I have copied below the relevant part of a reply from Betsy, founder of Petfinder, regarding my query as to whether they could set up a separate search on Petfinder for positives:
"Hi Pam, We've tossed this around a bit at our Petfinder staff meetings and in fact, at one time, resorted to an informal staff vote. At this time, the amount of people searching for an FeLV/FIV cat has been determined to not be plentiful enough to break it out of the special needs field. However, we have some very FeLV/FIV dedicated staff members (who actually have FIV (adopted) cats) who feel very strongly about this and so we are watching closely the searches performed for special needs to determine when it will make sense to break the field down into sections. Regarding highlighting or featuring these pets, we think that is a great idea and we are going to adopt a more PetShelter-esque approach to this in the near future (next few months)." I am glad they like my idea of featuring or highlighting them on the home page (as PetShelter.com did until its recent merge with Petfinder), but I am disappointed they aren't yet persuaded enough people are looking for positives that they need to break that out separately in the search. Karen, Carla - and anyone else - maybe you could e-mail them and see if you can change their minds.
