Do adoption fees really protect animals — or do they just make us feel better?
For years, adoption fees have been treated as a safeguard in animal welfare: a way to screen for commitment, financial readiness, and responsible pet ownership. The concern has always been that free adoptions invite impulse decisions and bad outcomes. In this episode, Penny Ellison explains why she once believed that logic — and why her thinking has changed.
Drawing on years of firsthand experience working with shelters, serving on the board of the Pennsylvania SPCA, and observing adoption outcomes across different systems, this episode looks closely at what happens during fee-waived adoption events. Penny examines the research often cited to support free adoptions, including its strengths and its limits, and explains why the data is encouraging but far from definitive.
Rather than arguing for or against adoption fees in the abstract, this episode situates the issue within today’s sheltering realities: rising intake, long-stay animals, capacity constraints, and euthanasia for space. The question isn’t whether fees feel protective — it’s what actually protects animals in a system under strain.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why adoption fees came to be seen as a protective filter
- What shelters observe during real-world fee-waived adoption events
- What the research on free adoptions does — and does not — prove
- Why adoption fees don’t measure commitment, and what matters more
- When fee-waived adoptions help animals — and when they can cause harm
Key Takeaway
Adoption fees don’t protect animals on their own. Strong screening, thoughtful matching, documentation, and post-adoption support do — and in an overwhelmed shelter system, getting animals into good homes faster can be lifesaving.
If you work in animal sheltering, animal welfare, or advocacy — or if you care about evidence-based policy for animals — this episode offers a grounded look at one of the field’s most debated practices
Episode Highlights
00:00 — Rethinking free adoptions and the belief that fees protect animals
01:11 — Why adoption fees were seen as safeguards against bad outcomes
02:40 — The shelter reality: long stays, stress, and euthanasia for space
04:19 — What fee-waived events show in practice — without mass returns
05:25 — What adoption research suggests, and where it falls short
08:30 — Why faster adoptions matter in overcrowded shelters
09:05 — How fee waivers expand the adopter pool and increase placements
09:42 — Why the ability to pay a fee doesn’t predict good ownership
10:13 — Why adoption process matters more than price
11:10 — When fee waivers become risky shortcuts rather than policy
Transcript
I used to think free adoptions were a terrible idea. I bought into the theory that if someone can’t afford an adoption fee, how will they afford the vet bills? The fee was supposed to be a filter – proof that you were serious, that you had resources, that this animal wouldn’t end up back at the shelter in a week, or worse, used as a bait dog in a fighting ring.
Turns out I was wrong. Not completely wrong. The story is more complicated than that, but wrong enough that I’ve changed my position.
And I want to walk you through not just why I changed my mind, but also why I’m skeptical of some of the research that advocates use to promote free adoptions, because I think both sides are oversimplifying.
Welcome to the Animal Advocate, where we arm animal lovers with the information and inspiration you need to become effective advocates. I’m your host, Penny Ellison, and I’ve taught animal law and advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. If you’ve ever thought someone should do something about that, I’m here to guide you on your journey to being that someone. You can find us on the web@animaladvocacyacademy.com and that’s where you’ll find show notes and resources, and you can send us your comments on episodes and ideas for topics you’d like to hear on future shows. So, onto today’s topic.
Let me start with the case I used to make. The logic seemed airtight. Pet ownership is expensive. A single emergency vet visit can easily run over $1,000 or a lot more. Food, vaccines, flea and tick prevention. It adds up. If the adoption fee is a barrier, how will you handle the real costs? There was also a fear, and you hear this constantly in some rescue circles and especially online, that free adoptions would attract the wrong people. Impulse adopters who’d return the animal in a week or worse. People looking for animals for dog fighting or as bait animals. And there was a sort of value argument. If something is free, people don’t value it. Luxury brands don’t give away their products. The price creates perceived worth.
So I believed what a lot of people in animal welfare still believe. The adoption fee protects the animal. Then I got more deeply involved in sheltering. I started running volunteer sessions for Hand2Paw, a nonprofit that I ran at the time ( I just chair the board now) that connects at risk youth with shelter animals. I joined the board of the Pennsylvania SPCA, and I started spending a lot of time in different shelters, getting to know the animals and their stories and watching what actually happens. And what I saw changed my thinking.
I found out that what happened in real life didn’t match my theory. I watched dogs sit for months, good dogs, adoptable dogs, just waiting day after day in a kennel. Stressed and confused dogs that had no behavior issues when they came in developed them from months or years of confinement in a loud kennel. Wouldn’t you?
At our local open intake shelter, the kind that has to accept every animal. I saw adoptable dogs being euthanized, not because they became aggressive or sick, because there was just no more room. The shelter had to make space for the next wave coming in.
That changes the calculation, doesn’t it?
We were so worried about what might happen in a free adoption that we weren’t thinking about what was definitely happening to animals who never got adopted at all.
Then I started watching what happened at fee waived events. Long stay dogs, the ones passed over for months, sometimes over a year, finally went home. Families who might never have walked through the shelter doors otherwise showed up. And some genuinely great matches happened. One example, Denim, a small black pittie who came into the Pennsylvania SPCA as a cruelty case. He sat in a kennel for over two years when a fee waived event called Pittie Fest brought attention and urgency. It was finally his turn to go home.
And the flood of returns I’d feared didn’t materialize.
At this point, you might expect me to point to the research and say, see, the data backs me up. But that’s not quite where I’m going.
If you look into this, you’ll see that major animal welfare organizations cite research showing fee waived adoptions perform just as well as paid ones. A 2011 Maddie’s Fund study found that 93% of dogs and 95% of cats adopted during fee waived events were still in their homes six to 12 months later. Similar results appear in studies from Australia and Edmonton. The message from these organizations is that the science is settled.
I don’t think it is.
I’ve changed my mind about fee waived adoptions, but not because of this research. I majored in math, so I pay close attention to how data is gathered and how statistics are presented. And when you look closely, these studies have some real weaknesses. First, they rely on surveys, questionnaires sent six to 18 months after adoption compared to a control group.
The problem is that not everyone responds. Even in the Maddie’s Fund study, one of the better ones, the response rate was 57%. And who do you think is most likely to respond? People whose adoptions went well if the placement didn’t work out. And the animal was rehomed or surrendered elsewhere, you’re far less likely to fill out a survey. That’s called survivorship bias. The failures – or even the neutral outcomes – tend to disappear in the non responses. Those headline numbers may not tell the full story.
Second, everything is self reported.
When surveys ask, is your pet still in the home or have you taken your pet to the vet? Researchers are trusting that people answer honestly. But people know what the right answers are, especially when the survey comes from the same organization that placed the animal. None of these studies cross check responses against independent data like licensing or microchip records.
And finally, the time frames are pretty short. 6 months, 12 months at the most, 18 months for a few responders. But pet ownership is a 10 to 15 year commitment for dogs and maybe even longer for cats. These studies can’t tell us what happens years later when novelty wears off or costs rise.
So what can we reasonably conclude? Well, among adopters who respond to surveys, outcomes look similar. That’s encouraging. It suggests fee waived adopters aren’t dramatically worse than adopters that come in on a normal day. But it doesn’t prove the outcomes are definitively the same. The research is encouraging, but not conclusive. I wish organizations promoting these studies were more upfront about that.
So if the research didn’t change my mind, what did? What I saw. And the math.
Shelters across the country are overwhelmed. Intake is up. Adoptions are flat or declining. Animals are being euthanized not because they’re dangerous, but because there’s just nowhere to put them. In that context, getting animals into homes faster isn’t just nice, it’s life saving. Every adoption opens a kennel. It reduces the harm of long shelter stays. It gives animals a chance they might not otherwise get fee waived.
Events also generate attention. Local news sometimes covers them. People who are on the fence finally act and come in and adopt. And that’s so important. The ASPCA’s Free Over 3 program, which waived fees for cats over three years old, led to a 226% increase in adoptions of those cats. That’s not marginal, that’s transformative.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe about this. The adoption fee is not the filter that we thought it was.
A family’s ability to pay $150 on a particular day, or whatever the adoption fee is, it just doesn’t predict whether they’ll be good pet owners. It doesn’t measure love, commitment or resilience. It just measures whether they have $150 right now. Plenty of wealthy people neglect their animals. Plenty of families with modest incomes provide wonderful homes. The fee filters for exactly one thing – liquidity.
So I support fee waived or reduced fee adoption events, but only if everything else stays the same. Waiving the fee should not mean abandoning the process. You still have the conversation. You still talk about housing, experience, expectations. You still work to make a good match. You still document the adoption, require id, counseling and a contract. That matters because people with bad intentions don’t want paper trails. And you still provide post adoption support, a behavior helpline, training resources, someone who can coach new owners through the hard part. A lot of returns happen not because people are bad owners, but because they hit a problem they don’t know how to solve. Give them somewhere to turn and many will work it out. And when it can’t be worked out, you take the pet back.
This is my big issue with some of those Mega Adoption events where dogs are brought in from other states for a huge Mega event with low adoption fees. It gets attention and brings in adopters, but sometimes the local shelters hosting the event won’t take those animals back. They’re considered adoptions from the originating shelter, which might be hundreds of miles away. Then, if the adoptions don’t work out, there’s nowhere to return those animals and they end up burdening the local system or as strays, or both.
Fee waived adoptions work when they’re part of a strong system. They don’t work as a gimmick to clear kennels. Success isn’t guaranteed by an adoption fee policy. It’s built one adoption at a time.
I changed my mind about fee waived adoptions not because the research proved they’re perfect, but because the feared harms haven’t materialized and the alternative is animals dying in shelters or languishing for way too long.
The fee was never what protected animals the process was.
If you work in a shelter and have experience with fee waived events, I’d love to hear from you. What’s worked, what hasn’t? How does your community respond and what do you wish more people understood?
That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate Podcast is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. You can find episodes and show notes at animaladvocacyacademy.com along with a link to our Facebook and LinkedIn pages where we discuss our podcasts and we’d love to discuss your thoughts and experiences there. If you’re interested in learning more about protecting animals, subscribe to the show so you get every episode when it comes out. If you have any questions on this or any other topic related to animal law, email them to podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com and we’ll make sure to get them answered. We’ll either email you back or feature them in a future episode, or both. And remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better.
Until next week, Live With Compassion.
