Love your Pet Day – Can We Adopt Our Way Out of Pet Overpopulation?

Over the last couple of weeks, Merritt Clifton’s online publication has had several guest posts about why spay/neuter is the solution to our pet overpopulation problems around the world! Yes, folks, we are going to start addressing this issue on a worldwide scale. What perfect timing, as today is Love your Pet Day – Can We Adopt Our Way Out of Pet Overpopulation?

If you haven’t read these posts I would highly recommend checking these out. It has sparked the conversation and several others joined in, as well!

Love your Pet Day

Today’s blog topic was set before these posts came out, since today is Love your Pet Day. I felt it would be appropriate to address adoption and its importance to us and to the cats in our communities, so what wonderful timing!

I fully agree with Dr. Young that we can not adopt our way out of pet overpopulation. However, I also think we need adoption programs to further continue our population control efforts. In Massachusetts, we are doing well with population control. Shelters are now adopting out fewer animals. If this is the case, how are people sourcing their new pets?

Generally, it is via Craigslist, Pet Shops and from friends and family. Those numbers may be going down, though, especially for kitten acquisition!

Right now in MA we are starting to see an uptick in local kitten surrenders. This is because people are sourcing more kittens outside of the sheltering system and therefore outside of a ‘spay/neuter before adoption’ market. Therefore, if we really want to have an environment where communities aren’t allowed to have an uptick in breeding, we need to have more stringent rules for spay/neuter for before adoption from backyard breeders and pet shops.

Some shelters are worried that they are going to put themselves out of business with lowering adoption numbers. I say that we may be in the business of sheltering for the wrong reasons! Some feel that the only way to raise money is by having rescue stories. This can lead to donations more easily for adoption programs.

I have heard many, many times how hard it is to raise money for spay/neuter. The reason we need high volume adoptions at our shelters is to ensure that community pets are spayed/neutered before they ever go home! Therefore, legislation will need to change, along with spay/neuter trends for. Without strong enough incentives in place to anyone for spay/neuter accessibility, we need to continue to supply our adoption programs!

The bigger question is how to do we do that when our local supply is low? Conversations like transport and intentional birthing from within a humane society are either talked about or already done. Therefore, I would say yes! We can adopt our way out of pet overpopulation and it will be interesting to see what happens next!