I’ve had this idea for quite some time. I came up with it after i saw what this dude in Texas did for his rescued animals.
I want to help animals in shelters and rescues get adopted. Pets in rescues and shelters are an unfortunate byproduct of domesticating animals to be pets.
And everytime I think about pets, I think about a quote from Ghandi:
“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
The immediate problem is that there are a lot of pets in shelters, and people continue to go out and buy pets from breeders. Sure, there can be behaviour problems with a rescued pet, but we suck as a nation if we just discard the unfavorable ones and go get new one. I find that extremely wasteful.
First, there are two things in this nation to help pets: animal shelters and animal rescues.
Animal shelters are usually state or city funded, operated, and most often times have a euthinization policy, as in, they are usually mandated to euthanize animals. Animal rescues are usually non-profits and operated by volunteers that want to help animals and do not have a mandate to euthanize animals, hence the “rescue” part. They’re rescuing pets from being destroyed just because no one wants them. Pretty shitty.
Most shelters and rescues will say they need lots of money to be raised to keep the organization going, but the ultimate issue is marketing. Getting the idea of adoption into the heads of people that could rescue a pet. And once a pet is adopted from the rescue, that means the rescue can go save another pet from an animal shelter. Marketing, just like any other business task, requires money to operate. How can rescues leverage marketing to pay for itself and at the same time get animals adopted so they can go rescue more from euthanization?
Enter the idea: The Bark Bus.
Who doesn’t love seeing dogs stick their head out the window of a car going down the road or highway? Exactly. I want to get a diesel yellow school bus, modify the inside a little bit so that the dogs can sit by themselves but also be close together and not get in dog fights while the bus is in motion going down the road. Maybe have a few web-cams located in the bus to broadcast a live stream on the website so people at work can log in and see the dogs while their at work on their lunch break since they aren’t able to be in traffic to see this bus real-time.
There could be some ad’s on the website, or shown during the webcam stream to generate some cash that way …
The main attraction though is while the bus is going down the road. The dogs will be happy and sticking their heads out the windows of the bus, so everyone will look at this bus.
The dogs would be picked up from a local animal rescue. There would be a QR-code on each side of the bus so people in traffic could easily point their phone cameras at the bus and be taken the link that pops up. Or just take a photo of the bus and there would be a URL also on there so they can refernece the website when they get to wherever their going.
On the website itself it could have a URL to the shelter that the dogs are from that day. Maybe theres a history of the last 30 days and links to the dogs on the bus for that specific day with photos of each dog, too.
I figure why not sell advertising for $500/month on this bus from say 25 local businesses, and that would yield 150k/year to pay for a driver to drive the bus since it’s dogs, not children so someone retired could do it, and some of the money left over would go twards gas, and maintanence of the bus.
I realize the numbers need to be worked on in detail and feasibility, but it could happen. There would probaly need to be 1 person from the shelter to come along to take care of the dogs on the bus, so theres some liability because they’re on the bus and the driver is employed by the non-profit.
I’m sure there would also be some private donors that would pitch it to keep it running if the advertising fell through. It may just need to be pitched as, it costs say $50,000/year to run, and just find some donors to put money in and then pick up the rest of the the tab through advertising. I think advertising is the way to go though first, simply because that would make it a sustainable business and not rely on begging for money each year from donors.