Yes, it sounds weird but this Halloween store has a very successful partnership with a cat rescue organisation to enhance the prospects of rescues cats finding new homes.
Starr Beverly owns and manages Halloween Express in Johnson City, Tennessee, USA and she wanted to use her store to help find forever homes for cats at the Unicoi County Animal Shelter which is an 18 mins drive away (16 miles).
The video explains nicely the link up and how Starr’s initiative works both for her store in terms of sales as well as for the animal shelter in terms of more cat adoptions. Some of the cats were stuck at the shelter for quite lengthy periods before finding an adopter at Starr’s store.
There is a weird juxtaposition of plastic cat skeletons at the store (see photo) and real live rescue cats, even black cats.
There is an unhealthy association between black cats and Halloween as some black cats are injured during Halloween because of the ancient link between black cats and witchcraft. In fact some animal shelters don’t allow black cat adoptions during Halloween for this reason. But it appears not to be a concern in this partnership.
I wonder how many such partnerships between commercial enterprise and animal shelters there are in the US and whether there should be many more. It is another example of taking an imaginative approach to maximising rescue cat adoptions which is vital to minimising kill rates at shelters.
