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Please help fill my bowl
If you’ve been surfing the Internet for any length of time then you probably know about thehungersite.com, the earliest in a chain of websites that ask users to click on banners every day to donate food or other resources to worthy causes. The series of sites now include support for the rainforest, child literacy, shelter animals, women’s health, and more.
It’s obvious with the various rescue sites where the money is coming from; once you’ve made a click you’re redirected to a page that’s plastered with ads. Advertisers pay that charitable money for us to be led to look at their wares. Because it’s all for a good cause, I’m O.K. with that.
Now there’s a new set of twin sites with a similar goal for animals: Free Kibble and Free Kibble for Cats. Each click donates, well, free kibble, to animal shelters. These sites have a bit of a twist, however, to set themselves apart.
Every day each site displays a trivia question related to dogs and cats. Answer the question and you donate the food. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve answered correctly; the food is donated either way. The trivia’s just there to make the sites seem a little more interesting.
Questions relate to anything from famous animals (my canine question today was what charitable cause does famous surfing dog Ricochet now support, the answer being anti-bullying) to minutia about breeds (my feline question was what other unique feature does the Scottish fold cat – the one with the folded ears – also sport, the answer being they can contort to sitting in a Buddha position). No matter how many times you refresh the page you’ll only get one question per day, but you can go back and look at prior trivia just for fun.
My biggest question about Free Kibble is how it makes enough money to donate a significant amount of food. It’s not covered in ads the way the hunger sites network is, and even with those sorts of sites I’ve always wondered whether or not any genuine work is being done for those in need.
According to the “About” section of Free Kibble, the site is sponsored by holistic pet food company Halo. A couple of the company’s ads do adorn the site, so perhaps Halo finds these ads enough to justify their donations. The front page of Free Kibble says that each answered question – again, correct or not – donates 10 pieces of kibble to an animal shelter.
The “Kibble Map” section of the site claims that Free Kibble has donated over 7 million meals to needy animals. You can then click on a U.S. state to see with which shelters Free Kibble is in partnership. It’s not a super long list; for example, my state, Maryland, doesn’t have any participants yet, but the nearest city, Washington, D.C., does have one.
Whether or not Free Kibble actually makes good on its promise doesn’t make too much of a difference; if you’re a fan of trivia it’s a neat site to put on your daily rotation. And I’m not so cynical that I don’t trust the site. However, if you’d rather support a cause that you’re sure is helping, check if your local Animal Control has a pet food bank in support of either a shelter or needy pet-owning families in the area. Many do, and it’s a great way to directly help animals in your community.
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*(This image by Rocky Mountain Feline Rescue is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
