A few years back, a Freakonomics reader named Stephanie Downs wrote in with an idea: bribing people (with cash, gift certificates etc.) to spay or neuter their pets. “I found your story about the [Israeli] daycares very interesting,” she wrote. “I want to do the research upfront on what will motivate people instead of spending years finding the right formula.” Stephanie recently launched the FIXIT Foundation, dedicated to “finding ways to increase interest in spay/neuter programs.” As she told us in a recent e-mail: “By January of this year we had agreement from the shelter in St. Croix to participate in the program and set ourselves up on island not long after. This summer we surveyed 2 percent of the island on their perception of spay/neuter and what if any incentives would bring them around to the idea. Last month we completed an animal census to calculate the number of animals on island, and this month we will be doing message testing in survey environments. That data will be used to select the best messages to launch live in January.” We look forward to finding out what kind of incentives Stephanie finds effective – or if, perhaps, they somehow backfire. [%comments]
Paying People to Fix Their Pets
TAGS: animals, incentives
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It depends HOW MUCH will they pay.
For a $1000, the SPCA can be VERY persuasive.
For $5, I don’t even want a text msg conversation.
Why on earth would anyone want to have more pets neutered? Neuter humans, the world will be better off.
@ #6: Yes, farmers have done this for years. Mankind also lived without electricity, traveled by horse and had surgery without anesthesia pretty much the whole history. Do you take that into account when deciding what is right for you?
I lost a beloved female one-year old dog several years ago when we took her to be fixed. A blood clot traveled to her heart.
And it was heart-wrenching enough to keep me from doing so ever again. All breeds are different. She was a Bernese Mountain Dog. I know that larger breeds are more inclined to have these sorts of problems, and I think that any data needs to be thorough in its analysis of ALL breeds before making claims to the dog-loving public.
Perhaps by only adopting male dogs from now on, I am taking the easy way out. I simply cannot bear to loose another puppy.
I grew up in a family which bred show dogs and, quite frankly, I’ve put down puppies in manners which now disgust me. I’ve made sure that every pet I’ve owned since then has been adopted, with spay service included, taking stray off the street and making sure they don’t perpetuate the problem.
The Israeli daycare morality example diverts only a fraction of offenders. While the emotional “I love puppies!” and “Must save them all” sentiments seem to cover the majority of offenders.
It seems to me that some combination of disincentives for illegal or rampant breeding, like sentencing to community service to euthanize strays, combined with discounted spay services and gift card incentives for bringing in strays would cover a lot of ground and pay big benefits.
I worked at a large inner city animal shelter. 30 to 40 percent of our animals were purebreds – bought from pet stores, breeders or the breeder’s overstock. Potential adopters would come in and say, “oh, I was going to adopt a mutt / mixed breed, but I had no idea you had purebreds! That siamese is just too pretty”!
So instead of saving “homelss” animals (strays), we were adopting out people’s toss-aways for them. Not a single one of our stray cats were adopted that year. Every single one was destroyed.
Why reward people for doing something they should have done to begin with? Give that money toward rescue groups. Our private shelter has spent tens of thousands out of our own pocket rescuing our neighbor’s throwaways. We sure could use that money.
You can’t just simply neuter all animals, we take in stray cats all the time at our farm and they help to keep mice down and are loving farm cats. If you want to neuter anything neuter Chinese.
In Sydney there are programs whereby pet registration for non-neutered animals is about 4x the cost for neutered animals.