Alexandra Protopopova and Kelley Bollen In this chapter, we will discuss both the experiences of the adopter as they navigate the selection and adoption process, as well as outline empirically based strategies that animal shelters can pursue to both improve adoption likelihood of their animals (Section 25.2) as well as ensure a successful adoption (Section 25.3). The concept of adopting out ownerless animals is fairly recent. Prior to the 1950s, the role of animal shelters was largely to remove loose animals from city streets in order to provide a quick death, with methods now understood as inhumane. Only later did animal shelters and humane societies begin exploring the concept of adoption rather than death as the outcome, and by the 1970s many facilities had adoption criteria in place (Troughton 2015). In the last two decades, there has been a shift in the adoption process within animal sheltering to focus on removing barriers to adoption—the philosophy of conversational adoptions. Previously, many municipal animal shelters required adopters to fill out lengthy applications and have the whole family present at the time of the application, conducted home visits and income checks, and set out many barriers to adoption. However, such an approach had serious consequences: the possibility of prejudice, limiting adoption, increasing unnecessary euthanasia, and ultimately not serving the community well. In fact, research has shown that adopter screening policies rarely match up with scientific rationale (Griffin et al. 2020). The alternative new philosophy entails seeing each adopter as an individual with personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as recognizing that adopters inherently mean well and are capable of gathering knowledge for appropriate animal care (Moulton 2003). In other words, the role of the adoption counselor, as discussed in Section 25.3, is to counsel and create a partnership rather than screen out adopters. Instead of finding reasons to deny an adoption, counselors now focus on aligning expectations of new adopters with the animals’ characteristics. This shift in thinking was prompted by a demonstration of two respected leaders in animal sheltering who showed that if they were truthful about their living circumstances, they would be denied an adoption application in many shelters. This demonstration of the impossible adoption criteria led professionals to reconsider the adoption process at an Adoption Forum, hosted first by the American Humane Association in 1999 and again by PetSmart Charities in 2003, and ultimately led to the shift in philosophy that we see today in many sheltering organizations (Troughton 2015). In fact, research shows that adopters from animal shelters that had an open adoption policy did not differ in the quality of care or retention of the adopted animal, compared to animal shelters with the older policy‐based adoption programs (Weiss et al. 2014). However, these philosophies seem to systematically vary depending on the total intake numbers in the region. Many communities with few animals coming into the shelters often have the privilege to conduct more matching to or screening of adopters simply due to having more resources available per animal. Additionally, due to increased resources, these communities are often able to admit and care for behaviorally challenging animals, thus a more thorough matching and screening program can reduce the chance of adverse outcomes such as injury to the family and the possibility of subsequent litigation. In contrast, for communities that are inundated with very large populations of companion animals serviced at the shelter, barrier‐free adoption is essential to avoid the substantial welfare risks of overcrowding and in‐shelter neglect. An additional emerging theme in adoption programs is to not view the return of the adopted animal as a fundamental harm. Instead, returns may be viewed as learning opportunities about that specific animal, which can make the next placement match easier. Additionally, new research shows that time outside of the animal shelter is beneficial to dogs and that returning back to the shelter does not seem to be more traumatic than coming to the shelter in the first place (Gunter et al. 2019). Similar research has not yet been conducted with other species, such as cats and small mammals. However, a recent study found that fecal cortisol concentration, a physiological marker of stress, was largely the same in a pet home three months after adoption, compared to the concentration while at the shelter, suggesting that cats may take longer to habituate to new environments (Fukimoto et al. 2020). Because we know that transport (e.g., to a veterinary clinic) is a highly stressful experience for cats (Quimby et al. 2011), returns or short‐term fostering may be more challenging for cats than for dogs. That being said, cats can learn to become accustomed to cat carriers and transport by car (Pratsch et al. 2018). Returns may also be beneficial for an additional reason—creating a partnership with the adopter. Rather than putting blame on the adopter for a failed placement, a return can be an opportunity to adopt out a different animal to the same adopter or at least create a new foster family or an animal shelter advocate. The field of marketing shows that establishing a new customer is much more costly than retaining an existing customer (Gallo 2014). Thus, it is logical to put effort into retaining the returning adopter as an adopter for that specific animal shelter rather than driving that adopter away. Allowing adopters to try out their new animal in their home through a “trial adoption” or “foster‐to‐adopt” program may also be beneficial in removing the stigma associated with returning the animal, as well as creating life‐long community partners who will recommend adoption to friends and family. Throughout the chapter, we will be echoing the theme of working together with the adopter in a partnership to help them find their animal and assist them in building a relationship with their chosen animal. It is generally beneficial to consider the adoption process from a customer’s perspective and use the science of marketing. By focusing on consumer behavior, we can describe and predict how adopters make decisions when choosing to adopt an animal. Additionally, we can learn how to determine what adopters want and need and by doing so, improve our ability to “sell” our “product”—or, in other words, increase adoptions. Kristen Auerbach, in a 2016 blog post, said it perfectly by highlighting the fact that most shelters do not use marketing approaches to their full potential. Instead, many tend to default to counseling (Auerbach 2016). For example, statements such as, “Lucky needs an active home with no children,” only function to scare adopters rather than increase interest in the dog. Whereas counselling has a necessary role to play in an adoption program, marketing needs to come first to bring the adopter into the shelter and open the door for the possibility of an adoption. In Section 25.2, we will describe the adoption process from the perspective of marketing science. We will cover how adopters make decisions when adopting animals and which animal factors predict adoption likelihood, as well as outline certain effective marketing strategies. To ensure high adoption rates, we must have a good understanding of our customer base—the adopter. Whereas research on the decision‐making processes of adopters is still in its infancy, scientists already have generated some data, which animal shelters can use to improve their adoption programs. The percentage of people who would consider adopting from an animal shelter seems to be on the rise as evidenced by continuous increases in dog adoptions over the years (Rowan and Kartal 2018). The main reported reasons for not considering the shelter as a source of the next companion dog are (i) believing that the shelter will not have the specific animal wanted and (ii) wanting a purebred dog, whereas the main motivations for adoption were reported as helping the animal (Maddalena et al. 2012 cited in Garrison and Weiss 2015) and it being the right thing to do (Zito et al. 2015). Survey research shows that whereas some adopters might be willing to drive more than 90 miles to get to an animal shelter, most will restrict their search within a 30‐mile radius (Garrison and Weiss 2015). This means that the majority of the adopters are coming from the local community of a shelter. It is important for the animal shelter to have an understanding of the demographics of their local community to both tailor adoption programs as well as ensure that no sectors of the community are neglected. Ensuring the animal shelter provides equitable services to all members of the community is essential. Previous policy‐based adoption programs were particularly poor at ensuring all community members were served by their animal shelter, as many adoption programs required moderately high family income in order to adopt. Income requirements as well as high adoption prices were justified by the flawed thinking that high family income was necessary to ensure good quality of life for the adopted animal. However, research shows that these concerns are unfounded; there were no differences in the attachment of adopters to their adult cats nor changes to return rates when adoption fees were reduced (Zito et al. 2015). In fact, a low advertised price of adoption was an important predictor of coming to a specific shelter as reported in a visitor survey (Crawford et al. 2017; Zito et al. 2015). One easy way to monitor whether the animal shelter provides services to all may be to request zip codes from visitors and subsequently ensure that the distribution across zip codes matches the overall population within those zip codes. If not, adoption programs may need to adjust accordingly. Many visitors to animal shelters will not adopt. In fact, as many as two‐thirds of visitors have no intention of taking an animal home that day (Southland et al. 2019). Most of these visitors do want to adopt in the future, but some have no intention to adopt at all. While many animal shelter staff are frustrated by these visitors as they may be viewed as taking staff’s valuable time for seemingly no reason, they present important opportunities for the shelter. If visitors have a good experience while they are visiting, they will come back to the shelter once they are ready to adopt. Additionally, even if they do not have any intention to adopt, the shelter may still recruit these visitors as volunteers. Ultimately, these visitors may be excellent future animal welfare advocates for their community. Thus, it is important to accommodate these visitors within the shelter. Finally, some visitors end up adopting an animal even when they had no original intention to adopt. These spontaneous adoptions should be encouraged as there is no difference between retention in spontaneous compared to thought‐out adoptions (American Humane Association 2013). Perhaps one way to mitigate the frustrations of overworked staff is for animal shelters to create volunteer positions that directly engage with the “just” visitors in order to capitalize on these available opportunities. In brick‐and‐mortar animal shelters, adopters seem to be making decisions in systematic ways. Of course, adopters already come with preconceived notions of their ideal animal (Garrison and Weiss 2015). However, once in the shelter, the majority of adopters seem to first browse all of the available animals and evaluate these animals initially based on morphology and, subsequently, on behavior. On average, visitors tend to stop and look at approximately one‐third of the available dogs and, once stopped, spend approximately 15–70 seconds looking at that dog (Protopopova and Wynne 2016; Wells and Hepper 2001). The interactions between the visitors and kenneled dogs can be grouped into distinct categories of behaviors: general affiliative interaction with the dog (e.g., speaking to, bending down, and reaching toward the dog) and actual interest in the dog (e.g., asking for more information about the dog and taking the dog out of the kennel). Ultimately, a given visitor, on average, takes about 1% of the dogs outside of the kennel for further interaction (Protopopova and Wynne 2016). Less research exists on understanding adopter behavior when browsing cats. Frequency of viewing the same cat predicted ultimate adoption but the duration of viewing did not (Fantuzzi et al. 2010). Adopters showed more interest in cats when they were housed in top‐tier cages and the cages contained a toy (Fantuzzi et al. 2010). Additionally, cats that displayed higher activity in their cages and lower stress (Gouveia et al. 2011) as well as human‐directed social behavior had a shorter length of stay at the shelter (Brown and Stephan 2020). Singly housed cats in traditional horizontal cages had the fewest adoption outcomes as well as the most stress behavior; even a simple re‐orientation of the cage to a vertical position and the addition of a shelf and towel to create a hiding area resulted in lower stress and higher adoptions (Gourkow and Fraser 2006). Whereas some behaviors of dogs inside their kennels were predictive of overall length of stay in the shelter (Protopopova et al. 2014), closer experimental evaluations demonstrated that in‐kennel training has no effect on adopter behavior. In fact, in an experimental study, only morphology of the dogs while in their kennel predicted visitor behavior (Protopopova and Wynne 2016). This suggests that the initial level of selection during the browsing phase is largely guided by evaluations of morphology. Whereas people have individual preferences for morphology, and thus, a variety of animals must be displayed, there are also overall population preferences for certain morphologies. Adopters seem to consistently prefer small‐sized dogs, puppies, certain breed types, long coat length, and perhaps a light coat color (Protopopova and Gunter 2017). Kittens, exotic breed status, unique coat patterns, and lighter colors are routinely preferred by cat adopters (Brown and Morgan 2015). Cat adopters seem to succumb to several notable biases when initially selecting cats for adoption. Black cats had a longer time to adoption (Kogan et al. 2013; Brown and Morgan 2015; Miller et al. 2019) and are judged to be less friendly and playful and more aggressive than light‐colored cats. These judgments were found to be driven by superstition as well as a perceived inability to read the cat’s emotion (Jones and Hart 2019). Cats that were labeled as owner‐surrendered were adopted faster than those labelled as stray, even if the two groups did not differ in their latency to approach a person and even when the only difference was the label rather than the cat (Dybdall and Strasser 2014). While seemingly superficial in their initial selection, we cannot be too annoyed with adopters—after all, even in romantic relationships, initial selection is based on appearance. People readily make judgements of character based on appearance; beautiful people are rated as being morally good, friendlier, kinder, more honest, and more trustworthy. In fact, we even choose political candidates based on appearance and give reduced prison sentences to beautiful people (Tsukiura and Cabeza 2011). Not enough research has been conducted on decision avoidance of adopters when they encounter numerous animals in the shelter. In a famous experiment, Iyengar and Lepper (2000) found that people were more likely to purchase a jam or a chocolate when offered a choice of 6 flavors rather than 30. Because of the fear of inducing this decision avoidance, some may be inclined to recommend limiting the number of animals that the public may see. This practice, for several reasons, may not be the best approach. Previous research has shown that adopters prefer variety and even choose to avoid shelters if they perceive that selection is limited (Maddalena et al. 2012 cited in Garrison and Weiss 2015). Additionally, allowing the public to view all animals, even those that are not ready for adoption, is likely to increase the public’s trust in the shelter and may establish the public as a partner. Ultimately, the research on the topic of decision avoidance in animal shelters is currently lacking thereby not supporting a recommendation to reduce the number of animals that the public can see. That being said, reduction of crowding and maintaining a shelter population within capacity for humane care is crucial to a successful adoption program in a given animal shelter. Crowding leads to unacceptable welfare concerns, including poor physical and mental health thereby reducing adoption rates (Janke et al. 2017; Hobson 2020). In summary, research supports limiting intake to ensure that the shelter is operating within its capacity for humane care; however, there is no published research to date that limiting the display of animals will reduce the supposed decision avoidance phenomenon. After the initial browsing phase, adopters pick about one to two dogs, on average, for a meet and greet. During this phase, morphology no longer plays a role, which makes sense considering that the initial selection already screened the animal for desirable morphology. During the meet and greet phase, adopters spend about eight minutes, on average, interacting with the dog, and about one‐third of the dogs are adopted following the meet and greet. For dogs, reciprocal play and lying down in proximity are the biggest behavioral predictors of subsequent adoption. Additionally, interacting in a small enclosed area led to the highest proportion of adoptions (Protopopova and Wynne 2014). Ultimately, adopters want to feel a connection to the animal—that the animal chooses to be with them, which is accomplished more easily if the dog is not distracted by other environmental variables. In an experimental study, when dogs were encouraged to stay in proximity and lie down next to adopters and only the dog’s favorite toy was allowed in the meet and greet room (in order to encourage reciprocal play), adoptions nearly doubled (Protopopova et al. 2016). While we do not have the same level of understanding of adopter behavior when it comes to cats, several researchers have asked adopters to reflect on their adoption decisions. Adopters reported that being able to interact with the cat by entering the enclosure as well as seeing their cat of interest interacting with other cats was important in their decision to adopt. Additionally, adopters reported selecting cats based on friendliness and playfulness (Gourkow and Fraser 2006). Latency to approach an unfamiliar person additionally predicted a shorter length of stay (Dybdall and Strasser 2014). Getting people into the animal shelter is crucial. While simplistic, we can estimate based on previous visitor behavior data that an animal shelter needs about 300 in‐person visitors per dog adoption. As 30% of visitors will visit online sites such as Petfinder® (www.petfinder.com) prior to coming to the animal shelter and 50% of adopters reported seeing their adopted cat’s online page (Workman and Hoffman 2015), any marketing approaches to increase adoption must start with the shelter’s online presence. In fact, having up‐to‐date information on available animals online is crucial—the number of clicks on an online profile of the animal had an inverse relationship with that animal’s length of stay at the shelter (Workman and Hoffman 2015)! A good online profile for an animal is up to date and has a good‐quality photo, perhaps a short video highlighting the animal’s best qualities, and an appropriate description. The animals preferably should be depicted outdoors, standing, making eye contact, and cats should have toys; having a person in the photo or having bandanas did not seem to make a difference to adopters (Lampe and Witte 2015; Schoenfeld‐Tacher et al. 2019; Workman and Hoffman 2015). Participants who viewed videos rather than photos of cats rated the cats as more adoptable (Schoenfeld‐Tacher et al. 2019), perhaps because they could better understand the cat’s personality. Additionally, removing breed labels did not seem to create any adverse consequences. Instead, after the removal of breed labels, one shelter in New York saw the length of stay reduced for all dogs and no changes in the return rates (Cohen et al. 2020). Researchers in Australia found that the following descriptive words predicted a shorter length of stay: “make you proud,” “independent,” “lively,” “eager,” and “clever.” However, words like “only dog,” “dominant,” “sensitive,” and “happy‐go‐lucky” actually increased length of stay (Nakamura et al. 2019). In addition, experimental research has demonstrated that adoption ads that use concrete and analytic language, rather than narrative language, resulted in higher interest from potential adopters (Markowitz 2019). Although more research is needed to clarify how language affects adopters, shelter staff must make conscious decisions when drafting the profile and focus on marketing the animal’s best qualities. The online profile should not contain warnings about potential matching issues (e.g., that the dog needs more training, needs to be an only dog, best in a home with no children, etc.). These issues, although critical, should be brought up with individual adopters during the counseling phase and not included in the initial marketing of the animal. When creating descriptions of the animal, take care to not be too negative about the previous circumstances of that animal. While sympathy is certainly a motivator for adoption, public‐facing animal profiles must be considerate of larger societal issues and avoid language that puts blame on the previous owner. Research has now rather conclusively shown that surrendering an animal is a deeply emotional decision and is tied to larger societal issues such as housing or financial insecurity (Ly et al. 2021). Likewise, animal profile creators must be mindful of not contributing to further discrimination by blaming entire groups of people. For example, phrases like “rescued from a lifetime on a reservation” are clearly inappropriate. Taking from human literature of what generates the most interest in profiles in romantic match‐making websites, descriptions should also be short, humorous, memorable, and, most importantly, focused on what the dog brings to the adopter. Additionally, the animal’s profile must be repeatedly posted on social media and frequently updated. People are susceptible to the “mere exposure effect,” by which simply seeing the same face repeatedly makes us perceive that face as more attractive. Additionally, updating the animal’s profile might also showcase that the animal shelter provides individualized care to each animal as well as improving the relationship with the community—community members may share the profile on their own social media platforms and perhaps even take a personal interest in the animal. However, take care not to accidently make the animal less desirable by including phrases like, “overlooked by adopters,” “still at the shelter,” or “waiting for over six months.” These phrases may indicate to adopters that since others do not want them, there may be something wrong with that animal. Instead, updates may include short cute stories. For example, if a volunteer took the dog for a ride in the car to get ice cream, a photo with the dog eating ice cream with a few words about his favorite flavor and overall experience may be included. Example “bad” and “good” profiles for dogs and cats are found in Boxes 25.1–25.4. Dog training with a mind to increasing adoption likelihood should focus on the meet and greet rather than in‐kennel presentation as that is where decisions based on behavior take place. Dog training should focus on teaching a dog to lie down next to a bench or a chair, where an adopter will subsequently sit. Additionally, volunteers may take the time to determine which toy and treats each dog likes best so as to provide this information to the potential adopter and thus increase reciprocal play (Protopopova et al. 2016). Dogs may also be taught to lie down and relax through relatively unstructured activities such as reading a book to the dog in the meet and greet area. The key is to not provide too much play and attention to the dog. Teaching a dog to relax in the presence of a person may not only improve their behavior in the meet and greet room, but may also be useful for the dog’s mental health. When showing the dog to the potential adopter, care must be taken to encourage the adopter to feel that the dog chooses them. Research has shown that when a person believes that they are liked by a stranger, that stranger becomes more attractive to them (Hove and Risen 2009). Additionally, joint attention and synchrony have been implicated in successful human relationships—shared activities lead to higher feelings of affiliation. Thus, encouraging shared activities such as reciprocal play is beneficial.
25
Animal Placement and Follow‐Up
25.1 History and Philosophy of the Adoption Process
25.2 Improving Adoption Likelihood
25.2.1 Adopter Characteristics and Behavior
25.2.1.1 Visiting the Animal Shelter
25.2.1.2 Decision‐Making at the Shelter
25.2.2 Marketing Approaches
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