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6A Daily News – Saturday, February 11, 2012 healthPets & LOS ANGELES (AP) — Have you been looking for love in all the wrong places? Move over, eHarmony and Match.com, and head to your local animal shelter to Meet Your Match. The color-coded program evalu- ates shelter pets and the people looking to adopt them in an effort to match personalities, energy levels and needs. Playing Cupid with Meet Your Match helped workers at the Richmond Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals increase adoptions by nearly 20 percent in just a few years. In 2008, when they launched the program, they found homes for 2,891 dogs and cats. Last year, 3,452 pets were placed. At the same time, returns dropped from 13 percent to 10 percent, said Robin Starr, CEO of the Richmond SPCA. Meet Your Match was designed by Emily Weiss, vice president of shelter research and development for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruel- ty to Animals. Potential adopters answer 19 questions on sub- jects such as whether they want a playful or laid-back pet, how their animal will spend its days and how they will spend together time with their new dog or cat. For the pet evaluation, animals are put in a room in front of a camera. Staff members watch how quick- ly they settle, lie down, curl up and what else they choose to do. They watch the animals play and inter- act. Pet observation sessions last only 15 minutes, but the staff in Richmond has become very adept at read- ing the animals, Starr said. ''There is no pass or fail or good or bad,'' Weiss said — for human or animal. People and pets are assigned a color — green, orange or purple — and one of three categories in each color category. Dogs are watched for friendliness, playfulness, energy level, motivation and drive. A dog might be a laid-back couch potato, a curious busy bee or an action hero go-getter, Weiss said. Green is for dogs who like to be physically and mentally engaged, orange for middle-of-the-road dogs who enjoy regular activity and interaction, and purple for dogs who are easygoing. Cats who test green thrive on adventurous, car- nival-style living. Orange is for go-with-the-flow pets, while purples require a less exciting, library-like home where they can be nothing more than a love bug, Weiss explained. Merope Lolis of New York, New York, tested at the ASPCA's Adoption Center as a good fit for a purple love bug — a cat that would be on its own much of the day. But she fell in love with a beautiful calico cat before realizing that it was a ''frisky cat who was going to need lots of atten- tion when I wasn't avail- able. I found that informa- tion to be very useful to me,'' Lolis said. Lolis kept looking and found a 5-year-old, light gray cat named Miss Piggy that had tested as orange, in between the active greens and mellow purples. She's had the cat since December and says it turned out to be ''a good match, a good fit.'' In the end, she said, ''I paid less attention to what I thought was important — what she looked like — and more to personality and whether it would work in the long run.'' She also renamed the cat Christina Penelope ''because she was much more regal than Miss Piggy.'' When Weiss was curator of behavior and research at the Sedgwick County Zoo, she developed a behavior assessment test that is used by shelters around the coun- try. Building on that, she came up with the Meet Your Match dog program. She developed the cat match program after she joined the ASPCA in 2005. Shelters across the coun- try use the matchmaking programs, building promo- tions and holiday ad cam- paigns around it. Valentine's activities Find puppy love through Meet Your Match The case of the pooping cat MCT photo Day is the most popular and comes with a reduction in the $95 adoption fee the shelter usually charges, Starr said. However, with Meet Your Match, ''love happens all year long for us.'' Richmond was one of the first shelters in the coun- try to embrace the match- making plan, Starr said. The hike in the adoption rate didn't happen immediately, but developed gradually, after a lot of training and a dedicated staff, she said. The best part of the pro- gram is that it encourages people to focus on things like which pet will be the right fit for their lifestyle and their personality — instead of appearance. On the other hand, Weiss said, with pets as with peo- ple, ''we know love at first sight happens,'' and Meet Your Match is flexible enough to accommodate that. ''We don't want to get in the way of love at first sight.'' Somestimes, Starr added, the ''best match is a mismatch and simply going home with the right expec- tations.'' Duke the Cat, pictured Jan. 20, had a two-year poop spree, doing it on the doormat finally did him in. His owner,Victoria Adair was found guilty of allowing Duke to damage the next-door Bal- lard property owned by Mark Simpson. The fine was $109. SEATTLE (MCT) — On the afternoon of Nov. 2, the case of Duke the Cat, described by his alleged victim "as the smartest cat that I've ever seen," ended up in Seattle Municipal Court. The 11-year-old longhair — well, actually, his owner, Victoria Adair — was found guilty of allowing Duke to damage the next-door Ballard, Wash., property owned by Mark Simpson. The fine was $109. That damage, according to Simpson, an architect, was from Duke's considerable and relentless pooping. In a statement to Seattle Animal Control, the architect says he and his wife, Joanne Simpson, in 2009 bought a dilapidated Ballard home on Northwest 61st Street as an investment. They hired contractors to turn it into a duplex. During the remodel, the architect says, because of Duke's poop, "Workers were sickened from the stink." Simpson describes a wily Duke who, for example, would wait until a door happened to be open, and sneak in and do his business. "He was a fast pooper," Simpson says. Adair says plenty of other cats in the neighborhood could have been using the property as a litter box. She even brought to court a photo of another cat that, to her, kind of looked like Duke and could have been the perpetrator. Simpson, meanwhile, had provided Animal Control with photos and a video that he says showed Duke on his property. And, he says, even though he never saw Duke actually performing the deed, he saw him fleeing the property at "least 25 times" over two years. Simpson says that when he saw Duke running away, and then saw the cat was running from "a warm, steaming pile," he could only come to one conclusion. Magistrate Adam Eisenberg ruled that the "preponder- ance" of evidence was that it was Duke who, time after time, hit Simpson's property. Experts disagree on trap, neuter, release program for feral cats AKRON, Ohio (MCT) — In an area of Akron, Ohio, that residents don't want disclosed live three colonies of wild, or feral, cats. They dine in trash bins, are fed by employees of a local restaurant and find handouts and shelter from people in the neighbor- hood. The Beacon Journal isn't disclosing the location because these cats are part of an experiment. By some estimates, there may be 90,000 feral cats in Summit County, Ohio, alone. To address this, resi- dents in the area of the colonies have taken the cats to the vet for vaccina- tions against diseases and to have them neutered, with the thought that the problem will eventually disappear without outright destruction of the animals. "There are probably five neighbors, and some of the waitresses help pay vet and food bills," said Karen Coleman, who is familiar with the experiment. She is affiliated with Alley Cat Allies, a national advocacy group that promotes TNR (trap, neuter and return feral cats to their place of origin). The colonies have been monitored for about five years, and there is a feeling of success. The oldest member of the colony is 10 years old — ancient for a feral cat. And most importantly, there have been very few additions over that period, Coleman said. That's why they don't want the loca- tion disclosed. Too little, too slow? Bird advocacy groups argue that the trap, neuter and return method cannot work fast enough to solve what they see as an envi- ronmental crisis. A feral cat is described as a cat born and raised in the wild, or one that has been abandoned or lost and has turned to wild ways to survive. In seven years, one female cat and her off- spring theoretically can produce 420,000 cats, according to estimates from the Humane Society of the United States. They are not a native species, said George H. Fenwick, president of the American Bird Conservan- cy of The Plains, Va. "As such, it has an advantage over all the native species that have found a balance in nature," he said. Because they receive vaccinations and auxiliary food, they have become "a super predator." "Take the 'C' off cat and replace it with an 'R.' They are both small predator mammals. How would people feel about TNR colonies of rats? They wouldn't take it well," Fen- wick said. His group estimates there are 9 million wild cats nationwide, part of a free-roaming population that is killing more than a half billion birds annually. In October, the conser- vancy sent mayors of 50 large American cities let- ters advising them of the threat "posed to birds and other wildlife in your city by feral and free-roaming cats." The letter stated that outdoor cats, even well-fed ones, kill hundreds of mil- lions of wild birds and other small animals each year in the United States, including endangered species. "Our read is really quite clear that free-roaming cats — that includes TNR cats — are proliferating. They are expanding horrifically and the data that we have, that's been peer reviewed and published, makes it quite clear that there is no evidence that TNR works," K W I K K U T S Family Hair Salon $200 REGULAR HAIRCUT off with coupon Not good with other offers 1064 South Main St., Red Bluff • 529-3540 Reg. $13.95 Expires 2/29/12 Fenwick said. "During the past year, there has been a lot of mis- information circulating about the decline of bird populations, and the cats in the ecosystem, based on inaccurate information or misleading statistics circu- lated by groups seeking to bolster their cause," Alley Cat Allies President Becky Robinson said from the agency's base in Bethesda, Md. Studies have shown cats to be mainly scavengers, not hunters, feeding mostly on garbage and scraps, she said. When they do hunt, cats prefer rodents and other burrowing animals, as witnessed by samples of the diets of outdoor cats, Robinson said. ACA cites studies that show that the overwhelm- ing causes of wildlife and bird deaths are loss of habitat, urbanization, pol- lution and environmental degradation _ all caused by humans, not feral cats. And when cats are removed from an area, rat populations soar and wipe out the birds completely, according to ACA.