Solving the Problem

The selected problem/opportunity I’m dealing with here involves the issue of pet euthanasia in American animal shelters. After the last exercise, I did some more researching into the statistics of how often euthanasia actually happens in animal shelters. One of the biggest problems I ran into was because shelters aren’t required by law to record all numbers of animals that come through their system. However, i did find out that in 1997, 64% of total animals that went into shelters were euthanized and as recently as 2008, it’s estimated that around 3.7 million animals in shelters were put down over the course of the year. I think that we can all agree that this is a problem that needs to have a better solution, which is where my idea comes in. My solution to this is more of a service than a product, and it has to do with an alternate way of pet fostering. For those of you that don’t know, pet fostering is something many shelters offer where you can become a sort of foster parent to a pet or pets for a set amount of time. The animal comes to live at you house perhaps while its owner is doing an overseas tour with the military, while waiting to be adopted into a forever home, or a variety of other situations. But what if you want to foster on a shorter scale, or you can’t have the actual animal kept at where you live? This is where my idea comes in. It’s a sort of foster homing meets Hotel for Dogs-type idea. I propose a service that teams up local motels with overcrowded animal shelters. Each motel room would be assigned a pet that lives there semi-permanently, and in exchange for taking care of the pet, the room’s fee would be paid for for as many days/nights you decided to stay and take care of the animal. For each room that did have an animal, profits for the hotel would come from sponsorships and donations. Ideally, some big-name sponsors like Petsmart for example, would be brought in to have a more permanent stream of income. This arrangement would also work for out-of-towners with a love for animals simply looking of a place to stay, or college students who miss their own pets at home who want to spend some quality time with an animal in need. With this service, the animals would have a place of their own that they’re familiar with, and the motels would have an increased amount of customers. Eventually, this could maybe even turn into a chain of new motels if the idea catches on and works!