Shelters Doing Good

The traditional shelter paradigm is sad and depressing. After all, it results in the deaths of healthy, treatable dogs and cats each year. So here are some ideas, programs, things shelters are doing that help dogs and cats.

Live in Wisconsin? Have an iphone? Want to adopt a dog or cat? There's an app for that, yo. The Wisconsin Humane Society created an app to check out the adoptable animals at their shelter. Animal adoptions for the 21st century.

The Edmonton Humane Society is overrun with cats, adopt some now! There's 400 of them, whoa! Some of these cats will not thrive in a home environment and instead of killing them, the shelter is offering them for FREE (OH NOES, the fear of free, peeps!) as barn cats. You still gotta give them food and water, but in return they'll growl at you and maybe eat some mice (run away, mice, run away). So it's a win-win, especially for the cat.

Some shelters are bucking the "pets don't make good 'gifts'" trend and encouraging people to thoughtfully and responsibly consider adopting a dog or cat this holiday season. Adoption tip - try and avoid creating a reason to AVOID adopting animals, not when you don't have to!

It's not just privately funded shelters doing some good stuff, either! Fort Worth Animal Care and Control doubled their adoption rate this year by hooking up with PetSmart, which spent all the money to build an adoption center inside their store and donates $15 to the shelter for every animal adopted. PetSmart benefits - what happens when a person adopts a dog or a cat? THEY BUY THEM STUFF!