Every time a bell rings at this weekend’s Super Adoption event, an animal has found its forever home.
Best Friends Animal Society in Northwest Arkansas will feature approximately 500 adoptable cats and dogs at the event, held this Saturday and Sunday at its facility in Bentonville.
The event will be from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m on both days. Attendees who pre-register online will be admitted at 10 a.m. for an early chance to adopt available animals.
Almost 40 animal shelters and rescue shelters from Arkansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma will participate in the event. Many of them have either reduced or eliminated their adoption fees.
Alongside the pet adoptions, the free event will have an “overall festival atmosphere,” with vendor booths, food trucks, giveaways, and an agility dog demonstration for attendees to enjoy. Current pets are also welcome at the event.
The Super Adoption event is a flagship event for Best Friends Animal Society, which runs six centers across the country.
Its Bentonville facility, which opened in March 2023, is the organization’s largest pet resource center at 20,000 square feet.
As the “new kids on the block,” there’s no time like the present for the Northwest Arkansas location to host the next Super Adoption event, Linda DeBerry, senior marketing and communications specialist for Best Friends Animal Society at NWA, said.
The Super Adoption event is a step toward reaching Best Friends’ goal of creating no-kill communities, meaning that all shelters will have at least a 90 percent save rate.
“This leaves room for those animals that are very sick, grievously injured, or have behavioral issues that cannot be overcome. We realize that some euthanasia is necessary, alas, within animal welfare,” DeBerry said.
When this initiative began in 1984, 17 million animals were being killed annually in shelters, according to Best Friends’ website. In 2023, 415,000 cats and dogs were killed in shelters, and now nearly half of the shelters nationwide are no-kill shelters.
