Animal Welfare Professionals

Do you hold dogs or puppies back from the adoption floor to attend adoption events? Our goal is always to expedite adoption outcomes, but trying to balance that with ensuring that a good variety of dogs are available to take to events is a challenge. How do you handle this at your organization?

Same question for those of you who do large volume transports. We're finding that if we keep animals available while in the queue for transport we don't have much to send once transport day comes, which is a great problem to have, but a lot of staff time is wasted doing health certs, behavior assessments, photos, etc. since animals have to be approved so far in advance. 

Any advice is greatly appreciated! 

Thanks, 

Nichole

We never hold. Adoption is the priority, there is never a guarantee that a particular dog or puppy will get adopted at an event, so if they have an opportunity to get adopted at the shelter we let them go. The events coordinator makes a list of candidates the day before the event, then the morning of the event she goes through her list and pulls from the kennel whatever dogs are left. There have been times that as she is taking a puppy or dog from the kennel and  someone wants to adopt him, so she lets that dog go to adoption and finds a another substitute for the event.

If we have large fundraisers our org puts on then we'll hold them back a few days but for smaller community events we do not hold. You're right, it's a tough balance because the cute highly adoptables are the ones that draw the most attention and (mostly likely) bring in more donations. We also ask our staff and/or volunteers to bring their pets (ambassadogs) to community events which helps. 

For adoption events, we've been using foster as our refill so we send more out to foster before the event, get them adoption ready. Then the night before, we get all the spaces filled with the foster dogs. In terms of transport, I'm not help!

We will sometimes hold back depending on the importance and size of the event. Like you, we prefer to keep everyone's length-of-stay as short as possible, but we balance that with things like commitments we've made to adoption partners. Typically we try to arrange intake to ensure we'll have extra animals in-house for the event, but sometimes that doesn't work out for one reason or another.