When I set out to write a holiday piece, I originally thought I would cover cute animal shelter holiday campaigns as a lighthearted way to bring joy to my readers in the holiday season. Spoiler: I didn’t find any lighthearted holiday campaigns. What I did uncover was an incredibly complex and fascinating evolution around giving pets as gifts.

The first real mentions of giving shelter pets as gifts I could find in the media began in the 1920s, and are mostly heartwarming news articles covering a specific pet that had been given as a gift, often to a child. Likely, at this point in time animal shelters were not the first choice for pet acquisition for families. Stories like the one below, from the 1920 Omaha Evening Bee were not super common that I could see, but I did find a handful of them.

Here’s another from The Evening News, December 27, 1927

Moving on to the 30s and 40s, interestingly, we see some of the first efforts to actively promote adoptions of pets to the general public. Some of the first adoption events were holiday ones, and they were all the things we’d hope for today: joyful and positive, with an open adoptions take. My favorite has to be this one, from 1946, where MGM studios brought Lassie to a shelter to promote adoption of puppies for Christmas.

In a similar way, articles from about this time take a happy view of pet adoption as a positive idea. Another example from the 1950s from the Vancouver Sun:

And here, from the Decatur Daily review 1948.

As we move forward into the 50s, 60s and 70s, we do see more articles cautioning people to ensure that if they do give a gift of a pet, they ensure that the animal is going to a good home. These articles primarily offer practical tips about how to have conversations with people before gift giving and also how to ensure the right pet is selected for the recipient. The article below offers that the shelter will provide free literature about pet ownership, for example.

Here’s another example from Terra Haute, Indiana in 1965

In the 70s, we still see plenty of articles encouraging Holiday adoption: Gloucester County Times, 1975

Soon, though, these articles start to shift. In the 1980s, the articles about pets as gifts start to take a different tone, admonishing people from getting pets as gifts at all. This example below from The Daily Item in Lynne, Massachusetts:

By the 1990s, there’s a full out war on the concept of pets for gifts, with the primary opinion of shelters being that it absolutely should not be something that happens. I found everything from intentional raising of adoption fees to adoption bans over the holidays. Here are some examples:

Quad City Times, Davenport, Iowa, 1990

The Marion Star, 1995:

The Baltimore Sun, 1990:

It bears noting that while many of the shelters were busy banning holiday options, the breeders of the world were not at all worried about this. Ads for Christmas puppies and kittens remained abundant during these years, highlighting that by stopping adoptions, most shelters were primarily concerned with the acquisition of pets under their roof, and not necessarily what was happening with all of the pets in their community. Here’s an examples of breeder ads from around this time:

These are from The Lima News in 1984, Ohio:

You could even get a llama!

Looking more deeply, the preventative practices that rose in the 90s to prevent pets from going to “bad homes” during the holidays line up with some of the other things happening in the movement at the time.

I recently covered the concept of “sadvertisting” and how as the availability of spay and neuter increased, it led to a culture of shelters blaming the public for the high intake of pets. This set a very definite shift in tone for the way shelters related to the public during the 90s and early 2000s around the public being “good enough” to own pets that we are still dealing with today, with much of the parameters we placed around adoption shifting from reasonable expectations for adopter to unreasonable ownership standards.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this interesting foray into pets as gifts. I’d love to know your own thoughts about this topic, and for anyone who worked in the movement during that period of time between 1980 and 1995, I’d love to connect further. Please shoot me a message or comment!

Happy holidays to you and yours,

-Audrey