Carver Scott Humane Society

We lower adoption barriers so good people can adopt good pets. We do this by approaching adoptions from a place of yes. Instead of a rigorous applications and policies, we use conversation-based methods. Our goal is to help match the person to the pet and the pet to the person.

A 2014 study showed that people who adopt through conversation-based programs provide the same high-quality care to their pets as those who adopted through a policy-based program. In addition, the study showed that these people are just as likely to be highly bonded to their pets as policy-based adopters.

Learn more by visiting www.carverscotths.org/adopterswelcome

Serve Where You Save represents our belief that we must provide targeted, comprehensive services to any community from which we intake animals. This means that we focus only on communities where we can offer services from all four pillars.

Serve Where You Save allows us to dive into the underlying causes of pet homelessness instead of focusing only on the symptoms. Before we adopted this pillar, 66% of the animals we took in were owner surrenders or strays. That meant that we were using less than half of our intake capacity to help local impounds. Introducing services from our Fur Keeps pillars (intake diversion) and TNR pillar (trap neuter return for community cats) transformed the type of animals we saved. Owner surrenders dropped to 3%, and 79% of our animals were transferred in from shelters, impounds, and animal control facilities. This effort not only increased our live release rate to 97%, it allowed us to be better community partners, giving the agencies we were serving a chance at higher live release rates, as well.

Due to our limited resources, we have chosen to focus on supporting Minnesota pets and their families. Most of our animal comes from right here in the Twin Cities! We primarily work with animal control facilities and shelters to transfer dogs and cats into our organization. We then provide them with the vetting and care they need before adopting them back into the community. We plan to expand intake to areas outside of Minnesota as we have the resources and capacity to expand services from all of our pillars.

Learn more at www.carverscotths.org/servewhereyousave.

Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) is an effective approach to managing outdoor cat colonies and is successfully practiced in hundreds of communities across the country. It’s exactly what it sounds like: cats are humanely trapped and taken to a veterinarian to be spayed/neutered and vaccinated. After recovery, the cats are returned to their home (colony) outdoors. Kittens and cats who are friendly and socialized to people may be adopted into homes. TNR improves the lives of the cats, addresses community concerns, reduces complaints about cats, and stops the breeding cycle, essentially reducing the population.