The CAT board meeting in August ran forty minutes long, and all of the overage was one line item. We are running out of cats.
That is not a sentence I expected to write this year. The Cat Adoption Team has been placing animals faster than intake since roughly April. Foster applications tripled. The hard cases went first, or close to it: the adult cats, the black cats, the nine-year-old with a thyroid condition who had been with us since Thanksgiving.
It is the best placement year in the shelter's history. I am also, quietly, braced for something.
Because I do this for a living on the other side, and I know what an acquisition spike looks like when a temporary condition is driving it. January gym memberships. Meal kits in the first month of a diet. MoviePass, which signed up three million people with an offer that only worked as long as nobody used it much. The signup is never the hard part. The signup is the fun part.
An adoption is not a transaction. It is the opening of a fifteen year relationship, and no boom in history has been followed by a retention plan anybody actually staffed.
What worries me is not the people. The people are wonderful. It is the conditions they decided under. Someone alone in an apartment in April, working from a kitchen table fourteen hours a day with nobody to talk to, decided a cat was the answer. They were right. But that decision got made inside a set of circumstances that will not hold, and the cat does not know circumstances were involved.
So the shelter is spending this fall on the least exciting work available. Check-in calls at thirty days and ninety days. A behavior helpline for the litter box problem that makes people quit in month four. Vouchers for low cost vet care, because the real reason animals come back is money. A standing promise, in writing, that we will take the animal back whenever, with nobody asking questions at the desk. The boring middle is where loyalty actually lives.
Brands get this wrong constantly. They spend the entire budget on the moment of yes and nothing at all on month seven, then act startled by the churn number and commission research into it. I have sat in that meeting. I have written that deck.
The boring middle is where loyalty actually lives.
Truffles came from CAT in 2016, Barnaby the year after, both adults, both unadoptable according to the internet. They have spent this entire year asleep on a heating vent, profoundly unbothered, briefly interested when the doorbell rings. If a few thousand Oregonians still have that in 2035, this year will have been worth the panic.