Never let it be said that ASAP, the group that takes care of the cats at the county animal shelter, isn’t trendsetting. Last year, it inaugurated a (somewhat controversial) trend with its first-ever Certified Pre-Owned Cat Adoption Event – 0% down, 0% financing, NO payments. At the Second Annual Certified Pre-Owned Cat Adoption Event, this weekend, August 18th and 19th, qualified adopters can take home a fantastic shelter cat – spayed or neutered, vaccinated, microchipped, and ready to love – for free.
The controversy? Some in the animal welfare community feel that an animal acquired for free will be given less care than one that is bought, or that free adoptions somehow means no screening process. In fact, neither is true. Many people get pets for free; that doesn’t mean they love the animal less. And ASAP’s free adoptions involve screening every bit as rigorous as the paid ones.
What these events do is to generate excitement, which gets people up off their couches and out to the shelter. (That’s pretty much the language that one adopter used last year, as she took home a difficult-to-place 9-year-old cat.) Indeed, some people were so excited by advance PR that they came early, found their cat of choice, and paid the fee in order to make sure it didn’t get snapped up by someone else during the actual event!