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Adopting a pet is so easy… right?

Catherine Reynolds/THE CONCORDIAN

An animal rescue and a cat café want people to know that animal adoption is a lot more work than they think

Animal rescues are experimenting with new approaches to ensure careful adoptions of pets, through educating people and encouraging interaction with the animals.

During the pandemic, many people wanted a little companion to keep them company. Adopting a pet to have a companion is great, but people sometimes forget the responsibility it requires to be a good pet parent. Additionally, animal rescues often struggle to keep future pet parents in check for adoption. Rescues offer online resources to prepare people for the steps of adoption, such as articles or chats to ask questions about the process. Most importantly, rescues recommend future parents know what kind of animal they want in their home.

Patricia Durocher is the communications coordinator at Proanima Animal Rescue in Boucherville. She is in charge of promoting the rescue through social media and helping people through the adoption process. Durocher is also head of a sensitization program she started in 2014 where she visits schools to educate students on how to be good adopters. 

“[The students] knew all the right answers. They knew, it’s very instinctive. I would say how to recognize the signs that an animal is uncomfortable, it’s scared, things like that. Then it seems like it gets lost over time,” said Durocher.

Adults tend to lose that perception about pets and later get confused about what kind of animal is best for them, according to Durocher. Even though she works with students, educating the adults on adoption must continue.

“It’s super important, but there is work with the adults that still needs to be done all the time,” said Durocher.

Durocher says that Proanima have younger animals who are in good shape, they just get adopted really quickly. She says that there is a stigma behind rescue pets which claims that they are damaged, old, or sick, which makes adopting them harder. 

“When [people] want an animal, they want it to be fast, they want a healthy animal and everything. This means that not everyone is ready to go find a shelter animal, which has an older animal, which has health problems,” said Durocher.

Durocher says there are many reasons as to why people abandon their pets. She believes that financial issues, a lack of time to care for the animals, and health concerns are some of the reasons that come up after an animal is adopted. Despite this, Durocher has noticed fewer animal abandonments and more adoptions in recent years.

When she is helping clients find their ideal pet, she notices it can be complicated. Sometimes during adoptions people have a specific idea of what kind of animal they want, without properly preparing for the experience. 

“You can’t necessarily adopt on a whim, but the problem it causes is that the person, if they find [the adoption process] too complicated or too long, they’ll just go somewhere else,” said Durocher.

Durocher feels that there needs to be a balance between an effective adoption process and ensuring that whoever is adopting a pet feels comfortable doing it.

Clément Marty is the owner of Café Chat L’Heureux in Montreal. His love of cats encouraged him to open a place where cats and humans can connect on a deeper level. By offering a new approach to animal interaction, Marty hopes that people will learn that altering their behaviour to understand the cats creates better adopters.

Café Chat L’Heureux, Catherine Reynolds/THE CONCORDIAN

“This is one of the things that will contribute to this, to be selective, to raise awareness around adoption,” said Marty.

Proanima and Café Chat L’Heureux have been partners since the café opened in 2014. The café’s cats are all rescues. There are eight older resident cats and every three to four months, two to five kittens from Proanima come to the café as part of their adoption program. Their cats walk freely around the café, interact with the clients, and remain independent when they feel like it. Marty has rules where the cats can do whatever they want, but the humans, not so much. Instead of mindlessly picking up or petting the cats, the people learn how each cat behaves.

“They will learn to take the time to look at the animal, to be interested in it. It’s all the little things that will help, in any case, to go in the right direction: to promote adoption in shelters, to promote good practices with cats,” said Marty. 

Marty and Durocher agree that people impulsively adopt animals without knowing what challenges to expect. This complicates things between the person considering adoption, the person interviewing the potential new parents of the animal, and the animal itself. The café allows the cats to wander free and gives people an opportunity to get to know the cats who roam the place. People can then have a clearer idea of what kind of cat they want in their homes. 

“There are a lot of people who adopt a cat, but who are not even aware of what it costs. They’re not even aware of what it requires. Offering a place like this, is to offer an alternative,” said Marty.

Café Chat L’Heureux Catherine Reynolds /THE CONCORDIAN

Marty makes it his mission to educate people on effective adoption and the cats in his café. He provides them with the tools they need to make a clear decision on their future pet. Plus, he feels that animals are more than just an investment. He wants to remind people of this when they consider adopting either from a rescue or from the café.

“Having a pet, it’s not a right, it should be a privilege,” said Marty.

Durocher admires what Marty has created and continues to create. Not everyone can open a cat café, but she believes that the project can work as long as it is done with pure intentions. 

“I think it’s just a positive experience. There’s another café that could open and do this all wrong, just take 10 cats and put them in the café. You can’t get there and then see cats that aren’t well, and that are terrified,” said Durocher.

Durocher and Marty continue to expand their businesses and help people adopt a pet the right way. Jumping the gun when adopting is not the way to go, it takes patience and a real idea of the kind of pet you are looking for. By doing it right, you will get a purrfect outcome.

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Ar(t)chives Arts

The displacement and forced assimilation of thousands of children in North America: Daughter of a Lost Bird film review

Filmmaker Brooke Swaney-Perpion Meg Acosta/ @city__ghost

The film explores the ongoing cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples specifically through adoption policies

The feature documentary Daughter of a Lost Bird, directed by Brooke Pepion Swaney,  centers the story of Kendra Potter as she reconnects with her biological mother. Growing up in a white family with a white culture, she knew she was adopted, but it was only later in life that she learned she had native blood. 

Daughter of a Lost Bird is Swaney’s first feature documentary. She is from the Blackfeet nation, which was cut off from the border forming process. Swaney is most known for helping produce the first season of the All My Relations podcast, along with Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene. 

The term “Lost Bird” refers to native children that were adopted out of their nations, mostly by force, and never returned.

This film explores Potter’s search for her mother, understanding the forced adoption of her mother, and coming to terms that she is a direct product of forced assimilation in the ongoing cultural genocide against Indigenous peoples across Canada and the US. 

“When someone says you are Lummi, I can’t wrap my mind around that, I don’t know what that means,” states April, Kendra’s mother in the film. She was raised far from her nation, so though she finds identity in being Lummi she cannot quite comprehend it. 

The film took seven years to make, between concretely finding Potter’s mother April, breaks for mental health, and the actual shooting of the film. 

Though the film is set in what is known as the US, adoption policies and methods of Indigenous erasure were very similar to those that transpire in Canada. 

The Q&A was composed of the Swaney and Na’kuset. Na’kuset has been the executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal since 1999, and is from Saskatchewan, Treaty 6. 

Q&A of Brooke Swaney Pepion and Na’kuset, MEG ACOSTA/@city__ghost)

“Because it’s an American film, the assimilation policy that they had was named differently than it is in Canada, but the harm is the same,” Na’kuset noted. 

The assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada was known under the name of the Adopt Indian and Métis Project (AIM) project. On record, there were 20,000 children displaced, but as noted by Na’kuset, “the numbers are larger than that.” 

Swaney and Potter met when Potter was cast as an actress in one of Swaney’s films. It was through learning more about her adoption story and the policies of forced assimilation that Swaney wanted to produce a documentary film about Potter’s life. 

It is noticeable that Potter is a capable actress in certain scenes, as she is very comfortable as she stares directly at the camera. This has the effect that the audience almost feels like she is seeing past the camera, past the spectators, as if daring the audience to judge her.  

It’s in moments of reunification with her mom that the audience feels they are seeing a real version of Potter. She is not as aware of the camera in scenes reuniting with family members she’s meeting for the first time. 

When moving back to Montana after finishing her studies in New York, the filmmaker was able to reconnect with her family. 

“My mom and I grew up off-reservation, it was nice to come home, but also complicated; I have family members who are struggling with addiction, and I have nieces and nephews who are out there in foster care.”

Moving back to Montana let Swaney gain the knowledge that, “all of these topics are close to every Indigenous person, it’s not one’s own personal experience.” It’s a series of colonial policies that have constantly tried to erase and assimilate Indigenous folks. 

This film served to raise awareness about adoption programs in the US, and their direct impact on people’s identities and cultural losses. 

Crowd at Cinema Politica screening, DAVID BEAUDOIN/ @3.2.888

“Where I feel like there’s a huge difference is between our societies, is the native voices are so much more present and louder in Canada than in the States.”

Swaney’s commentary throughout the film provides context to the story. She comments on her discomfort at times of almost projecting what she wants Potter to feel with her mother. She ends the film by stating that Daughter of a Lost Bird is ultimately Potter’s story. 

In her closing notes, Na’kuset discusses one of the projects Native Montreal is working on. It’s a new project for housing women that seeks to offer supportive housing. In relating it to the film, she says: 

“This is how we get our children back.” By supporting native women who need housing, there is the possibility to return forcibly adopted children to their families and cultures. 

Tips for adopting a furbaby during the pandemic

The diamond in the ‘ruff’

Luz Adriana Monsalve’s decision to adopt a pet changed her life in more ways than she ever imagined. An Engineering student at Concordia, the adoption of her dog helped Monsalve get through the pandemic.

“At first it was actually terrifying because we first got our dog at the beginning of quarantine. I quickly realized that I was in a building of more than a thousand people. I was going up and down the elevator two to three times a day to walk my dog. So, I would be exposed to a lot of people,” Monsalve explained.

Since March of 2020, there has been a surge of animal adoptions. Many shelters around the city are running out of animals to put up for adoption.

Maria Garcia, an administrator at Refuge Zen in Laval, a shelter for stray animals, explained, “Over the pandemic, people have been adopting animals left and right. As soon as we post a picture of the animal on our Facebook page, they immediately get adopted a few days later.”

Monsalve explained the process she had to go through with the SPCA to adopt her dog. Following hygiene measures, the SPCA sets up an interview with the prospective adoptive parents of the animals. Based on the living situation, the lifestyle of the adoptive parents, the SPCA links you to a certain breed of dog or cat.

According to an article written by Health Affairs, “The struggle to balance literal survival with all the things that make surviving worthwhile has never been so clear, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing many to sacrifice social connections — and therefore quality of life — for life itself.” One measure that has been helping many is pet therapy.

Medical News Today describes an effect produced by humans interacting with animals as the ‘human-animal bond.’ What this bond means exactly is the human desire to relate to animals.

The article further explains the bond itself helps people by “reducing boredom, increasing movement and activity through walks and play, providing companionship and decreasing loneliness, increasing social interaction, and improving mood and general well-being.”

Every person has a specific need for a therapy animal. Based on the type of therapy needed, the article outlines some of the goals set out for pet therapy, such as “providing comfort and reducing levels of pain, improving movement or motor skills, developing social or behavioral skills, and increasing motivation towards activities such as exercising or interacting with others.”

Emmalyne Laperle, a Sociology student at Concordia, explains her experience adopting her cat. She adopted her cat through the organization Chatopia in September of 2020.

“Since my cat is a pure breed Persian cat, he was used for breeding. He was forced to breed. Some people that I talked to ask[ed] me ‘what’s the big deal? He just has to get female cats pregnant and have babies.’ But the fact is, regardless if he’s having the babies or not, he was kept in an environment that was really harmful. When we got him, he was so stressed that he had patches of fur missing,” Laperle recalled.

Laperle explained that it took a while for her cat to warm up to her and her significant other. For the first couple of weeks, her cat felt uneasy when she would go to pick him up. However, after some time passed, the cat grew a beautiful new coat of fur and the patches are no longer there.

As much as it’s great to give an animal a home, most people do not truly realize the great responsibility that comes with adopting an animal.

“As much as it’s amazing to adopt a dog, it’s a lot of time commitment. A big-money commitment if something goes wrong. They could have a big vet bill,” Monsalve explained.

Pet therapy is a wonderful avenue during this uncertain time, however, it needs to be proceeded with caution. As we are trying to social distance from one another, pets provide companionship and a good distraction from the world around us.

Monsalve, referring to her dog sitting right next to her during a Zoom interview, said, “This dude is my best friend, he’s been a huge company to me throughout the pandemic and I think I would’ve felt really lonely without him.”

 

 Graphic by Taylor Reddam

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