Always a holiday for pet adoption

Shelter volunteer Elaine Seamans gets some love from a furry friend.

Some people just have a knack for matchmaking. Elaine Seamans, for instance, has arranged hundreds of long-term relationships.

Last Halloween, she helped kindle more than 80 love affairs in a day at the county’s Baldwin Park animal shelter. Dozens more found the mate of their dreams at her Fourth of July and St. Patrick’s Day pet-to-person meetups.

And this week, the county Department of Animal Care and Control will be expanding the shelter volunteer’s signature love fest—a hearts-and-flowers pet adoption extravaganza that has found homes for nearly 100 stray and abandoned animals during the last three years.

“The idea was just to use the holidays to celebrate adoptions,” says Seamans, a 58-year-old Valley Village designer who has been organizing “My Furry Valentine” at the Baldwin Park shelter since early 2011. “But this has just gotten bigger and bigger every year.”

Colorful and festive, the event turns the shelter into a giant Valentine for one day, welcoming prospective pet owners with chocolate, gift bags, music and doggie kisses. This year, each of the county’s six shelters will hold a more or less elaborate version of the Baldwin Park celebration through the Valentine weekend, with the usual $50 adoption fee discounted to a heartfelt $14.

Holiday-themed adoption events have been a growing trend for some time at rescue nonprofits—the Found Animals Foundation has long held an annual “Happy Pawlidays” campaign in December, for instance, and the Best Friends Animal Society holds an “aCATemy Awards” tied to Oscar season. But until recently, it was unusual for a county shelter to initiate this kind of promotion, according to animal control officials.

The reluctance stemmed partly from an ambivalence about holiday adoptions. People are tempted to give pets as gifts, “and having a pet isn’t like getting a sweater that you can return—it’s a lifetime commitment,” says county Animal Care and Control Director Marcia Mayeda.

But, she added, county shelters were also slow to get on the holiday bandwagon because the shelter staff is consumed with day-to-day animal care duties. Only in the past decade, she says, has the county shelter system developed a volunteer program with the base and coordination to do fundraising and event planning, and “a lot of this is dependent on volunteers.”

Seamans, who has been volunteering with Best Friends and other rescue nonprofits since the 1998 death of her dachshund Quackers, had been donating her time for about a year at the Baldwin Park shelter when she suggested to shelter manager Lance Hunter that more could be done to find homes for the bereft dogs and cats in the shelter kennels.  That, she says, is when she pitched the Valentine idea.

“It started out as just this little grassroots thing with just a couple of volunteers and some decorations,” says Hunter. But when their usual rate of eight or ten adoptions per day nearly tripled, he says, he took Seamans up on her offer to do more holiday events.

Since then, he says, other county shelters have begun hosting their own festive campaigns, and no holiday has been left behind when it comes to rustling up homes for pets at the Baldwin Park shelter. Last year, Seamans and her fellow volunteers organized events at Christmas, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth of July and Halloween, which Hunter said “topped the charts” at the shelter for holidays.

Among the attractions at the Halloween event were a fog machine and buckets where humans could bob for apples and dogs could bob for cocktail wieners, says Seamans. But “My Furry Valentine” is still the most elaborate promotion.

Among last year's highlights was a "kissing booth" for pet lovers.

“Last year Elaine put frames and flowers around the outside of the kennels, and hung signs all over that said things like, ‘Your Best Friend Awaits’ and ‘Your Heart Is Missing Something’,” laughs Hunter. “We even had face painting and a ‘kissing booth’ built with some of the donations. And she got a young actor she knew to dress up as Cupid.”

“This year we’re getting a harpist,” adds Seamans. “This woman is donating her time in honor of her retriever, who passed away in January. Can you imagine? A harp player in the kennel! I’m dying to see how the dogs react to that.”

Mayeda says holiday events not only save pets’ lives, but also generate donations to the county’s Animal Care Foundation and improve morale among the county’s now-thriving ranks of volunteers.

They also put a friendlier face on the county system, says Seamans.

“A lot of people think shelters are scary,” she says. “They think they’re death camps, or where the ‘problem dogs’ go.”

But when people actually meet the pets, she says, they’re less concerned about their surroundings. All three of the dachshunds she has now—Quizzie, Fred and Doodles—were strays or abandoned. And after the 2011 event at which her teenaged actor friend Lou Wegner played Cupid, he returned to shoot a music video at the Baldwin Park shelter to benefit pet rescues.

In any case, she says, few things are more heartwarming than matching the perfect pet with the perfect family. Take, for instance, the note she got from a young mother who adopted a little dog for her 6-year-old son on a therapist’s recommendation last Valentine’s Day.

“Ohhhh, she is soooo good. Her name is Sassy,” the mother emailed. “Since the day we brought her, she let us know when to take her outside . . . She does love the bed, so we suckered her into sleeping with us or the kids. She is perfect for us—thank you.”

And that, she says, is just the product of one love story among hundreds.

“I tell people that the shelter is where your best friend is waiting,” says Seamans. “These animals are out there just waiting to show you how great you are.”

For more on “My Furry Valentine”, click here. And for more on the county’s other pet adoption programs, click here.

Posted 2/13/14