July is packed full of fun pet-themed holidays to help you showcase your Neighborhood Pet Shop, your Astro Offers, and your participation in Sharing the Love!

Table of Contents: July Holidays 2021

Month-Long Observances

• National Lost Pet Prevention Month™

• National Pet Hydration Awareness Month

• Dog House Repair Month

Week-Long Holidays

• July 25-31: National Feed a Rescue Pet Week

One-Day Events

• July 1: Canada Day
• July 1: ID Your Pet Day

• July 4: Independence Day

• July 10: National Kitten Day

• July 11: All-American Pet Photo Day

• July 15: National Pet Fire Safety Day

• July 18: National Ice Cream Day

• July 21: National Craft for your Local Shelters Day

• July 21: No Pet Store Puppies Day

• July 21: National Hot Dog Day

• July 26: National Parents Day

• July 31: National Mutt Day

Month-Long Observances

You have a full month to bring awareness to these educationally centric holidays while promoting your store, products, and loyalty programs.

National Lost Pet Prevention Month™

PetHub started Lost Pet Prevention Month in 2014 to drive a deeper conversation around the many aspects of keeping pets safe at home with their families. According to the ASPCA, around 6.5 million companion animals enter animal shelters every single year. In that 6.5 million, around 3.3 million are dogs and 3.2 million are cats. Luckily, there are many strategies a pet parent can take to prevent their pet from getting lost and entering a shelter.

Learn more about how you can get involved and help bring awareness by going to PetHub's Lost Pet Prevention Month homepage.

On their blog, you can also find assorted articles full of advice on how to help pet parents prevent their pets from getting lost. I found this one, "Don't Let Your Pet Run Around Naked" to be particularly eye-opening.

Over 90% of the pets that DO make it home…are reunited with their families because of ID tags, microchips, or other identification means.

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National Pet Hydration Awareness Month

Our friends at PetSafe started National Pet Hydration Awareness Month in order to bring attention to the simple fact that our pets rely on us for their hydration.

We are working hard to get the word out to pet owners everywhere to be aware of their pet’s water intake and limit their exposure to extreme temperatures, especially in what is usually the hottest month across the US.

Be aware of the signs of dehydration. Keep freshly filtered water available to your pets at all times so they are enticed to drink the proper amount of water. Each time you reach for your bottle of water to keep yourself healthy and hydrated, think of your pet. These furry guys depend on us for access to freshwater.

This July, join PetSafe in their quest to bring more awareness to Pet Hydration!

Also, as we all know, anyway that a pet owner can introduce moisture into their pet's diet is a win. This is where our bone broths, dehydrated diets, raw diets, and canned diets come into play. Astro has plenty of these types of Offers for July!

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My Promotion Idea: Like any good pet shop I'm sure you have a section dedicated to hydration supplies - fountains, travel bowls, water bottles, water filters, etc. July would be a great time to offer a special on these products.

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Dog House Repair Month

Depending on your customer base this holiday can vary from sharing "Doggo Tiny Dream Home Designs" to sharing solid tips for building a functional and safe dog house. If your shop carries dog houses, or materials to aid in one's construction, this is the month to share your know-how!

Dogs who live predominantly inside with their human families would still benefit from having a dog house outside in their yard. These outdoor homes can provide either permanent shady spots or cozy dens during their outdoor lounge time.

I can picture my dog's dream home now... It would have a planted roof covered in plants to help keep the bugs away - citronella plants are amaze-balls for this and they cultivate like crazy! The planted roof would also help keep the interior cool. He'd have his very own hobbit-hole! Ok, I'm truly loving this idea. 😁

Now, there are pet families that need a functional, year-round home for their dogs. This type of dog house will need to do so much more than just look cute. The Spruce Pets has shared a collection of 16 Free DIY Dog House Plans that are worth checking out.

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Week-Long Holidays

You have a full week to celebrate and bring awareness to this charitable holiday while promoting your store, products, and loyalty programs.

July 25-31: National Feed a Rescue Pet Week

Launched in 2017, this holiday by GreaterGood.org and The Animal Rescue Site aims to feed shelter pets. The Rescue Bank, started by Greater Good Charities, provides a year-round way to donate pet food to shelter and rescue pets. 

We’ve granted more than $30 million in essential supplies to over 300 animal welfare organizations across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

Check around in your community for ways you can participate.

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One-Day Events

Bring attention to these holidays and your related promotions in the days leading up to them via Astro Campaigns. Then hit your social media pages on the day off to spread some cheer!

July 1: Canada Day

All those who celebrate Canada as their home and native land celebrate Canada Day on July 1st. The day commemorates the anniversary of the Constitution Act, which consolidated three territories into the single nation of Canada,  way back in 1867. That's right — Canada celebrated its 150th birthday in 2017!

Parades, picnics, fireworks, and festivals are all common ways to celebrate Canada Day. We all know that many pets are anxious around loud noises, so this is a good time to educate your customers on the ways that you can help them keep their pets safe and calm this season.

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July 1: ID Your Pet Day

July 1 is National ID Your Pet Day and was started by the ASPCA in order to serve as an annual check-in to make sure your pets' identification information is up to date.

Identification can be a lifesaver for a lost pet.

It's a good idea for all your animal companions—even indoor-only pets—to always wear a collar with an ID tag that includes your name, current phone number, and any relevant contact information.

This is a great time to share with your customers the resources that you provide at your store to help keep their pets safely identified. 

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July 4: Independence Day

The Fourth of July is a holiday of fun and celebration for many, but it can also be a night full of anxiety for our four-legged friends. Since we can't prevent our neighbors from setting off a chain of fireworks on the Fourth of July, we have to focus on the things we can do to help our pets stay safe and calm.

Tips for Keeping Your Pet Safe and Calm this Fourth of July

We have put together a blog article for you to share with your customers to help them keep their pets safe and calm during the festivities.

This article contains safety tips and educational content related to CBD. It also features 5 Astro Offers by four of our CBD brand partners - Austin & Kat, Earth Buddy, Heirloom Pets, and Holistic Hound.

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July 10: National Kitten Day

A day dedicated to kittens! I'm in. National Kitten Day is intended to “celebrate the magic of kittens, highlight the plight of kittens in shelters and to encourage adoption,” according to author and animal advocate Colleen Paige.

The National Kitten Day celebration was initially sponsored by BLUE Naturally Fresh Cat Litter for a couple of years. Then later on the event expenses were divided between The Blue Buffalo Corporation and Naturally Fresh cat litter. Naturally Fresh has a great collection of blog articles centered around cat adoption, such as "Tips for Adopting a New Cat or Kitten".

It is especially important to think of kittens and their need for both foster care and adoption during the months of April through October, also known as Kitten Season - and we are smack dab in the middle of Kitten Season. As someone who has done her fair share of kitten fostering and foster failing (looking at you MeNow and Mr. Bumbles) I understand how rewarding and emotionally draining volunteering can be. At times it seems there is an endless sea of kittens that need our help. So on this day let's give some love to our kitten fosters, shelter volunteers, and rescue groups. Oh! And our Cat Cafes - looking at you PurrCup Cafe Raleigh.

This holiday pairs perfectly (ahem, purrfectly) with Sharing the Love. Let your local shelters and cat rescues know about your participation in this program so they can direct their new kitten adopters to you. 

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Social Media Fun: Kitten throwback photos are some of my favorite things! Ask your customers to share pics of their cats now, and as kittens.

Sharing the Love: Is this the first you have heard of Sharing the Love? Neighborhood Pet Shops and Pet Supply Brands can participate for FREE! Learn more here.

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July 11: All-American Pet Photo Day

All American Pet Photo Day is celebrated across the globe on July 11 through various social media platforms. According to the national calendar, this day is celebrated by posting various pictures and videos with the hashtag, #AllAmericanpetphotoday. 

The motive of All American Pet Photo Day is the celebrate the sacred bond between humans and their adorable pets of various kinds. The pet need not be of a particular breed or type. Every animal, bird, and mammal is appreciated through varied pictures and clicks. The hashtags related to pets and animals trend across the globe on All American Pet Photo Day.

Sharing the Love

This holiday is perfectly suited to pair with your Sharing the Love platform!

Sharing the Love encourages social media participation. When a newly adopted pet stops by your shop to redeem their Welcome Home Kit make sure to snap a pic and post it to your social media.

Please please tag us so we can see your posts! @astroloyalty for Instagram and @astropetloyalty for Facebook.

We love seeing how you are showcasing your participation. And our hearts sing every time we see an adopted pet with their new treasures!

For some additional inspiration courtesy of your peers in love, check out our Instagram Tagged feed. 

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Social Media Fun: #AllAmericanPetPhotoDay is the hashtag of the holiday. Encourage your customers to use the hashtag and share a pic of their pet. Ask them to @tag your business pages so you can sit there gleefully and watch all the pet pics roll in. You could even collect those posts and put together a fun collage on Canva and share a pic of all your pet customers!

Sharing the Love: Is this the first you have heard of Sharing the Love? Neighborhood Pet Shops and Pet Supply Brands can participate for FREE! Learn more here.

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July 15: National Pet Fire Safety Day

National Pet Fire Safety Day takes place every year on July 15, and it's a day to learn how to keep your pet safe in a fire. For many of us, pets are our most precious asset so it makes sense that we would dedicate a day to keeping them safe during one of the scariest things we can imagine. It was started by the Kennel Club and ADT Security in 2009 to help pet owners learn safety measures to protect their beloved pets and homes from fire, and it’s a great opportunity to learn how to keep your fur baby safe.

The original article associated with the launch of this holiday contains a bunch of useful information. We have pulled key tips from this article and included it in the template we added to your Marketing Suite.

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July 18: National Ice Cream Day

We have borrowed this human-centric holiday so our pets can also benefit from this excuse to enjoy a sweet frozen treat. The cool thing about pet ice cream, or fro-yo, is that most brands have created a healthy treat that doesn't require a cheat day to enjoy.

Brands like Boss Dog Brands, The Bear & The Rat, and Cloud Star, all have loyalty programs on Astro for their fro-yo yum-yums. Cloud Star even has an Astro Offer this month!

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Social Media Fun: Ask your customers to share a pic of their pet enjoying a sweet frozen treat in the heat and @tag your page. #NationalIceCreamDay

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July 21: National Craft for your Local Shelters Day

Erika Lindquist is the owner of the "Sew Doggy Style" blog and the founder of National Craft For Your Local Shelters Day, celebrated on July 21^st this year. Inspired by her rescue dog Sebastian, she started the holiday in 2012.

"I wanted to come up with a way for people to give/donate to their local shelters that would be fun and affordable," says Lindquist. "If someone is unable to help their shelter financially, they can help by making simple, yet meaningful, items for the animals."

The I Heart Dogs blog put together a fantastic article titled, 10 Ways to Craft For Your Local Shelter On July 21st. It contains a range of fun crafty ideas for any skill set, from "Adopt Me" Bandanas to No-Sew T-Shirt Beds. I love a good craft and so many of these are doable with items I currently have lying around my apartment. 

So take the pledge to get crafty for your local shelter! If you want to go one step further you can organize a collection and a drop-off of all your customer-generated crafts. When you do drop off the collection be sure to include some Sharing the Love flyers so those pets who are adopted know to come to your store for their Welcome Home Goodies. (Flyer templates coming soon!)

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Social Media Fun: Ask your customers to share pics of the crafts they made to donate.

Sharing the Love: Is this the first you have heard of Sharing the Love? Neighborhood Pet Shops and Pet Supply Brands can participate for FREE! Learn more here.

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July 21: No Pet Store Puppies Day

I want to preface this by saying that Astro is a firm supporter of those pet shops that have a 501c3 license and who host adoptable rescue pets in their store. Our Adoption Reward Platform, Sharing the Love, rewards the adoption of pets from local rescues and shelters, not those procured from known puppy mills. I want to congratulate our retailers for promoting their participation in this platform to the appropriate 501c3 circles so we can all make sure that the rescue pets most in need of homes are welcomed into them.

The ASPCA started No Pet Store Puppies Day in order to bring attention to the still staggering number of known puppy mills in the USA.

The ASPCA estimates that there are between 6,000 and 10,000 commercial breeding facilities in the United States—and we refuse to rest until every single mill dog is safe.

WILL YOU FIGHT FOR LOVE?

The commercial puppy industry keeps dogs captive in cruel conditions just so they can keep making puppies. It's time for dog lovers to fight back. Pledge to stay informed, educate others and help us stamp out the puppy mill industry for good. 

This is a great time to share information about your store's participation in Sharing the Love. Let the world know that your pet shop is on the side of rescue and adoption!

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Sharing the Love: Is this the first you have heard of Sharing the Love? Neighborhood Pet Shops and Pet Supply Brands can participate for FREE! Learn more here.

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July 21: National Hot Dog Day

Here's some Hot Dog History for ya... References to dachshund sausages and ultimately hot dogs can be traced to German immigrants in the 1800s. These immigrants brought not only sausages to America, but dachshund dogs. The name most likely began as a joke about the Germans' small, long, thin dogs. In fact, even Germans called the frankfurter a "little-dog" or "dachshund" sausage, thus linking the word "dog" to their popular concoction.

Based on this fun fact from history this seems like the perfect holiday to celebrate our dachshund friends! It's a great time to celebrate your Weiner Dog customers and ask pet parents to post picks of their little weiner dogs and @tag your social pages. If you don't want to wait, check out The Nose Print's blog for the dachshund slideshow of your dreams. I'm flashing back to a time where I serendipitously stumbled upon a Weiner Dog Meetup in Charleston, SC. Best afternoon ever!

You can also stress the word "Hot" and offer your pet clients some frozen treats to help keep them cool. Or you can play on the fact that hot dogs are treats for humans, and our cool dogs should also be rewarded with a treat this day! Check out our Offer Pairings showcasing some of our favorite treat offers for the month.

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Social Media Fun: Please! We need to flood the internet with weiner dog pics. After all, we wouldn't have hot dogs without the visual inspiration provided by our dachshund friends.

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July 26: National Parents Day

Ok, you caught us. Yes, technically this holiday celebrates those parental units with human children, but we cannot deny that Pet Parents have become their own phenomenon. Some psychologists have even dubbed these as "interspecies families" and I am here for it!

Psychology Today shared a study by researchers Nicole Owens and Liz Grauerholz, where they explored, "How people who identify as pet parents make sense of and describe their roles in relation to their pets?" If you are curious, here are the full findings of this study as published by Nicole Owens and Liz Graurholz. 

Of the 39 respondents, 8 did not consider themselves to be pet parents at all, and an additional 6 only somewhat considered themselves to be pet parents or said that it depends, even though they all considered their pets to be family members.

However way you look at it, our pets are a vital part of the family. And family is important. And as pet support specialists we can all help our customers be the best pet parents, best pet guardians, and best pet roommates, ever! 

I'm just going to lay this right here for your enjoyment...

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Social Media Fun: Ask your customers to share pics of their pets, and ask them how they identify. Do they consider themselves to be "Pet Parents", or does "Pet Guardians" or "Pet Roommates" resonate more. Conduct your own study and have some fun with it!

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July 31: National Mutt Day

I love this holiday. Mutts will always be my favorite type of dog. They are comprised of all the best pieces of the breeds within them and are therefore truly unique. There are times where I feel that my Huxley was made especially for me, he is truly a mystery-buddy extraordinaire!

National Mutt Day, also known as National Mixed Breed Dog Day, was created in 2005 by Celebrity Pet & Family Lifestyle Expert and Animal Welfare Advocate, Colleen Paige and is celebrated on both July 31st and December 2nd. 

This special day was created to be celebrated on two dates per year, to raise awareness of the plight of mixed breed dogs in shelters around the nation, as approximately 80% of dogs in shelters are mixed breeds. 

There is a Facebook Page dedicated to National Mutt Day where you can follow along with their "World's Cutest Mutt" photo contest. When sharing posts and content related to this holiday make sure to tag them, @nationalmuttday. 

Mutts really are amazing. I mean come on! Are those corgi ears on a yellow lab? I'm in love! 😍

This holiday pairs really well with Sharing the Love and is the perfect platform on which to bring awareness to mixed-breed adoption in your community. 

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Social Media Fun: Encourage your customers to share adoption stories of their mixed-breed buddies and how they have enriched their lives since. #NationalMuttDay

Sharing the Love: Is this the first you have heard of Sharing the Love? Neighborhood Pet Shops and Pet Supply Brands can participate for FREE! Learn more here.

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