Home checks, references, waiting periods, and more barriers keep animals in shelters when they have loving people ready to take them home. Let's take a look at recent research around shelter adoptions.
In 2020, approximately 347,000 dogs and cats were killed in American shelters just because they didn’t have a place to call home. According to the American Pet Products Association 2020-2021 annual survey, 90.5 million American households included a pet: the issue is clearly not a lack of available homes.
Although increased pet adoption from shelters is the ultimate solution to end killing as a method of population management, many shelters and rescue groups still have restrictive policies in place that deter potential adopters. While proponents of restrictions on adopters believe that lowering these barriers results in lower-quality placements (Pierce, 2018), the research currently available does not support these claims.
Adoptions Save Lives
For example, a 2018 study by Kerr et al. examined the live release rate (i.e. the number of animals who left the care of the shelter alive) for cats at RSPCA Queensland shelters between 2011 and 2016. Their study concluded that 5,830 fewer cats were killed by increasing adoptions from the shelter locations, adoption location partnerships with pet supply stores, special adoption events, and increasing foster home placements (Kerr et al., 2018). While the scope of this study did not detail the shelter’s adoption policies, we may infer based on their results that they embraced an approach conducive to higher volumes of adoptions.
Open adoption is an animal services industry term used to describe a conversation based adoption counseling approach that seeks to understand each individual adopter’s situation and preferences in order to make an adoption match.
Instead of relying on time-consuming and often impractical practices like inspections of the potential adopter’s home or extensive reference checks, organizations practicing open adoptions place animals into a home on the same day following an abbreviated adoption counseling process.
Trusting People to Help
In a 2014 study, Weiss et al. compared the quality of care provided by adopters who were matched with animals using two discrete methods of adoption counseling. The first period continued the shelter’s original more restrictive policy-based adoption practices and the second introduced open, or conversation-based adoptions. The authors concluded that the policy-based practices resulted in fewer adoptions due to the inherently discriminatory nature of the criteria.
However, the volume of adoptions is not the full picture— those who practice policy-based adoptions do so under the assumption that they will find better placements for animals than open adoptions. The study did not support these assumptions: “[their] findings indicate that those that adopt through conversation based adoptions (policy-free) provide similar high quality care and are just as likely to be highly bonded to their pet” (Weiss et al., 2014).
Given the comparable outcomes between the two approaches and the life-or-death urgency to find live outcomes for animals, the open adoption approach is preferable in its greater efficiency in connecting animals in need to people willing to care for them.
Open Minds, Open Hearts
Advocates of more restrictive policy-based adoptions claim that removing barriers to adoption such as landlord checks by adoption counselors result in more animals being returned to the shelter (Pierce, 2018). Yet a 2020 study by Hawes et al. tracked reasons for the return of adopted dogs and cats at a shelter in Austin, Texas and found that dogs were most often returned for behavior challenges (55.9%) and cats were most often returned for “personal” reasons (56.9%) including moving to a new place (19.4%), none of which could be eliminated through pre-adoption screening policies.
The study authors found that the percentage of adoption returns due to landlord restrictions was just 3.9% for dogs and 2.8% for cats, a statistically irrelevant number compared with total dog and cat adoptions and certainly not enough to justify landlord screening for every potential adopter. Hawes et al. concluded that effective adoption policies include services both before and after adoption, including access to behavioral support and affordable veterinary care.
De-stigmatizing Returns
Even if it were true that less restrictive adoption policies result in more adoption returns, a 2018 study by Patronek and Crowe found that adoption returns did not result in more dogs killed in the shelter. The study sought to identify predictors of live release for dogs at large, open-admission municipal shelters where “lower live release may be assumed as inevitable… …due to their high volume, unselected population of dogs, unpredictable timing of intakes, and limited resources to devote to placement and adoption, compared to limited admission shelters” (Patronek & Crowe, 2018).
Although adoption returns are considered by many in the animal welfare field as failures, Patronek and Crowe’s data showed that 94.5% of the dogs returned subsequently left the shelter’s care alive. The authors concluded
“Dogs returned from adoption have a live-release advantage as well, which suggests that the temporary experience in a home is not detrimental and may have facilitated the likelihood of live release after return, akin to a foster situation.”
All animal advocates share the goal of finding safe, loving adoptive homes for animals in shelters who need them. While traditional animal adoption policies include restrictive policies designed to screen adopters out based on one-size-fits-all factors, the available studies suggest that these policies do not increase the quality of the adoptive home or prevent adoption returns.
While more studies are needed to reinforce recent findings, the evidence suggests that open adoption practices based on conversations with potential adopters yield the same quality of adoptive homes and an increased number of adoption placements at a faster rate. Given the need for more adoptive homes to prevent unnecessary killing of dogs and cats in shelters, practicing open adoptions is a key factor in achieving success.
References
American Pet Products Association. (2021, March). Pet industry market size, Trends & Ownership Statistics. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp.
Best Friends Animal Society. (2021, June). National dashboard. Retrieved September 26, 2021, from https://ww2.bestfriends.org/no-kill-2025/animal-shelter-statistics.
Hawes, S. M., Kerrigan, J. M., Hupe, T., & Morris, K. N. (2020). Factors Informing the return of adopted dogs and cats to an animal shelter. Animals (2076-2615), 10(9), 1573. https://doi-org.proxy.li.suu.edu:2443/10.3390/ani10091573
Kerr, C. A., Rand, J., Morton, J. M., Reid, R., & Paterson, M. (2018). Changes associated with improved outcomes for cats entering RSPCA Queensland shelters from 2011 to 2016. Animals (2076-2615), 8(6), 95. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani8060095
Patronek, G., & Crowe, A. (2018). Factors associated with high live release for dogs at a large, open-admission, municipal shelter. Animals, 8(4), 45. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ani8040045
Pierce, J. (2018, October 18). Is the trend toward open adoption good for animal welfare? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-dogs-go-heaven/201810/is-the-trend-toward-open-adoption-good-animal-welfare.
Weiss, E. , Gramann, S. , Dolan, E. , Scotto, J. and Slater, M. (2014). Do policy based adoptions increase the care a pet receives? An exploration of a shift to conversation based adoptions at one shelter. Open Journal of Animal Sciences, 4(5), 313-322. 10.4236/ojas.2014.45040.
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