A glimpse into the future from Dolitter:

Sign-overs occur when clients bring you pets they can no longer care for or whose treatment they cannot afford. Hospitals have the option of drafting a document that allows us to take over ownership of the pet to do as we like with them.

Though sign-overs are a humane option for placeable, treatable pets, lately it’s been getting to be harder for vet hospitals to do without cracking open that proverbial box of wigglies.

Here’s a scenario: A dog is riddled with fleas, requiring a transfusion (or three) to nurse him back to health. The owners can’t afford it so they agree to sign him over to the hospital.

A week later the dog is living with a technician who fell in love with him. She paid for the basic materials for his care, her own dog provided blood for the transfusions and she’s in love with her new baby whose life she helped save.

Meanwhile, the previous owners have come back to the hospital saying they’ve changed their minds. The tech doesn’t want to give up the dog. He was poorly cared for by them. She’s offering an infinitely better home and she knows it. Her stance is etched in stainless steel. She’s willing to risk her job over it.

But the former owners are unrelenting. They call the local TV news and next thing you know the story’s out that X hospital steals dogs from their clients. Your clients make the phone ring off the hook, perhaps wondering how you, their vet, could have become so cruel when you’ve always been so caring…

If you haven’t already this might be something to talk about with your local vet – a watertight rescue surrender form and the promise that the pet will be taken offsite for processing might be enough to protect these vets who are willing to lend a hand to rescue.

The March/April issue of Animal Sheltering Magazine, “What Happens After Happily Ever After” argues; that the real measure of a successful rescue isn’t the number of pets saved, but the number of successful placements.


So what defines a successful placement? If your client is happy with their pet; if the pet lives as family member, if any behavioural problems are managed to the client’s satisfaction and the pet has a lifetime home – that’s a successful adoption.


If the pet ends up back in rescue; if it is demoted to the backyard, if the person finds their pet unmanageable and vows to never buy another shelter pet again – obviously that’s a bad match.

 

But while adoptions will always involve a level of uncertainty, they need not be the end of a shelter’s relationship with pet owners. Ideally the day an animal goes home with a new family should be only one moment in an ongoing relationship between the organisation and the adopters.

Imagine how many anti-shelter animal messages could be produced by one frustrated adopter who, these days is likely to be chatting over lattes, text messaging her friends, sharing anecdotes with her workmates and blogging about her pet peeves on the web.

It seems pretty clear what you don’t know about your adoptions CAN hurt you.

So how many shelters actually know how well their placements are working? Do we acknowledge that we need to have happy customers in order to call ourselves effective? And what are we doing to check that our pet owners are indeed, happy?


By becoming more customer focussed, we’re not selling our pets short – we’re ensuring that they are ending up in a happy home for the long term.

Dear the PIAA,

You should change your policies and get live pets out of your stores.

Not because there aren’t statistics that make you look less accountable. Or because of any new laws that might be brought in to force you to stop.

But because the key to the PIAA’s success lies in being an organisation that the public feel they can trust, and the truth about commercial puppy breeding is very, very dodgy.

Realise the only thing you need to care about is how your customers feel about you and Oprah says pets in stores come from puppy mills.

Many of the dogs born in puppy mills end up in pet stores or sold on the Internet.
Oprah 2008

Once a person learns about dog farms, puppies in pet shop windows will make them feel sad. And people don’t spend money at places that make them feel anything but really, really good. It will become uncool to be seen with you – and that’s bad. And you’ll be in trouble if someone else presents an alternative.

Some of the biggest successes in the world at the moment are previously ‘unclean’ businesses becoming more community minded, or being overtaken completely by new, more ethical initiatives. Because that’s what consumers now demand.

Fighting to stop change in a society inspired by new ideals is a great way to be left behind. Instead have the guts to lead the charge.

Completely re-write what it means to be a pet store. Have the edge on your old-fashioned competitors by launching a publicity campaign that piggy-backs on the media frenzy generated by the Clover Moore bill and support it. Generate goodwill in the community by making ethics what sets you apart; your live pet-free policy means you in no way support puppy milling or breeders careless enough to sell to stores.

Change your story to customer focussed, progressive and one of the good guys. Rather than just trying to distance yourselves from the evils of retail pet sales.

As Seth Godin put so succinctly;

We’re responsible for what we sell and how we sell it. We’re responsible for the effects (and the side effects) of our actions. It is our decision.

You have the opportunity to be so far ahead in this new world, that when the tide turns and the pet industry is finally forced to evolve, that your competition never catch up to you. And you can sleep well at night, knowing you’re not condemning thousands of dogs to short or miserable lives.

Or you can fight alongside the profit motivated sellers and puppy millers to keep things the same.

It’s the opportunity of a lifetime – what will you do?

From a pound worker from the outer regions of NSW (about 7hrs out of Sydney).

 

“The work I mainly do now is 90% full time impounding dogs and trapping cats. So far since 1st June 2007, 1024 dogs and cats have passed through the small animal shelter, all bar 17 have been destroyed. You ask what can be done, I feel all companion animals should be desexed unless the owners are registered breeders of these animals”

See that? See how blame was shifted from a department failing to save animals and instead was put onto the “evil nasty public who won’t desex”.


If saving a pet is a success and killing a pet is a failure, these guys are failing 99.8% of the time. I don’t know of any other industry that would be happy with a 17 in 1,024 success rate – certainly nothing in the private sector where failure that extraordinary would make the papers.


Yet this group is allowed to blame and feel helpless, go in to work day in day and fail, while avoiding doing the one thing that could actually save these animals – taking a good hard look at their operations and asking “what are we doing wrong?”

• are we doing enough to work with rescue groups or could we find people to help us start one?




• do we offer enough in the way of discount microchipping and awareness of it’s importance?




• do we make it easy for low income earner to have access to desexing? Do we desex all the animal we release ourselves?




• can we promote our animals better? Use newspapers, internet or local media to let people know about us?




• do our location, opening hours and procedures make it easy for people to reclaim their lost animals?




• do we welcome people who want to adopt from us? Do we make it easy for them to do so?




• could we be moving animals to another location to keep from killing for space?




• are we working enough with our community? Are we involving them in solutions? Are our messages getting through? If not, why not?




• could we be doing more?

Blaming the public is a cop out; 17 pets saved out of 1,024 isn’t a desexing issue… thats an impotent animal control department.

Last month, a small WA city council voted to give the responsibility for investigating and prosecuting animal cruelty to a independant, volunteer run, non-profit organisation, rather than appoint an RSPCA inspector.

 
Seems great doesn’t it? A rescue initiative based on goodwill that disbands the monopoly on council tenders held by the RSPCA and puts animal welfare firmly in the hands of people who voluntarily care for the plight of animals. Certainly many in rescue were celebrating.


But what does this actually mean for rescue?


Now, to be fair this rescue group has significant experience so I do understand why they feel they have the best knowledge base to make changes in their city. And having officers to investigate complaints is a necessity to ensure the welfare of animals in the community. But this group has forgotten its purpose – saving as many homeless pets as possible.


If you’re a rescue group you should focus on rehoming and the growing infrastructure to do it. If you have limited resources to rehabilitate pets, support new pet owners, market your adoption services, fundraise and build goodwill in the community…
… why on earth would you risk damaging your reputation by taking on the duties of the ‘pet police’, and for your staff to do it for free?


When organisations stop being focussing on ‘happy feel good stories’ and start driving law enforcement, there’s a risk you will stop being seen as a group who only do good and start becoming someone to be wary of, or avoided altogether in the eyes of your public. Featuring in the local newspaper for seizing pets; being seen in court prosecuting owners and showing up at people’s front door is not how you build a feel-good factor or endear yourself to your community. Especially in a small country location.


Meanwhile, by offering volunteers, they’ve set a precedent that could make it hard for the rescue industry as a whole to ever be paid a decent amount for the valuable work that we do.


Let hope when, in the 2008/2009 budget, this group adds “Stray and Feral Cat Control” to their services, that they realise that becoming the unit whose volunteers seize and kill cats, won’t be good for building a base of dedicated pet-loving donors.


Me fears the animals of Kalgoorlie are the real losers in this one.

Hey guys,

Sorry I’ve not been around – have started a new job and so have been flat out! Good news is, it’s for a PR company so I’m hoping I can share lots of what I’m doing here…

And, do you know what the most excruitating thing in the world is? Sitting and pressing refresh on PetRescue for a whole morning!

From her show on puppy mills today

“The fact is, what they’re doing is not illegal,” Lisa says. “But the objective I think here is to raise awareness. People go into the pet stores, and they see these cute little puppies not knowing where they come from and what they go through.”