Rehome My Pet: How to Find a Home For My Pet

Adopt a Pet has a program available for individuals in the U.S. who need help with cat or dog rehoming. Whether you rescued a pet from a shelter, found one abandoned in the street, or they’re coming from a home that could not (or no longer wanted to) keep them — you can find them a new loving home.

Rehome by Adopt a Pet is a peer-to-peer service that allows individuals in the U.S. to post pets they cannot keep or stray/rescue dogs and cats to Adopt a Pet’s website.

The information below is not intended as a complete guide to rehoming a pet but is a great way to get started. Here are three ways to rehome a pet.

1. Find your pet a new home yourself

You will need to do the work yourself to find the pet a good home, but Rehome can help. If you choose to post your pet on Rehome, you will be guided through the entire process — from creating your pet’s profile to transferring vet records to the new person. And once your pet’s profile is live, millions of potential adopters will be able to view them.

Here are a couple of other tips that can help you with the rehoming process:

• Friends, family, coworkers and neighbors are valuable adoption resources. Not only are they potential adopters, but they can help spread the word to others as well.

• Have the pet spayed or neutered-you’ll have better luck adopting them out.

• If you cannot keep the pet in your home, ask friends and family to help, or look for a boarding facility or veterinary office where you can pay to house the pet.

Screen any potential new home

If you are considering giving the pet to someone you don’t know, you will want to screen them to ensure the match is a good one. Let your pet’s personality be a guide for what questions to ask. Is your pet good with cats, dogs, and kids? Do they have any characteristics that warrant a more experienced pet parent? If you are using Rehome, you’ll get suggestions on how to screen applicants to find the best home for your rescue dog or cat.

Once you’ve chosen a few top applicants, you should meet with the potential adopter in person to make sure it is a good fit. Through Rehome, we offer tips on how to set up a safe and successful in-person meeting. Trust your intuition — you want to be sure that the adopter has your pet’s interests at heart. You may want to check identification and ask for references. Let the new adopter know they can call you for questions or advice. When you pick the perfect new home for your pet and transfer ownership, you may want to give the new pet parent a call after about a week to find out how things are going.

Do not give away a pet for free

Free pets are much more likely to be abandoned, and in some cases, someone might be seeking to obtain a pet for free to use for an illegal purpose, such as dog fighting. When using Rehome, there will always be an adoption fee applied that will be donated to help more pets find their forever homes. Having someone pay money for a pet is one of the most important ways to be assured that the person who is taking the pet is serious about wanting them, and can afford to pay for the food and veterinary care the pet will need throughout their life.

2. Surrender to a rescue or no-kill shelter

There are privately-run shelters and rescue organizations that do not kill pets. But because they keep the pets for as long as it takes to find a new home, they are usually filled to capacity, so it can take weeks to get an appointment. If you do find a “no-kill” organization that might take the pet you rescued, offering as big a tax-deductible donation as possible will help.

Remember, in the case of private shelters and rescue groups, they are just people who are doing their best because they care about pets, most are volunteers spending significant amounts of their own money to cover vet bills, and they all get far more legitimate hard luck cases than they can possibly handle each day. For a list of shelters and rescues in your area, click here.

3. Surrender to a public shelter

It is greatly preferable to find the pet a home yourself rather than taking them to a shelter. Even the best shelter is stressful for the animal, and you have only one animal to focus on, while a shelter may have hundreds. Publicly run animal shelters are already overcrowded, and, in many cities, a majority of the pets are not adopted but instead are euthanized.

Even purebred and friendly pets are routinely euthanized at public shelters to make space for new pets coming in. The extent of the overpopulation problem varies from area to area. See a list of shelters and rescues in your area.

Remember, this pet has no one but you — the loyalty you show and the effort you put forth to find this pet a new loving home, even if it causes inconvenience for you now, will be well worth it when you know that this pet is living out a healthy and happy life.

For more questions about cat or dog rehoming, please visit our FAQs page.