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Petfinder.com gets new home
New Year's resolution helps find homes for 10 million pets
JOPLIN, Mo. — A New Year’s resolution by a Joplin woman 11 years ago to help unwanted pets has turned into a $35 million acquisition by media giant Discovery Communications Inc.
The sale of Petfinder.com was announced this week. The online company has helped find homes for more than 10 million animals in the past 10 years.
“It feels like we got adopted,” said Betsy Banks Saul, co-founder of Petfinder.com.
Saul said the company was sold to Discovery in November after merging with PetsIncredible, a company that produces digital video discs on pet training. Both companies will be part of the newly formed Animal Planet Media Enterprises. Discovery Communications operates 16 U.S. cable channels, including the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet.
Saul and her husband, Jared, will continue to lead Petfinder.com as senior vice presidents of Animal Planet Media Enterprises. The couple now live in New Jersey.
Saul, a Joplin High School and Missouri Southern State University graduate, said she fell in love with the idea of helping abandoned animals as a 12-year-old in Southwest Missouri, working with Opal Hyslep and Animal Aid, volunteering to clean the animals’ cages on weekends. She created Petfinder.com in December 1995 as a New Year’s resolution to help homeless pets.
“We didn’t have any business doing this,” Saul said. “I’d just finished my master’s in water hydrology, and my husband was in medical school. Our deal was as long as we saved one animal’s life each month, we would call it a success.”
Saul said the site surpassed her expectations a long time ago, and the potential impact of what the couple created gives her chills.
“Something magical happened that first month,” she said. “I was typing in the stories of the animals, and I realized I was starting to see not the pet, but the woman who stopped in the middle of the road to pick it up and paid to take it to the vet. I saw not the cat that was thrown away in the Dumpster, but the heroic trash man who pulled it out.
“That’s the best thing about Petfinder: Anyone can make a difference.”
As an employee at the Joplin Humane Society, Deeanna Hornback said she could hug Saul. She said she works for the Joplin shelter because of her love for animals and a desire to help them. With a house already full of pets, Hornback knows she cannot personally save each of the 50 to 150 animals the shelter sees every day. That’s where Petfinder.com comes in. The site links Internet users anywhere in the world to any shelter, including those in Joplin and Carthage.
Nearly five years after signing up to participate in the online directory, Hornback is still surprised by how successful the service is in finding homes for unwanted animals. She said she tries to post as many animals as possible on Petfinder.com and updates the site two to three times a week.
“We’ve even placed animals in Kentucky, Dallas, and I had an Old English sheepdog puppy that someone from Canada wanted,” she said.
Petfinder’s system is based on the idea that specific breeds of animals are difficult to find in certain areas of the country or the world. Hornback said a woman from Topeka, Kan., was thrilled recently to find a yellow Labrador at the Joplin shelter because she had been looking in her area for months without success.
“It’s funny, because here, they’re a dime a dozen,” Hornback said.
The matching procedure proves to Hornback that there is no such thing as unwanted pets, just animals waiting for someone to connect them to the right owner.
“There’s a diamond in every piece of coal,” she said.
Petfinder.com isn’t limited to cats and dogs but embraces all domesticated animals, including horses, donkeys, birds, snakes and rodents. Hornback said a hairless guinea pig recently was adopted by a St. Louis resident, and just last week she posted several red-tailed boa constrictors as available for adoption.
“It saves lives without a question, and it probably saves some money, too,” Hornback said, explaining that Petfinder.com reduces the number of animals that shelters kill.
Saul quit her day job in 1998 to focus entirely on Petfinder. Her husband recently retired from medicine to work with Discovery in the effort. Saul said she knew a time would come when Petfinder would get too big for the couple and their 20 employees to handle, and she looks forward to the opportunity to take the site international with Discovery.
“We’d taken Petfinder as far as we could,” Saul said. “But I always said unless I found the perfect steward, I would never sell it. It was very hard for me to imagine finding that perfect steward, but we did. They’re pretty committed to let us do what we do best: finding animals homes.”
Melissa Dunson writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.
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The big dog
n Petfinder.com is the largest searchable database of adoptable pets on the Internet.
n It is the No. 1 visited animal site, with an average of more than 120 million page views per month.
n Visitors to the site have immediate access to more than 200,000 adoptable pets from more than 10,000 animal shelters and rescue groups across the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Source: www.petfinder.com
