News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
The Cookeville/Putnam County Animal Shelter is making pet adoption more affordable this week in the final push before Christmas.
Shelter Director Jennifer Tracy said the “Home for the Holidays” promotion aims to get pets into new homes as quickly as possible. Adoption fees are nearly cut in half across the board with puppies for $100 and kittens for $75 through Saturday. Tracy said Christmas is always a popular time for pet adoption.
“We still have quite a number of cats and dogs, so we wanted to do something that benefitted both, and we’re off to a good start,” Tracy said. “We adopted out 15 dogs on this past Saturday when the event started, and we’ve been needing to move some dogs. The larger dogs have definitely been struggling to get adopted.”
Tracy said she is glad to be able to relieve some of the financial stress for those looking to adopt a pet for a loved one.
“Right now, there’s property taxes, there’s shopping for everybody else, there’s a lot of other expenses going on,” Tracy said. “We were fortunate that we had some funding come available so that we could at least reduce our adoption fees and for those people wanting to have a pet join their family, hopefully, ease the financial burden of that a little bit.”
Tracy said the shelter also sees a rise in adoptions during the holiday season because people have more availability to train a pet or get it acclimated to its new home. Tracy said kids are out of school and parents often have time off work to be around their new pet and help ease the transition, so she is happy to see people adopting animals when they have plenty of time to help them get comfortable in a new environment.
Tracy also said people have become more aware of the benefits of sharing their homes with animals, making it more rewarding to see animals get adopted by the dozen.
“Everybody knows by now that there’s definitely a benefit to having a pet in your home,” Tracy said. “I mean, there’s the health benefits, the emotional benefits. The human-animal bond is very strong, so that’s just something that people really feel strongly about and connect with.”
Tracy said she has noticed a trend in people being more considerate when gifting pets. In the past, January and February were often months when many pets were returned to shelters when people realized they did not have the time to take care of an animal, or they did not want the pet they had been gifted. That problem has lessened in recent years.
“People are being more thoughtful about doing this,” Tracy said. “Rather than surprising someone with an animal as a pet, the adopters or the gift-givers are engaging the recipient in the selection of the pet, so I think people are being more thoughtful and we’re not seeing that pattern as much as we did 10-15 years ago.”
