SPCA Executive Director Patrick McLaughlin.(Submitted photo)

By Patrick McLaughlin,

SPCA Executive Director

Do you remember I Love Lucy?

If so, you're almost certainly familiar with a famous scene: Lucy and Ethel are working in a candy factory, wrapping pieces of candy as they come down the conveyor belt. If you're not  familiar with this classic bit of television history, please take a moment to get up to speed, but come right back when you're done!

There are two ways to look at Lucy and Ethel's problem, and each perspective lends itself to a different solution: On the one hand, you could look at it as a problem with the conveyor belt. It's simply moving  too fast,  or the number of candies on it is simply  too many  for Lucy and Ethel to handle. Obviously, that's the way Lucy and Ethel would see the problem. On the other hand, their boss probably sees it differently.

She even threatens them, "If  one  piece of candy gets past you...you're fired!" To her, the problem isn't the conveyor belt  or  the number of candies it's moving, it's Lucy and Ethel's inability to keep up.

As the scene unfolds, we observe Lucy and Ethel panic and start making questionable decisions, like stuffing stray candies into their hats or down their shirts, or eating them outright. Whatever the problem was initially, their panicked reaction hasn't made anything better.

The Chenango SPCA is in a similar situation, which repeats every year: We have too many animals here, too many animals coming in, and not enough animals getting adopted. As predictably as the shorter days and lower temperatures of autumn, or the frantic attempt to stuff candies wherever you can fit them, we end up getting a little  too creative  about how to provide all these animals with the shelter and care they deserve.

Thankfully, our problem does have  some  differences from the  I Love Lucy  episode. Perhaps the most important is this: In real life,  both  perspectives on this problem can be true. On the one hand, the conveyor belt of lost and stray animals into our shelter  is  moving too fast and it  does  have  far  too many  animals on it. On the other hand, we  can  get them adopted faster!

That very thinking is behind two big announcements that I'd like to make:

First, we're offering a frighteningly large  adoption discount  from Friday the 13th through Halloween, which happens to be a Tuesday. We're open until 7 PM on Tuesdays. Starting tomorrow, all cat adoptions are only $13, and all dog adoptions are only $31.

We're able to provide such a steep discount (our regular adoption costs are $100 and $155) because of support from Zappone Subaru here in Norwich. As part of the Subaru Loves Pets program, they're giving us $100 for every animal adopted in the month of October- up to 31.

Second, we've made our adoption application shorter and easier, which will enable us to process and approve adoptions faster. In part, this is in response to advice we received from our friends at Maddie's Shelter Medicine Program at the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine, who encouraged us to make adoptions faster and easier.

Our hope is that these changes will help us move into November with  plenty  of empty kennels and cat condos to be thankful for!