As many of you know, we adopted a kitten on July 4th and she had some serious unexpected problems. You can read about them here, here, and here. Since the last post, Oreo has made a complete recovery and will be getting her final 2 staples out this Friday. She is a healthy spunky little kitten!

Baby Oreo

Adopt-a-Pet Guest Post
(All information in this post is coming directly from Adopt-a-Pet representatives)

Adopt-a-Pet.com is the world’s largest non-profit pet adoption website. We are like an ad agency for shelters and shelter pets. Sadly there are 4 million healthy adoptable companion animals killed in shelters each year due to overcrowding. We do our best to relieve that problem and put pets from shelters in the homes of pet seekers all over the country.

Our website makes it easy for anyone with an internet connection to find profiles and pictures of adoptable animals by location, breed, gender, age, size, and color. Over 8,000 shelters posts pets on our website displaying over 125,000 pets available for adoption at any given time. We also help volunteers connect with shelters, and currently host thousands of people listed in our volunteer database for shelters.

What Makes Adopt-a-Pet.com Unique?

On our website, people can use something we call “Search Saver.” This feature will notify users by e-mail when a particular pet of their specifications in available for adoption. For example, I can tell “Search Saver” where I live, and what type of breed I am looking for. When that animal is available, I am notified the next time a pet matching my search is added on Adopt-a-Pet.com.

In addition to dogs and cats, we now feature all kinds of pets for adoption, including rabbits, farm animals, ferrets, hamsters and other small animals, horses, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and even fish. This was a major initiative that took many months to research and program into the site, and it is being well-received within the shelter community.

By teaming up with the renowned street-artist Shepard Fairey, who designed the iconic Obama “Hope” image, we have available a number of stylish ways to promote pet adoption. Shepard was able to translate his work with Obama to an image that can be used to represent pet adoption support. Merchandise can be found at MuttsLikeMe.

Let’s Q&A

Q: If someone reading this isn’t in a position to adopt a pet right at this time, but still wants to help homeless pets, what are 5 things they can do to get involved?

A: 1. People can do Social PETworking! They can run a search on Adopt-a-Pet.com, find a pet they want to help get exposure for, and use the share tools on our site to post the pet link on their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or other social network page. Or, they can email the link of a pet in need form our site to their friends.

2. They can place a link/grpahic or even a search widget for Adopt-a-Pet.com on their personal website to encourage they users to see pets in need at local shelters.

3. People can add their info to our volunteer database so shelters who need volunteers can find them.

4. People can search Adopt-a-Pet.com to find a local shelter, and make a cash donation to that shelter to help them with the costs of housing, feeding and medical care of shelter animals.

5. People can encourage other pet owners to spay or neuter their pet to help prevent unwanted births.