Alexa B.

Now that I have your attention. Did you come here to write a bad review because you didn't get that cute animal you found on Petfinder? Then this is for you, because you clearly do not understand what petfinder is and how it works.

Petfinder is a third-party go between for shelters and people looking to adopt. Petfinder does not choose who gets the adoptable animal or if/when an interested party gets a response from the shelter. Giving Petfinder bad reviews because you didn't get the animal you wanted or a response from the shelter, is like blaming Facebook because you sent someone a friend request and that person denied it. It isn't Facebooks fault the other person rejected your friend request.

Also, don't inquire about an animal through Petfinder, most shelters don't actually see Petfinder inquiries, again, not Petfinders fault. If you are interested in an animal go to the shelter details, pull up that shelters website, find the adopt section on their website, and fill out the shelters adoption application. Once you see an animal you're interested in on Petfinder, go directly to the source (the shelter), cut out the middle man (Petfinder). Your application will be guaranteed to be looked at and get seen by shelters much quicker this way.

In 2013 Petfinder wasn't around, and shelters didn't really post their adoptable animals online (It would have saved me a lot of time and gas if it was around back then). If Petfinder still weren't around today, you'd have to spend months looking at a long list of individual shelter websites and all their adoptable animals for a chance to find even one animal that matched your search criteria, especially if you're looking for a specific species, breed mix, and/or age group (for example, a husky mix puppy). Then if someone else beat you to it, you'd have to repeat the process.

Thanks to technological advances like Petfinder, finding a puppy is much easier. However, along with the wider reach of technology also comes more people aware of that puppy's existence and more competition to adopt that puppy. Lets not forget about the fact that during the pandemic, demand for adoption sky rocketed.

Petfinder is only a virtual centralized location service, used by hundreds of shelters across the USA & Canada as a platform to share the animals in their care and hopefully expedite the adoption process for their adoptable animals. Stop blaming Petfinder because you were turned down by a shelter. You would have very unlikely known that animal existed in the first place, if it weren't for Petfinder.

I am not affiliated with Petfinder. I did however adopt a puppy in 2016 and in 2021. They are my everything and i would never have known about them if they weren't listed on Petfinder. Instead of wasting my time and energy searching through animals I wasn't interested in, I was able to put in my criteria and have it immediately narrowed down to strictly what I was looking for, and from many more shelters than I would have found by myself.