Empty trucks return to shelters after Best Friends Super Adoption
Super adoptions are a signature Best Friends event. We didn’t come up with the idea, but we developed it into a model program 25 years ago and pushed it out across the country as a cornerstone of coalition building and the no-kill movement.
If you don’t already know, a super adoption is a highly publicized, multi-organization special event bringing together municipal shelters, local animal rescue organizations, hundreds of adoptable pets, and the animal-loving public. It’s an attraction greater than the sum of its parts that gets pets from shelters out of their kennels and into the public eye. That’s a big deal because even many of the most well-intentioned would-be adopters must steel themselves to visit a municipal shelter in person. The “party-in-the-park” atmosphere of a super adoption is a different story with a sense of community, celebration, and contribution.
On November 2 and 3, I had the privilege and pleasure to attend the Best Friends Super Adoption in Los Angeles at Rose Bowl Stadium, and this one lived up to its pedigree: 15 organizations including Los Angeles Animal Services, L.A. County, Riverside County, and local rescue groups joined; hundreds of dogs and cats sat ready for adoption; and celebrity guests including Allison Janney, Ron Perlman, Rob McElhenney, Kaitlin Olson, and Lauren Ash all did on-stage promotions of individual dogs.
The result was spectacular. More than 460 dogs and cats — including 100 from Los Angeles Animal Services’ shelters — were adopted, placed into foster care, or transferred to rescue groups. Every shelter truck drove back to base empty, and shelter staff were standing around at the end of the day wondering what to do with themselves without any dogs to wrangle!
It was a huge boost to the L.A. animal community and a gift from above for shelter staff.
Because of the scale of the event, media took notice. All the local news channels had cameras at the Rose Bowl doing stand-up interviews with staff and visitors. That kind of positive attention to the issue of pet adoption is priceless. And that’s just on the local level.
Celebrity participation moves the needle at a national level, elevating the cause and boosting adoption as the preferred way to acquire a pet. In fact, if only 6% more of the families planning to bring a new pet into their home in the coming year adopt from a shelter or rescue group rather than buy from a breeder or pet store, we would be a no-kill country. We are that close.
The message that a super adoption sends to the animal welfare community is that collaboration works for all concerned. Each organization can do more of what it does best when we are operating at scale and the public is engaged. The myth that there’s only a small pie of support for animal welfare that has groups vying with each other for a larger slice gets entirely blown up.
None of this is new. We have published various versions of this blog in various formats going back decades, but the story bears repeating, especially today as we head into the final stretch of the campaign to bring the country to no-kill in 2025. Super adoptions embody all the elements needed to reach that goal — collaboration, community engagement, lifting up local shelters, and letting the world know that the coolest type of pet is an adopted pet.
Together we will Save Them All.
-Julie
