Millions of cats and dogs are euthanized each year in the US alone, yet pet stores continue to sell animals, almost all of which come from large-scale commercial breeders (commonly known as “puppy mills” and “kitten mills”).
Demand for animals from pet stores can be reduced to the point of unprofitability within a generation if children learn early that the proper place to get an animal is from a shelter.
Persuade teachers and youth activity leaders to engage children in memorable exercises that demonstrate the merits of animal adoption.
Rescue Tails Book Series
Create a series of illustrated children’s books starring shelter animals and their rescuers. These books will frame the children in the stories as heroes for saving the lives of the animals by adopting them. These books will primarily serve as templates for children to emulate. Offer books at no cost to schools participating in Rescue Tails activities.
Language and Art Exercises
Create high-quality lesson plans that cast animal adoption in a positive light. Language modules will include reading stories as well as participating in creative writing exercises in which students individually or collaboratively write their own stories. Art modules will include illustrating their stories or those written by other students.
Create lesson plans at a variety of grade levels. Older students can create books intended for younger local students to read.
Book Publication App
Develop an app that allows teachers to prepare their students’ work for publication. Fully automated software would be needlessly complex and prohibitively expensive to develop and maintain. Instead, the automated portion will guide users to create a nearly finished prototype, but the actual print-ready files will be prepared by Rescue Tails staff. This will provide the additional benefit of giving specialists the opportunity to identify and correct potential mistakes before costly printing errors are made.
To help teachers publicize the activity, the app will also generate press releases and include tips for submitting them to local newspapers for coverage of the students’ participation.
Finally, the app will allow teachers to submit their students’ work for inclusion in the official Rescue Tails series. Depending on the volume and quality of submissions, qualification for publication could be determined by staff or else by the results of public contests between other submissions.
Book Sales
Make published books available for purchase through Amazon. As revenue generation is not the goal of this project, set book price close to printing costs.
Allow participants who wish to use this activity to raise funds to set the price higher and designate another animal welfare organization as the recipient for the profits.
