Danielle, a 23-year-old paralegal stumbled upon a dog adoption event in a North Brooklyn beer garden, where a beagle mix being paraded out of the back of a rescue van reminded her of the dog she grew up with, Snickers. It all felt like fate, so she filled out an application on the spot. She and her best friend/rommmate Alexa soon found themselves sitting across from a serious-looking young woman with a ponytail. Danielle and Alexa were confident they would be leaving with Millie that day-- they had a 1,000-square-foot apartment a few blocks from a dog park and were employed full-time with the ability to work from home for the foreseeable future. But the volunteer kept posing questions that they hadn’t prepared for. What if they stopped living together? What if Danielle’s girlfriend’s collie mix didn’t get along with her new family member? What would be the solution if the dog needed expensive training for behavioral issues? Which vet were they planning to use?
All of which, upon reflection, were reasonable questions. But when it came to the dog's diet, they were caught off guard. Danielle's childhood dog Snickers had lived to 16 1/2 on a diet of Blue Buffalo Wilderness, the most expensive stuff that was available at her parents’ Bay Area pet store. “Would you want to live on the best version of Lean Cuisine for the rest of your life?” sniffed the volunteer with a frown. She recommended (seemingly insisted upon) a small-batch, raw-food brand that cost up to $240 a bag. “If you were approved, you’d need to get the necessary supplies and take time off from work starting now,” the dog gatekeeper said. “And the first 120 days would be considered a trial period, meaning we would reserve the right to take your dog back at any time.” Danielle and Alexas nodded solemnly.
The friends rose from the bench and thanked the volunteer for her time. Believing the roommates were out of earshot, the volunteer summed up the interview to a colleague: “You just walked by, and you’re fixated on this one dog, and it’s because you had a beagle growing up, but you want to make your roommate the legal adopter?”
Back in the day, one could show up at a shelter, pick out an un-housed dog that just wanted to have someone to love, and take it home that same day. Today, much of the process has moved online to Petfinder, and various animal-shelter Instagram accounts that send cute puppy pics with heartrending stories into your feed and compel you to fill out an adoption application. Posts describing the dogs drip with euphemisms: A dog that might freak out and tear your house up if left alone is a “Velcro dog”; one that might knock down your children is “overly exuberant”; a skittish, neglected dog with trust issues is just a “shy party girl.” Certain shelters have become influencers in their own right, like the L.A.-based Labelle Foundation, which has almost 250,000 Instagram followers and counts Dua Lipa among its A-list clients. Rescue agencies abound, many with missions so specific that you could theoretically find one that deals in any niche breed you desire.
This deluge of rescue-puppy content has arrived, not coincidentally, during a time of growing awareness of puppy mills as morally indefensible-- so much so that even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was attacked for seemingly buying a purebred French bulldog in early 2020. Then came the pandemic puppy boom, a lonely, claustrophobic year in which thousands of people simultaneously decided that they were finally ready to adopt a dog. The corresponding spike in demand in certain markets has simply overwhelmed the agencies-- New York shelters that were used to receiving 20 applications a week were now receiving hundreds, with as many as 50 people vying for a single pup.
Applying to adopt rescue dogs is now akin to seeking admission to an Ivy League school-- but even Harvard isn’t forced to be as picky as, say, Korean K9 Rescue, whose average monthly applications tripled during the pandemic. And yet someone has to pick the winners — often an unpaid millennial Miss Hannigan doling out a precious number of wet-nosed Orphan Annies to wannabe Daddy Warbuckses who feel empowered to judge the intentions and poop-scooping abilities of otherwise accomplished urban professionals, some of whom actually did go to Harvard. Unsurprisingly, this has led to hard feelings.
Every once in a while, someone will complain on Twitter about being rejected by a rescue agency, and it will reliably set off a cascade of attacks on “entitled rich white millennials assuming they can have whatever they want,” followed by counter-attacks on those who “appoint themselves the holy sainted guardian of all animals.” Danielle the Brooklyn paralegal was ultimately deemed unworthy, not even meriting a generic rejection letter via email. After all, there isn’t really that much incentive for the rescue agencies to be polite these days.
The modern animal-rescue movement grew along with the rise of the middle class. The growth of the suburbs provide a rich market for animal adoptions Research studies later demonstrated that animal companionship provide health benefits in addition to teaching kids about responsibility. In the late ’80s, spay and neuter procedures became streamlined and were being recommended by vets as well as by Bob Barker on The Price Is Right.
Things started to change significantly after the ASPCA came out with its gut-wrenching ads featuring distressed puppies and kittens set to a heartbreaking redition of Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel.” In just a year, the ad raised 60 percent of the ASPCA’s annual $50 million budget, and the organization was able to increase the grant money it gave to other animal-welfare organizations by 900 percent in ten years.
Theoretically, the reason we need dog adoption services is that there are more dogs born into the world than there are humans willing to care for them. But as interest grew, the supply problem became less acute. Due to the advertising efforts of the ASPCA and the widespread availability of spay/neuter policies, there are now simply too few unwanted litters to feed the adoption market.
In 2017, researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine for Mississippi State University published a study reporting that the availability of dogs in animal shelters was at an all-time low. The rescue mutt had become not just a virtue signal but a virtue test. Who was a good enough human being to deserve a dog in need of rescuing?
Heather remembers the old easy days. “I went on Craigslist and an hour later, I had a pug,” she says of her first dog-getting experience with her boyfriend in college. George the pug humped everything in sight, shed everywhere, and chewed through furniture until the end of his life, but she loved him all the same.
Flash-forward 16 years. She and that boyfriend are married, have two kids, and can’t seem to get a new dog no matter what they try. She could easily find a breeder online and for less than $400 get a dog with only a few screening questions. But instead, in the middle of the pandemic, “I was sending ten to 12 emails a night and willing to travel anywhere, and no one would give us any sort of animal,” she remembers. Shelters would send snappy emails about how her family wasn’t suited for a puppy, even though they made good money and had clearly cared for their dearly departed George (they once drove three hours to get the pug a specially made knee brace). “I was trying to be really up front with people and would say that my daughter has autism and that I have a 3-year-old, and they would say no. It felt like they were saying, ‘We don’t give dogs to people who have disabilities.’ ”
It didn’t matter what kind of dog she applied for — older, younger, bigger, smaller — there was always an official-sounding excuse as to why her family wasn’t suitable. (“Pups this age bite and jump and scratch and while they are cute to look at, they are worse than a bratty ADHD toddler, without diapers,” one rescue wrote. “Sorry.”) “It got to the point of me wondering, Okay, so what dogs do children get?” she recalls. “I always thought that dogs and children go together.” By the fall of 2020, Heather had turned back to breeders, but avoids discussing the details to avoid harsh judgment from the uninformed.
For rescue organizations, the pandemic has proven to their moment to shine. As they were bombarded with adoption requests, they finally got to feel the power. They got to make someone’s dreams come true or smash them to the ground. For many, the inquiries can get extremely personal.
“I found the questions very offensive,” says Joanna, a Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center nurse who tried to adopt last year with her architect husband. She and her husband were forced to discuss which one of them would be the one to get their pet in the event of a divorce. The two also had to grapple with what would happen if one or both of them died of COVID during the pandemic. And would both of them be able to take three days off at a moment’s notice to help the dog acclimate to its new home? “I was frank, telling her that I take care of cancer patients,” said Joanna. “She was very unsatisfied with our answer.”
“The more popular the rescue is on the internet, the more clout they have,” says Molly, a writer in New York. She finally got an interview with a rescue agency whose dogs she had seen on social media. They asked to tour her apartment over Zoom. Fine. They asked for her references. Great. But then they asked if she would pay for an expensive trainer. She asked if she could wait — not only was it during the height of COVID, but the cost of the sessions with the trainer were close to $1,000. The person she was dealing with said over email that dogs were investments and suggested she look elsewhere.
In some corners of the rescue world, a reckoning is taking place. Rachael Ziering, the executive director of Muddy Paws Rescue, which found homes for around 1,000 dogs last year, got her start volunteering at other nonprofits whose adoption processes she found abhorrent. She saw, for instance, people look at adoption applications and say, “Oh, that’s a terrible Zip Code. I’m not adopting to them.” Or they would judge people based on their appearance. “I know a lot of groups that will ask for your firstborn along with your application,” she says. “I think it’s well intentioned, but I think it just took a turn at some point. It’s morphed into sort of an unhealthy view that no one’s ever gonna be good enough. Nobody’s ever perfect — the dog or the person.” Muddy Paws is instead embracing what is known as “open adoption,” a philosophy that allows for rescue volunteers to be more open-minded about what a good dog home might look like. It has started gaining traction among groups like the ASPCA in recent years, in part because the organization’s current president was denied a dog — twice. Instead of rejecting applicants outright based on their giving the “wrong” answers, Ziering’s team speaks with hopeful dog owners at length, learning about their lifestyles and histories to match them with the pet best for their family. Muddy Paws rejects less than one percent of applicants, while some decide to adopt elsewhere if it means getting a dog faster.
There are now signs of a cooling of the puppy boom. The unbearable loneliness of the pandemic has abated, replaced with anxiety about how to possibly do all the things all of us used to do every day. People are now being summoned back to the office or planning vacations. Local shelters are seeing application numbers slip — many say they have returned to pre-COVID levels — which, in turn, has made it slightly more of an adopter’s market.
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