I don’t know off the top of my head what the average across the country is, and imagine that overall statistics might be hard to come by. We hope to improve our numbers though and are always looking at how to improve our followups, behavior resources, etc.

Do you have any sense of what your “return rate” is?

Overall, I’m not sure if that’s one of the standard statistics used by shelters or rescues or not. It could - however - certainly be a useful piece of information in evaluating the true effectiveness of screening procedures.

At the Humane Society of Indianapolis, we had a record holiday adoption weekend as well (kudos to IACC!), with 65 pets finding homes. So far, with barely a week having passed in July, more than 140 pets have found homes, even after the holiday. A lot of them were adults who’d been with us for a long time - Piper and Ryker, two FIV+ kitties, had been here nearly all year, and Virginia, a Shepherd mix, had been with us for 5 months and treated for heartworms during her stay. These pets found homes through our regular adoption process and with the help of a simple holiday promotion. We’re thankful to the families who’ve welcomed new pets into their lives this month, and we also hope other shelters find similar success with simple promotions and lots of TLC for their animals!

I think with large municipal and county shelters, volume is an important key. If you send out 50 pets, and get 10 back, you have gotten 40 out of the system. If in the same time period, you use stricter criteria, don’t place with out intensive screening etc… and place 25 ( and still get 3-5 back,) you have still saved more and given more a chance.

However, the shelter I adopted from DOES have follow-up programs such as call-in helplines and post-adoption training classes and such. Which in some ways might be even more important for a lot of folks.

So I’m kind of with you in being torn. However, here’s a thought-provoking statement from the end of the article Christie linked to:

“No amount of screening or background checking will guarantee that an adoption will end up well. It is guaranteed, however, that animals that are adopted into a home have a 100% better chance of staying in a home than animals that don’t leave a shelter alive.”

That’s great - but were all those cats and dogs (and fish!!) adopted to the best matched family for them? No home checks, probably no one-on-one family-pet meetings (since how could the shelter manage that with 150 adoptions in one day?), etc.

I’m all for getting pets out of shelters ASAP, and I’ve run into my own problems trying to get a dog from a rescue with insane regulations (their rule was never to give a dog, any dog, to someone who had never owned a dog before), but events like this always make me wonder how many of those pets will end up back in the shelter in the next few months.

And aside from the in-your-face hostility, getting to the adoption applications, if you haven’t been turned off and decided to look elsewhere, requires going through a spam filter to prove you’re a person and not a ‘bot.

Their app was written by someone who believes that the only kinds of fences are “chain link”, “privacy”, and “invisible.” And it’s a mandatory question; can’t submit the app with choosing one of those three, or “none.” Are picket fences and rail fences and all the other varieties of fences I see in my neighborhood, illegal or unheard-of in Lake County?

The available adoption forms are Cat, Dog, and “Coffee and Donuts.” Really? They put buying coffee and donuts as part of a fundraiser on the same level with adopting a dog or cat? There was really no way to put their Krispy Kreme fundraiser link in a different spot, maybe with the Krispy Kreme logo making it a bit clearer what this was about, rather than including it in the list of “Adoption forms” ?

Really, aside from the waves of hostility flowing off of their site, these people are idiots.

I wonder how well that’s working out for them?

Here’s the opposite http://www.lakecountyanimalservices.org/

this is a private shelter in economically depressed, poor and rural Lake Co.
After reading through this site, I would not

bring a dog there
Adopt a dog there, as if they’d let me!
recommend anyone to them

Talk about hostility! I felt like taking a shower to wash the hate off, and the stink of Blame the Owner, you MADE us kill this pet!