Host: How does the shelter prescreen the cats for health and personality?

Bridget Speiser: All shelters and rescues will have their own system for prescreening the cats for health and adaptability. This is one of the questions that you should be armed with when you are making your shelter visit to really determine what kind of background the organizations are gathering on the cats. also whether they have an in house veterinarian or they are using a veterinarian in the community to do the health checks.

Many shelters do have preset assessment programs that are starting to sprout up. These programs come come from national organizations like the ASPCA, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They have a wonderful blanketing program called Meet Your Match, that we are utilizing here in Washington, that actually give shelter staff a guideline to perform internal assessment to really, again, come up with these personalities that are inherent in each and every animal including cats. So you do want to find out what kind of program maybe the shelter has employed to determine again adaptability and house of any of these animals that in their care and to see if that's a good match for you when you are in working on this process.