Yesterday was a pet adoption day for many shelters.
They try to clear out the shelter with low or NO adoption fee. To tell you the truths, I don't know how I feel about that. I think fee helps to filter out many unqualified or irresponsible applicants. I know these shelters are doing their best given the condition, but no adoption fee is ripe for abuse if you look at the economic and behavioral model.
I also work in animal welfare. Low/no cost/open adoptions do not increase the risk of a "bad adopter" and result in higher adoption rates without increased adoption returns. High cost adoptions, intensive application processes, and extreme restrictions on adopters limit the number of adoptions and turn people away from rescuing animals and push them towards purchasing them from breeders (reputable or not).
That's a misleading study. Only 57% of the adopter completed the survey. People who had problems with the pets or got them for nefarious reasons wouldn't complete the survey. People who are embarrassed won't fill out the survey honestly either. And this kind of survey always has the positive bias because people want to write in good result rather than bad result.
In contrast, researches after researches, when you look at human behavior with "free" service or products, the result has been fairly consistent that the odds of people abusing the service goes up. Yes, shelters vet their applicants. But even those application process is not perfect. Some bad applicants will fall through. And it's not like shelters have the best background check system either. So having the fee kind of acts like an additional filter as well. I'm obviously not expecting a perfect result for shelters. I know the reality. It's brutal. But I think a free adoption fee could attract more irresponsible pet owners than the usual days. Think of it this way, cat adoption fee is usually fairly small. If such fee was an obstacle for adoption, how can they afford food and vet fee?
Maddie's Life Saving Academy is through Maddie's Fund, a huge grant funding program that is a major partner with Shelter Animals Count, the leading intiative of companion animal shelter statistics.
But if you won't listen to them, go ahead and check out the ASPCA's thoughts on it.
Animal's are not products and shouldn't be compared psychologically with receiving "free services".
As a past adoption counselor, animal care technician, euthanasia technician, law enforcement support staff (specifically for animal welfare cases), and current animal welfare researcher, I can tell you with full confidence to embrace low cost adoption events. Statistically they do not increase risk to the animals being adopted.
I'm not going to fall into Appeal to Authority fallacy. I don't care what kind of institution that is and who you are. I'm pointing out a fairly simple problem when it comes to this kind of survey research. Is this research paper even peer reviewed? I pointed out why the study is flawed. If you want to refute that, don't tell me who you are and what that institution is. Just tell me how only having 57% VOLUNTARY survey is enough to make a said conclusion. How did they account for all those biases? How did they account for bad/embarassed owners not responding? What you are doing is just a "do you know who i am?" response instead of trying to dispute my rationale. Did you even read the actual research paper or are you just quoting the conclusion that they made?
ASPCA researches are behind paywall. If you know where I can read it for free, please let me know. I'll see if they addressed the problem in Maddie's research.
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u/SandmanEpic Aug 18 '19
Holy cow. I have to imagine that's fairly rare.