Lucky Dog Animal Rescue Selected for National Lifesaving Initiative to Boost Pet Adoptions

Best Friends Animal Society partners with animal shelters and rescue groups for Bring Love Home Challenge, to increase pet adoptions December 1-31 

Alexandria, VA (December 5th, 2025) — Lucky Dog Animal Rescue will participate in the Bring Love Home Challenge, a nationwide effort to help more cats and dogs find homes this December. Led by Best Friends Animal Society, a leading national animal welfare organization working to save the lives of cats and dogs in America’s shelters and take the country no-kill*, the challenge aims to increase lifesaving, and participants will be eligible to receive grant funding.

Lucky Dog Animal Rescue is joining nearly 300 animal shelters and rescue groups across the country to address the critical need for increased pet adoptions by piloting data-backed changes to help more pets get adopted or fostered — such as reducing adoption fees, eliminating home checks, and offering multilingual customer service for adopters and fosters.

In conjunction with this challenge, Lucky Dog Animal Rescue will be hosting an adoption event on December 7th, 2025 at PetSmart in Alexandria, VA (3351 Richmond Highway).

When Best Friends launched its first Bring Love Home Challenge in June 2024, the response was extraordinary — 34,557 cats and dogs found loving homes, an impressive 3,548 more than the same time the year before.

“We are incredibly proud to join Best Friends Animal Society for the Bring Love Home Challenge this December," said Mirah Horowitz, CEO & Founder of Lucky Dog Animal Rescue. "To meet the urgent need for lifesaving, we are evolving our approach by updating our foster process to allow for on-site approvals. By empowering our community to step up and help the moment they walk into our December 7th event in Alexandria, we can get more dogs and cats into loving foster homes immediately. Every foster we approve on-site directly opens up space for another animal in desperate need of rescue."

“More adoptions and pets being fostered means more lives saved, ” said Whitney Bollinger, Director of Strategy & Network Operations, Best Friends Animal Society. “We selected Lucky Dog Animal Rescue for the Bring Love Home Challenge because of their commitment to making adoptions and fostering more accessible in their community and helping more cats and dogs find the homes they need and deserve.

To learn more about the pets available for adoption and fostering at Lucky Dog Animal Rescue, and how to support lifesaving, visit luckydoganimalrescue.org and follow us on social media for Bring Love Home Challenge updates.

Learn more about Best Friends at bestfriends.org.

*No-kill is defined by a 90% save rate for animals entering a shelter and is a meaningful and commonsense benchmark for measuring lifesaving progress. Typically, the number of pets who are suffering from irreparable medical or behavioral issues that compromise their quality of life and prevent them from being rehomed is not more than 10% of all dogs and cats entering shelters. For any community to be no-kill, all stakeholders in that community must work together to achieve and sustain that common goal while prioritizing community safety and good quality of life for pets as guiding no-kill principles. This means cooperation among animal shelters, animal rescue groups, government agencies, community members and other stakeholders, all committed to best practices and protocols