Since many animal shelters rely on donations to sustain themselves, employees often have to get creative to attract people’s help. Some try to appeal to the animal lovers by sharing the most adorable pictures to melt their hearts. Others turn it into a fun game. One of these creative people is Pris Austin who is a director of the animal shelter called Los Adoptables located in Mexico.
Last year, Austin came up with a great idea to get more dog food for her shelter inhabitants. Since her birthday was coming up, she decided to ask people to help her create a throne out of nothing else but bags of dog food. "I was at Costco getting the dog food like 5 days before my bd and someone was texting me what do you want for your birthday, so I said dog food, but then I was trying to get the community involved so I figured a "Bag of Dog Food Throne," she told Bored Panda.
After posting a sad photo of her sitting on a single bag of food, the donations started to pile up and eventually turned into a giant throne for her to celebrate on.
"The shelter is in an awesome community. Lots of expats in our neighborhood and they love helping in our crazy ideas and love to support the animals, we got 41 bags plus some extras after the day."
She and her canine buddies were beyond grateful, so Austin decided to make this into a tradition and asked people for the same birthday present this year too.
As of now, 26 bags of dog food have been donated, but there are two days left till her birthday, so hopefully, people will donate even more. If you want to participate too, click here.
Los Adoptables is located in Ensenada, México. The shelter mainly focuses on spray and neuter program, rescues and rehomes dogs and cats and teaches its community how o properly take care of animals.
"I've been doing this for over 3 years. But my dad always worked in vet offices and I helped him with ranch animals since forever. We started the shelter when a lady was no longer capable of taking care of some dogs she rescued, she had 177 dogs when we stepped in. The goal was to find a home for those dogs but then evolved into a proper shelter.
"[Los Adoptables] was founded in October 2016, the person couldn't manage anymore with all the animals they had and it was getting chaotic, the animals were the ones suffering. A group of 4 ladies and myself started helping out until slowly everyone had to leave and it was just me in the admin part. But I wouldn't be able to do this without their guidance and the overwhelming support of my community."
Right now, the shelter has 45 dogs and 9 cats. While it is not easy to run a shelter, Austin admits that the work is very rewarding. "The satisfaction of helping an animal find a loving home. Watching them evolve from beaten down, sick on the streets and then watching videos or pictures of them in their new sofa and surrounded with love, without that I don't think I would be able to do this. "
It’s not Austin’s first creative idea to help the shelter she’s working in. She once had an idea to allow people to cut a lock of her hair if they donate $5 to the shelter and she ended up raising $200.
"I feel any amount we get out of any "campaign" we do is a success. It's cash we didn't have before. We only use pr money for facebook for events and thanks to the people that support us we've never had an unsuccessful event," she said.
The shelter also has an “adoption tree” which features the names of monthly sponsors and has tiny paws which represent animals that have been adopted.
"We have the Adoption tree and that has our monthly sponsors, their names go in the trunk. It's painted on the wall and you can see their names in our videos every couple of days because every time one of our dogs gets adopted we put their paw as leaves. We had monthly sponsors but after we announced the tree we got a little more sponsors," Austin explained.