In this trying year, shelters come out ahead
COVID-19 presented everyone with an everchanging and challenging landscape in 2020. For animal shelters, shutting down their campuses meant that dogs and cats weren’t being seen or adopted.
Shelters had to think quickly about how they could continue adopting out pets. And in spite of limitations that kept shelters closed to the public for many months, San Antonio animal groups found creative ways to keep services going, which ended up exceeding their expectations in many ways.
When the pandemic started, the Animal Defense League leveraged its technology to give the public more online access to pets on its campus. It updated the website several times a day so people could look for pets in real time. When people found an animal they wanted to meet, they could make an appointment to meet that pet.
“Once an individual arrives for their appointment and selects an animal or animal(s) they feel would be a great addition to their family, our team then completes our adoption application and contract processes outside in the open air environment while maintaining safe social distancing,” ADL Executive Director Joel Mclellan said.
The strategy worked. While pandemic closures led to a 60 percent decrease in visitor traffic from 2019, ADL found homes for 5,225 dogs and cats as of Nov. 1, compared with 5,298 in all of 2019. And with several weeks left to go, Mclellan anticipates 2020 will set an adoption record.
While overall adoptions, rescues and return-to-owner rates dropped 10 to 20 percent this year at San Antonio’s Animal Care Services, its 92 percent live-release rate is the highest in the city shelter’s
history, according to ACS spokeswoman Lisa Norwood. In fact, she said, this is the first year ACS has maintained a 90 percent placement rate for the entire year, and curbside pickup for adopters, rescuers and
foster volunteers — created because of the pandemic — is now a permanent part of the services it provides.
While adoptions are also down for the San Antonio Humane Society, the group reported that wellness services more than doubled this year. SAHS launched curbside services because of the pandemic, and the public, with perhaps more time on their hands, got their pets up to date on their vaccinations in record numbers.
It’s not easy adapting to a new normal that requires strategies for keeping people safe while at the same time encouraging people to adopt pets. Despite the pandemic and loss of traffic to animal shelters, though, San Antonio shelters did manage to create new ways to care for and find homes for pets. And foster volunteers and adopters stepped up in a big way to help.
It’s something to be thankful for this holiday season.