How to rock your pet adoption listings

Have you ever wondered if there's some secret to writing successful adoption pleas for a homeless animal? There definitely is.

It's not to make the animal seem as victimized as possible. It doesn't involve making people feel pity or guilt or horror. It definitely doesn't have anything to do with ominous or frantic warnings that the pet will be killed in horrible ways at an uncaring animal control facility if someone doesn't step up and adopt him.

Some of the research done for the Ad Council's Shelter Pet Project (which I do some work for) revealed that the main reason people who start out wanting to adopt a pet from a shelter don't carry through on that plan is that they're worried that the pets in shelters come with too much baggage, and have too many health and behavior problems to fit into their families.

PetSmart Charities also researched obstacles to adoption, and while they broke down their data into categories that seem designed to drive a pet overpopulation message rather than one promoting pet adoption, if you look at their findings, they're actually quite similar to the Shelter Pet Project's.

While the inability to find the kind of pet (17 percent) or breed (13 percent) desired are the number one and two reasons people fail to adopt, for a total of 30 percent, that total is misleading.

The other ten reasons given for not adopting, which add up to 68 percent, are all perceived problems or concerns about shelter adoptions in general -- health and behavior problems of shelter pets, poor customer service or other bad experiences at shelters, etc.

So if fears about either shelter pets or shelters themselves are the main obstacles to adoptions among those who have indicated they'd like to adopt a pet, it stands to reason that emphasizing the negative things about an individual pet or the facility where that pet is housed will do nothing but make those obstacles worse.

That's because relentless negative messages make the vast majority of people shut down and avoid the negativity instead of taking a desired action. Or rather, such messages are often very effective for getting people to donate money, but are much less so in getting them to walk into a shelter and adopt a pet to live with their kids.

Even worse, those negative messages risk not only turning most adopters away from that pet, but turning them away from the idea of adopting altogether.

What does work to get people to consider adoption is seeing the pet as an individual, with his or her own personality and story. The pet doesn't need to be perfect, and certainly shelter and rescue workers shouldn't hide illnesses, potential problems or special needs from prospective adopters.

But don't lead with the animal's problems. Don't start out talking about how abused the dog was, or how the cat was "dumped" or "abandoned." Don't castigate the previous owners or begin your description talking about the pet's health or behavior challenges, if any.

After all, when we fall in love with people, we do it on the basis of the things about them we find appealing. When we later learn about their flaws, we usually take them in stride.

Shouldn't we give prospective adopters a chance to fall in love before hitting them over the head with the sob story? Can't we devote, I don't know, a paragraph to the things that make that animal special and wonderful before we mention the dog's heartworm infection or the fact that the cat doesn't like men?

Last weekend I was hanging out with a cute little puppy who needs a home. She's safe in foster care, and she's healthy and has a great personality, so there's really no "sob story" here, and no problems, unless the fact that she's a pit bull counts as a "problem."

I was snuggling with this little girl outside of Whole Foods Market in Sacramento, getting my chin kiss-chewed and marveling at her pretty face and sucking in that wonderful puppy breath. She was a feisty little thing in her neon pink collar, and I started making her dance around my lap singing the greatest hits of Joan Jett and the Blackhearts... "Bad Reputation," "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" -- you know the songs.

"Should I name her Joan Jett?" her foster mom, Jennifer Fearing, asked, laughing at me.

I had a different idea.

"I used to have a pit mix named Lita," I said. "She was named after Lita Ford, the guitar player in Joan Jett's first band, The Runaways. You could name her Lita because she's a perfect rocker chick puppy, and in honor of my Lita, too."

And so it was done. A pretty little pup in a pink collar became a bad-ass rock 'n' roll pit bull puppy destined to make some bad-ass rock 'n' roll chick a happy dog mom.

It may not be an image that appeals to you, but it's exactly how you give a pet a personality. And while of course Lita is perfect, even if she does turn out to have a few flaws, well... if you like those rocker babes, you won't care. You'll just love her even more.

And if you or someone you know are, in fact, in the market for a bad ass rocker girl pit pup, let me know in the comments!

Photos of Lita the puppy taken by Jennifer Fearing, her foster mom. Photo of my Lita taken by me. And the photo of Lita Ford is by Shadowgate and  is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Comments

[Lis]

Speaking of rocking your adoption listings:

Adopt Munchkin



They also got a really engaging segment on NECN, the regional cable news network:

Munchkin the pug is fast on wheels

[Erica]

I think there is a good reason they usually put the pet's flaws up first. If someone is searching for a new pet and can only get on for say 30 min at a time when they also have to check email, write people back, etc., they don't want to spend 10 min reading about a dog they think they might want only to find out in the last sentence that the dog has an issue that makes it unfit for their home. For instance, if you see first off that a dog cant be in a home with cats, you can skip their profile and read in depth info on a dog that gets along with cats.