What are the logistics of the actual rescue?
We distribute the number of animals we have to rescue among our rescuers so they’re not in such a far-flung distance that our rescuers [can’t meet] their commitments within 18–24 hours. I have one [client] in Vermont, one in New Hampshire, and one client in Massachusetts. I could cover all three of those within 24 hours, no problem. Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Mississippi, those are our top states. In Georgia, we already have four rescuers. In Georgia, we have 16 clients, in Alabama we have 23. Mississippi, as you’d expect, it’s the most religious state, has 25 and Arkansas has 22. Then Oklahoma comes in with 21. We try to keep it at a 6 or 7:1 ratio of rescuers to clients. We don’t do Texas yet, but if we did, it would be a problem — we’d have more rescuers proportionate to the customers that we would like. I don’t want to hurt people’s income by diluting our pool income among more people when we can’t justify the number of clients.
The more populous a state is, the more profitable it is for us and the rescuers. We get a lot of requests from Canada, but we haven’t even considered going to Canada yet because it’s such a big country and there’s so few Rapture-believing fundamentalist Christians that it would dilute our earnings.
And the payments?
We had to increase our rates since the [latest] Rapture prediction: $135 for the first pet and $20 for each additional pet at the same address. For that they get a ten-year coverage term. So that if [the client] gets Raptured within the ten years following the signing of the contract, we guarantee that we will save their pets and rescue them and put them in good homes. If they want to renew their contract, we will offer them another ten-year period at a discounted rate, but we don’t advertise that because we’ve only been in business for two years. All of the income that we generate from contract sales is put into a pot every month. Irrespective of from what state we get a client, and irrespective of from what state our rescuer lives, all of our rescuers share evenly in all of the income generated from contract sales. I send it out to them via PayPal transmission once a month. Once we answer [the client’s] technical questions, we get a contract and a PayPal transmission. If we accept their contract, we send them a certificate, which shows the terms of coverage. If we do not accept the contract, we refund their PayPal and tell them, “Sorry, we cannot do it.”
Under what circumstances would you reject a contract?
Circumstances like, “I’m doing this for somebody else and I don’t want them to know about it.” I don’t want to deal with that. Circumstances like, they need coverage for an animal that we won’t cover. We had someone with a chimpanzee, but we had to turn it down. Not everybody wants to have a chimpanzee in their home, especially [since] that woman had her face torn off.
