The Humane Society of St. Lucie County is showcasing animals in desperate need of homes by partnering with local restaurants to attach adoption flyers to takeout orders.<\/p>\n
The initiative is called “The Opie Project,” after a longtime shelter resident named Opie. He was the star of flyers that went out with pizzas ordered at Big Apple Pizza in Fort Pierce.<\/p>\n
Owner Scott Van Duzer said the approach worked, and Opie landed a home after waiting 800 days.<\/p>\n
Van Duzer started sending out more flyers featuring other cats and dogs at the shelter, helping at least a dozen of the shelter\u2019s longest residents find families.<\/p>\n
Now, the Humane Society is building on that success and looping in more businesses. Sunrise City Cafe recently started featuring cats and dogs on their takeout orders, too.<\/p>\n
“It makes a massive impact on such a small scale so why not make it a bigger scale?” Shannon Glendinning, with the Humane Society of St. Lucie County, said.<\/p>\n
“Because any way that we can lead to more adoptions means more pets we can save down the road, too,” Glendinning said.<\/p>\n
The Humane Society is calling on more small business owners to join the free program. The shelter prints and delivers the flyers, hoping to help customers lock eyes with a pet that could be their perfect match.<\/p>\n
This story was reported on-air by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Humane Society of St. Lucie County is showcasing animals in desperate need of homes by partnering with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":223093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[100973,171,173,172,3034,100972],"class_list":["post-223092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-port-st-lucie","tag-castration","tag-port-st-lucie","tag-port-st-lucie-headlines","tag-port-st-lucie-news","tag-sex-offender","tag-zachary-doolittle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}