Eight Holiday Ideas for Animal Lovers to Help Homeless Pets

Here are eight ideas for animal lovers and their families to help homeless pets this holiday season.

— Order a Kuranda bed for your local shelter.

— Offer to set up or add to the advertising budget for your local shelter. This is the first item to be cut from many cash-strapped budgets.

— Tell your friends and families to donate to your local animal shelter or rescue instead of a gift. Provide the specific link to your shelter’s website donation page.

— Offer to provide the refreshments for holiday open houses at your local shelter or events that benefit the shelter. For example, if offsite adoption events are held during the holiday season, offer to provide cookies and punch. If you have kids at home, involve them in the preparations.

— Give your shelter an I.O.U. for free services you and/or your family could provide during the next year. These services could include photography, writing ads, designing a newsletter, designing a newspaper ad, writing press releases, walking dogs, cuddling cats, etc. An I.O.U. from teenagers to walk dogs twenty times in 2011 would be a great help to the shelter and a good way to educate kids about giving gifts of true value.

— Does your local animal shelter offer summer programs for kids to educate them about animal welfare and care? If so, give a gift certificate to the kids in your family to attend.

— Contact every community event in your community that could possibly provide an opportunity for an offsite adoption and/or donations of pet food. For example, art shows, holiday home tours, parades, etc. would be good opportunities.

— Arrange with local businesses to set aside a weekend to help homeless pets. For example, ask local big-box chains and/or strip shopping centers to post flyers that they are collecting pet food on a specific weekend. These locations could also be locations for offsite adoptions.

Also, see the blog post-Seventy Holiday Ideas to Help Homeless Pets.