Rescue & Adoption

One Ohio Shelter Turned Your Worst Ex Into Its Best Fundraiser

For five bucks, an Ohio shelter wrote your ex's name in a litter box and let the cats handle the rest. It cleared its goal several times over, and kicked off a whole genre of spite-powered animal fundraising.

By Sasha Ford, Feline Behavior Specialist

February 14, 2023 · 3 min read

Link copied

Every February, animal shelters compete for the same shrinking pile of Valentine’s Day goodwill. In 2023, one shelter in Ohio skipped the roses and went straight for the resentment, and discovered something most nonprofits never figure out: heartbreak is a renewable resource.

The Animal Friends Humane Society, the oldest and largest nonprofit adoption agency in Butler County, Ohio, made a simple offer. Donate five dollars, name an ex you’d rather forget, and the shelter would write that name inside one of its litter boxes so the resident cats could pass judgment in the most literal way possible. Supporters could give in person or over Venmo, where they added the offending name and a certain brown emoji to the payment note. Every dollar went toward the animals’ food, housing, and vet bills.

Spite scaled fast

The shelter had hoped the stunt might pull in around a thousand dollars. By the time the donation window closed, it was hovering near four thousand, with more than five hundred separate people paying to publicly demote someone in a box of cat litter. Some donors sponsored more than one name. A few gave well beyond the five-dollar minimum, dropping twenty-five, fifty, or a hundred dollars to memorialize a single ex. The runaway favorite name, for the record, was Josh.

The mechanics were part of the charm. The fundraiser ran the first two weeks of February, and on Valentine’s Day the shelter promised a video, first names only, showing off the roster of the condemned. The cats assigned to litter-box duty were, naturally, adoptable, which quietly turned a gag into a recruitment tool: come for the schadenfreude, leave with the idea of taking home a cat.

A template other shelters stole immediately

What looked like a one-off joke turned out to be a repeatable format, and the animal-welfare world noticed. The San Antonio Zoo built an entire annual campaign, “Cry Me a Cockroach,” around the same emotional logic: for ten dollars you name a roach after an ex, for twenty-five a rodent, and the zoo feeds your named nemesis to one of its animals, then sends you a video of the meal. Smaller operations followed. The Louisville Nature Center ran its own version, naming roaches after exes and feeding them to a turtle. Other zoos offered superworms handed over to sloth bears, complete with a personalized clip of the snack.

The through-line is why it works. Traditional fundraising asks people to feel warm and generous, a crowded emotional lane in February. Spite fundraising taps a feeling that’s just as strong, far less contested, and genuinely fun to act on for five dollars. It’s cathartic, it’s shareable, and it costs the shelter almost nothing to run. The animals never even know they’ve been drafted into your breakup.

The actual point

Underneath the gag, the Ohio shelter was doing what good rescues always try to do: meet people where they are and turn attention into support. The same organization ran a straight-faced companion offer that month, half off adoption fees for anyone whose heart had more love than grievance in it. Both messages landed in the same inbox, and both funded the same bowls of food.

So if a shelter near you tries something this shameless next Valentine’s Day, take it as a good sign. It means someone there understands that the fastest way to a donor’s wallet isn’t always the sweetest one, and that a well-run rescue will happily let a few cats do its collections.