she says, until the woman finally ended the conversation by saying she knew the collar was fine because her veterinarian had recommended it. At that point, Irvine had lost her—and feared she may have lost the woman’s willingness to listen to any messages from the shelter in the future.

“I had, albeit inadvertently, cast her in a particular role—that of inhumane guardian,” says Irvine. “If I had anticipated this, I could have adjusted my behavior to minimize her resistance.”

As much as humans like to think of themselves as logical creatures, research suggests that we are not so much “rational” beings as we are “rationalizing” ones, Irvine notes, paraphrasing the work of social psychologist Elliot Aronson. In other words, an adoption counselor could have all the right information—and could even be the top expert in the field of animal behavior or proper pet care—but would still be ignored by adoption applicants if she isn’t equally adept in her management and understanding of people behavior.

“Humane education, like education in general, requires precisely the right conditions,” Irvine writes. “The ‘student’ should not feel threatened, attacked, or belittled. The ‘teacher’ must therefore ‘read’ the interaction and attempt to make it conducive to learning. Among other things, this involves producing a positive emotional state in the students, even while feeling angry or appalled at the misconceptions they hold.”

The Human Temperament Test

In trying to see the world through the average pet owner’s eyes, a new breed of adoption counselor understands that many of the people who come to the shelter saying “I want an indoor/outdoor cat” or “I’m going to declaw him” or “I want an 8-week-old puppy” are simply not aware of better alternatives. Studies show that people rely most on their veterinarians for information and advice, and since most veterinarians do not condemn the practice of declawing or explain the dangers of outdoor cats, it’s easy to see why pet owners have not gotten the message. After all, if they knew that declawing was actually painful and that in most circumstances it’s best to avoid it whenever possible, why would potential adopters walk into an interview with a humane organization, hoping to impress the counselor, and declare their open-ended support for such a practice?

Instead of condemning people for what they don’t know, Hall assumes they would make a different decision if only they knew better. When a young couple with a toddler came in looking for a cat about a year ago, Hall asked if the cat would be an indoor-only cat. Yes, the woman replied. So far so good. Hall then asked if they were looking to declaw. Yes, the woman said again.

“I said, ‘If that’s the situation, what I’d like to do first is see what cats we have here that are already declawed because [it’s better] if we can save you and a cat the trauma,’ ” recalls Hall. “I said to her that it’s the equivalent of pulling out the fingertips and she said, ‘Oh God!’ I said, ‘It’s pretty invasive surgery, but ... sometimes people kind of end up where they’re forced to do that, but there are lots of ways that you can combat scratching first.’ ”

Armed with the new information about the pain of declawing, the woman reconsidered whether she’d want to put a cat through such a procedure. But in the end she didn’t have to make the decision at all, because Hall found three declawed cats in the shelter and ended up placing one of them—a “big old fat thing,” as she affectionately describes the four-year-old male with blue eyes who went home with the family.

“Rather than saying, ‘I’m not going to adopt to them because they’re going to declaw,’ ” says Hall, “we go through a whole different conversation, which means in the end, not only is a better match made anyway, but I’ve done some education. And now when her friend talks about declawing in some random conversation in six months, she can go, ‘Did you know that’s actually [painful]?’ ... What I’ve started is a cycle of something positive, as opposed to shutting her down.”

Every interaction should be an educational experience—and not just for the adopter: “We can certainly stand to learn from people, too,” says Hall. As it turned out, by using a technique Irvine calls “narrative knowing”—or the act of attending not just to what someone says but also how she says it—Hall discovered that the adopter who wanted to declaw was not concerned about her furniture. She was afraid more for the safety of her one-year-old toddler, worrying that a cat with claws might inadvertently scratch him.

“And we forget about that if we’re a cat owner without children, as I am,” says Hall. “I’m not thinking about children. But if I’m a mom, or an older person with really thin skin, that changes my perspective.”

People’s interactions are shaped largely by the feelings they “give off” to each other, rather than by the things they actually “give” or say, writes Irvine. In the shelter setting, the situation only becomes more aggravated because emotions usually run from high to higher. “Although I do not mean to suggest listening to everyone with an ear to the hidden agenda, I want to call attention to how effective humane education requires deciphering the clues contained in the stories people tell,” writes Irvine. “The clues reveal the kind of ‘people problems’ that occur along with, and often create or aggravate, ‘animal problems.’ ”

In Hall’s previous shelter, the desire for an indoor/outdoor cat would have been grounds for denial in an adoption interview, but the Dumb Friends League takes a more mediated approach, starting with the premise that perhaps there’s a good reason a potential adopter has answered “yes” to the question of whether she would let her cat outside. When asked why, sometimes people respond that they want company while they work in their gardens, for instance. Others might say they want to put the cat in a harness and walk her on a leash. But even when the reasons are the more common and less acceptable ones, counselors adept in the art of conversation can peel back the layers of a person’s thought process by first validating the humane sensibility that brought her to the shelter in the first place and then steering her gently in the right direction, says Hall: What are you looking for in a cat? Why inside/outside? Why is that the road you want to go down? Sure, we can still do the adoption, but let me give you some pieces of information to think about ...

© Geoff Handy/HSUS By using a technique sociologist Leslie Irvine calls “narrative knowing”—or the act of attending not just to what someone says but how she says it—counselors can learn more about the backgrounds, concerns, and needs of potential adopters.

“Now you’ve got somebody who had wanted an inside/outside cat but might work towards getting that cat a little more inside, and the cat is altered,” says Hall. “The reality of it is, if people want to adopt an animal, they’re going to adopt an animal. And if it’s not here it will be somewhere else—or if they don’t adopt it, they’ll buy it. If you have an inside-only cat policy and ... you say ‘no’ without going any further than that, they’ll find another place to get a cat, and by God, it’s going to be an inside/outside cat.”

Even in the case of sacred spay/neuter restrictions, education often makes more sense than outright rejection, says Barbara Bonkowski, president of Friends of the Clifton Animal Shelter in New Jersey. The organization would never budge on the requirement to sterilize adopted animals—and usually even rejects adoptions to people who already have unsterilized cats and dogs at home. But there are cases in which that rule serves no practical purpose, says Bonkowski: If an applicant has a 13-year-old unspayed dog and wants to adopt a neutered cat, for instance, it wouldn’t make sense to issue a denial if everything else checks out.

Bonkowski encounters these scenarios often; the area around the Clifton Animal Shelter is home to many people from countries where dog and cat sterilization is not as commonplace. “If they don’t know about it or they don’t agree with spaying and neutering, then we start pulling out the literature and we spend a lot of time talking about it, trying to be positive,” Bonkowski says. “And we try to turn them around. We don’t just say, ‘Get out because we don’t like you.’ Then you are just sending them to a pet store. You’re sending them to another shelter where they’re just going to lie because they already know the right things to say.”

At the Maryland SPCA, counselors have the latitude to refer would-be adopters to the Pet Basics class—not just families with young children but anyone else who might need a crash course in responsible pet care, says Gabbey. Twice a week, 10 to 20 people show up at each class, which includes half an hour of instruction for cat adoption applicants and an hour for those who want to adopt dogs.

“Sometimes people will go and be like, ‘You know what, I went and I still don’t think I want my dog inside.’ We say, ‘Okay, well, we can’t adopt to you at this time,’ ” says Gabbey. “But more often than not, they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I had no idea it took so much work, and I’m really glad I got a chance to ask some questions!’ ”

Hearing someone who’s called a “teacher” repeat what an adoption counselor may have already said adds credibility to the message, says Gabbey. “It gives the adoption counselors more tools. I think it makes things easier for them, and it makes things easier for the public,” she says. “Critical to a lot of this is making things easy. If somebody is interested in adopting from a shelter and if they’re interested in learning and in education, don’t make them work hard to get that stuff. Don’t put a lot of barriers in their way.”

Extending a Lifeline

The Maryland SPCA tries to smooth the bumpy roads of life after adoption as well, working with local trainers to offer “Ask the Expert” sessions for problems requiring professional assistance and “Puppy Preschool” classes for owners who want to prevent those problems from developing in the first place. For a one-time registration of $25 and a token payment of $3 per class for sterilized pups and $5 for unsterilized ones, new puppy parents and their animals can attend as few or as many Saturday classes as they want—and in no particular order. The loose structure provides the kind of flexibility people need, Gabbey says, allowing them to share stories and work with trainers in a no-pressure environment.

The importance of carrying on such ongoing relationships cannot be underestimated; the adoption is just the beginning of the pet owner’s journey. Follow-up calls, interactive forums, training programs, and behavior helplines all serve as roadmaps for people trying valiantly to live with species who don’t speak their language and animals trying just as hard to adjust to being strangers in a strange land.

© Kristi Atkinson and Nan Kené-Arthur At the San Diego Humane Society’s Doggie Café, adopters and shelter representatives can share their love of animals over a cup of coffee under the sky. Described on the shelter’s website as “the place to see and be seen for the canine set,” the event is fertile training ground for the human clique. Pet owners thrive in the informal environment, getting helpful advice from trainers on everything from appropriate collars to humane methods of teaching a dog to sit.

Whether it’s a woman in heels and fancy clothes who is embarrassed by her nosy black Lab’s invasion of everyone else’s personal space or a couple with an energetic weimaraner who can’t sit still, canine companions regularly have revelatory experiences at the Doggie Café, a monthly event held at the local Borders bookstore by the San Diego Humane Society and SPCA. Like the Puppy Preschool in Baltimore and the greeter dog program in Fort Wayne, the Doggie Café allows pet owners and shelter employees to walk on common ground, sharing their love of animals over a cup of coffee under the sky.

“We have dogs that show up in these [pinch] collars and choke chains, and people who have not been exposed to any other form of training, and so this information that we’re giving about positive reinforcement is oftentimes a really new thing for them,” says Gigi Bacon Theberge, the shelter’s director of marketing and public relations. “And it’s really amazing how our trainers don’t run right over to those people and go, ‘Oh no! What are you doing?’ It’s really a casual conversation, and we’re able to raise the level of awareness.”

“Everything about our trainers is calming, and they can be standing there with the dog for a matter of minutes and have the dog sitting and focused and working with them so that the dog really calms [down],” says Bacon Theberge. “And to see the owners recognize that is just amazing. ... It’s like a light bulb goes off.”

Giving pet owners access to trainers and other expert assistance is particularly helpful to staff who are forced to be less choosy than they want to be when doing adoptions, says Messick. As the head of a municipal agency, the Schertz Animal Services manager laments he doesn’t have as much control over the process as he did while working for private organizations—but that doesn’t stop him from trying to keep returns low and make more permanent placements.

After all, as Messick has learned, necessity is the mother of invention: By serving as a kind of one-man helpline and offering his assistance both pre- and post-adoption, he can refer people to trainers he works with, recommend the purchase of crates from a woman who offers them at discount and as trade-ins, and talk to people at length about the propensity of puppies to grow far beyond their owners’ expectations. “We’ve slowed down a lot of potential returns that way,” he says. “And very few of the returns we get are real problems.”

Although they crave assistance, many people are inherently afraid to ask questions even when they need to, says Linda Gelb of Community Animal Rescue Effort (C.A.R.E.), a volunteer organization that manages the daily operations of the Evanston Animal Shelter in Illinois. Some people fear they’ll be seen as bad pet owners; others worry about “tattling” on their animals.

And that’s where follow-up calls come in, says Gelb. Because they run a small facility that takes in only 770 animals a year, C.A.R.E. volunteers are able to make contact with adopters two days after placement and then again two weeks later. “A lot of times when you ask how things are going,” Gelb says, “they say everything’s fine.”

More probing, however, often reveals the need for some sort of assistance. After many years of practice, Gelb and her colleagues have learned to be specific in their line of questioning: Has the dog pottied outside? Is he growling? Is he getting up on the sofa? What happens when you try to get him off? Did he try crawling into bed with you last night? Does he try to bolt when you open the door?

Most of the answers reveal issues that may seem overwhelming to the pet owner but commonplace to counselors. Occasionally a call reveals a more serious problem; in those cases, counselors put the blame on themselves, encouraging the adopters to come back and try to make a better match. “Sometimes we tell them we’ve done a bad adoption, that this is not an appropriate dog for their house and they need to bring it back so we can do this again,” says Gelb.

What pet owners often need most of all, though, is just a little reassurance, says Lenz, a positive answer to questions such as “Is it normal for the puppy to go outside and play and then come inside and use the bathroom?” and “Is it normal for the dog to be chasing the cat?” And adopters get that boost of confidence from the Humane Society of Indianapolis, where customer service employees spend their mornings doing follow-up calls—first within a few days following adoptions, then again a couple of weeks after that, and finally five months later. Each call is recorded, with notes on the outcome placed in a file for future reference.

Even with effective screening and counseling on the front end, the follow-up program is integral to the mission of the organization—part of which is “to further the bond between people and animals,” says Lenz. After all, as she and many other counselors have learned all too well, even when a shelter offers every kind of assistance imaginable during adoption interviews, it’s not likely that excited new pet parents have heard even half the spiel.

“You can say until you’re blue in the face in the middle of an adoption, ‘Hey, we have a behavior helpline, and give us a call if you have any questions,’ ” says Hall, “but people are thinking, ‘What am I going to name him? Oh, I have to go to the store and get a litter box and food.’ ... And they’re looking at this cat and as far as they’re concerned, this cat is fantastic—why on earth would they have any trouble with it? So they’re just simply not hearing you.”

Gaining Friends With Influence

Follow-up calls conducted by Bloomington Animal Care and Control in Indiana have confirmed the phenomenon of the short attention span, revealing that the agency was overwhelming new pet owners, says director of education Jo Liska. Maintaining contact with adopters after they bring an animal home has helped Liska revise the agency’s adoption packets and hone in on the most important information during counseling sessions. “I think there’s a delicate balance,” she says. “If you give them too much information, they’re not going to look at it. If you give them too little, then you’re really not helping them.”

Liska has developed a rolling file of tip sheets that staff can distribute to people with questions not covered in the packet; she’s also used follow-ups to help tailor her television program featuring adoptable animals and pet care tips. “It’s aired seven times a week throughout the county, and we get tons of great responses,” Liska says. “[Follow-up] helps me with that program to target what kind of issues people typically have trouble with, what they don’t know anything about.”

Though follow-up programs are often still in their embryonic stages where they exist at all, their importance is ever-increasing as shelters seek better data to assist in developing services that preserve and strengthen bonds between people and pets. As Gary Patronek and Stephen Zawistowski point out in their introduction to the JAAWS adoption study, little research exists on what happens to animals after their placement in new homes. “It ... is surprising because the goal of shelters and rescue groups is to place animals in permanent, loving homes,” they write. “Outcome data would appear to be essential to guiding adoption protocols. Yet, it is something of a truism among animal shelter staff that doing follow-up calls with people after animals leave the shelter is notoriously difficult and frustrating.”

Contributing to the failure to establish contact are a host of possible factors, the JAAWS editors write: lack of time and resources; lack of interest or failure to recognize the value of follow-up; and inability to reach adopters because addresses and identities have not been properly verified. The frustration isn’t just felt by shelters alone; even a professional marketing firm that helped conduct the adoption study was unable to maintain contact with 51 percent of adopters—a situation Patronek and Zawistowski call “alarming” and indicative of the critical need to develop more systematic and effective follow-up programs.

In the meantime, as organizations such as the Nebraska Humane Society scramble to find grants for doing just that, they continue to chip away at the problem in other ways. Even though follow-ups are still only a blip on the organization’s radar screen, the Omaha shelter has been weaving another kind of safety net in the last few years, making outreach to the veterinary community one of its highest priorities.

Because of Carbaugh’s diligence in developing partnerships with the most influential animal care professionals in his community, 70 vets in dozens of clinics offer free examinations to adopters and reduced fees for heartworm treatments and other services; many of them also participate in the “Adopt a Pet from Your Vet” program that allows clinics to place shelter kittens with clients.

The arrangements have changed not only the way the veterinarians view the shelter but also the way they talk about the organization with their clients, says Carbaugh. “When we had a bad relationship with the veterinarians, if I adopted a cat out of here that had the sniffles,” he says, “it would go to the vet and a lot of vets in town would say, ‘Well, of course your cat’s sick. It came from the shelter. All the animals are sick. Take it back and go get yourself a good cat.’ ”

The turnaround in attitude has been rapid; in the last five years, vets have begun to explain to clients that it’s normal for their pets to have picked up illnesses in a shelter environment where they are housed with multiple animals. “So the clients are keeping their animals and they’re not calling us angry that they had to spend 25 bucks on antibiotics in addition to the adoption,” says Carbaugh. “Because their veterinarian gave them a mind-set that this is natural, this is normal, the humane society is a great place, and this would have happened whether you bought it [there or] from Pets R Us.”

Veterinarians even refer clients to the shelter now when they are looking to adopt an animal—or venture over themselves to help in the search. And they’ve helped the shelter with something Carbaugh considers more important than adoptions: returning animals to their original homes through better pet identification. By dedicating a position to lost-and-found, microchipping every adopted animal, and promoting the concept of microchips to the public and the veterinary community, the Nebraska Humane Society has managed to double its return-to-owner rate—from between 1,000 and 2,000 animals a year before the program started to more than 4,000 last year. “For so long we focused so much energy on doing adoptions and increasing them by this amount or that amount and kind of ignored the [idea of] getting them out of here within 12 hours to their original homes,” Carbaugh says. “And so when we took a look at everything as a whole, I think we got a better perspective on what our mission was.”

In the end, as everyone in the field already knows, the only way to solve a people-created and people-perpetuated problem is to provide assistance to those people through all stages of pet ownership. Yes, it does take a community—of shelters, adoption groups, veterinarians, pet owners, and others who have any association with animals—especially since the majority of people looking for a pet or seeking information about animals still do not come to shelters. But it also takes an individual, working one case at a time, approaching the sometimes fragile, sometimes sensitive, sometimes caustic, sometimes unsocialized, always enigmatic human being with that one question that works so well in our relationship with animals: Is he educatable?