The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is launching Feline-ality, the latest addition to its stable of Meet Your Match cat adoption programs aimed at increasing adoption rates and reducing animal shelters’ return rates and overpopulation.

Just like Canine-ality and Puppy-ality do for dogs and puppies, Feline-ality identifies distinct feline personalities in cats and matches them with potential adopters whose personalities and lifestyles fit them best.

“The key to developing successful adoptions lies in making good matches between adopters and pets, thus creating lasting bonds. “Feline-ality is a tool that does precisely this,” said Emily Weiss, the ASPCA’s senior director of shelter behavior programs.

Feline-ality uses detailed research-based surveys and behavior assessments, both for cats and potential adopters, to make the best matches possible between the two. The cat assessment reliably predicts how an individual cat is likely to behave in its new home.

An adopter’s survey identifies the characteristics of the adopter’s preferences and lifestyle that correlate with specific feline-alities. Adopters can then look for the cats with feline-alities they feel would be good fits for their households as identified by matching colors and sub-categories.

To create Feline-ality, the ASPCA said, it conducted two years of research. The first two phases of research focused on prediction of cat behavior. The third and final phase was beta testing the entire matching process.

Five shelter organizations beta tested the program: Animal Refuge League in Portland, Maine; Kansas Humane Society in Wichita, Kan.; Humane Society of Boulder Valley in Boulder, Colo.; Animal Welfare Association in Voorhees, N.J.; and the Hamilton-Burlington SPCA in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

The ASPCA said initial results for the program have been extremely encouraging; adoptions have increased by up to 46 percent, while returns and euthanasia numbers decreased by up to 40 percent.

Also, 105 out of 107 adopters reported that they would probably choose a shelter that uses the Meet Your Match program when adopting an animal in the future and rated their satisfaction with the program 8.89 out of 10, according to the ASPCA.

For more information on the ASPCA’s Meet Your Match, click here.