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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Pets.com and its deluded ilk have gone the way of used kitty litter, but online animal rescue and adoption centers are thriving.
Nov 18, 2003 | When Bethann Billings went looking for a second dog this September, she knew what she wanted: a large, mellow, male dog who would show "a little respect" to the older bitch who rules her family's home in El Cerrito, Calif.
She, her husband, Alan, and their 10-year-old son, Ian, visited local pounds and shelters without success.
"We'd go to the pound, and they'd have only pit bulls," she says. "It's pretty depressing to go there." But Billings, a sales manager for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, also cruised the pet profiles on rescue Web sites at her desk at work: "I had all my rescue organizations bookmarked: Milo Foundation, Home at Last, Second Chance in Marin.
"One day I was just searching, and I saw the face," she gushes. The photo grabbed her, but the profile clinched it. "It's like a personal ad," she says: "'Big mellow boy would be a great dog for people with children. Would know how to play, but knows how to be calm when playtime is over.' That's what really got me. And it's true."
Today, two-thirds of the animals adopted from the network of 200 volunteers that make up Hopalong Animal Rescue in Oakland, Calif., first meet their new owners on the Internet, says Rosalie Brown, the nonprofit's development director. Between July and September of this year the San Francisco SPCA attributed 95 adoptions to wannabe pet owners first seeing the animals on the SPCA's Web site, says webmaster Karen Jaffie. The Internet has also been a factor in more than 50 percent of the pets adopted from the Brooklyn Animal Resource Coalition in New York.
During the dot-com bust, the superheated race between Pets.com, Petstore.com, Petco and Petopia to dominate the online pet portal space became an easy target for anyone who wanted to skewer the delusional, hyperbolic giddiness of the Internet boom. Pets.com alone spent millions of dollars promoting a sock puppet.
None of the sites succeeded, despite hundreds of millions of dollars of capital infusion. But the Internet chugs along, and today, on the quieter nonprofit side of the pet industry, where strays are rescued and cared for by self-professed "foster parents," the online pet marketplace just keeps heating up. That late-'90s fantasy that venture capitalists, dot-com CEOs and investors could get rich sending 50-pound bags of dog food across the country, while losing money on shipping costs with every order, is no more. But the Web is turning out to be pretty useful if you're interested in finding an actual live dog near you that's "not too bright, but 80 pounds of love," as Billings describes her new pooch -- Jabba da Mutt.
Small shelter groups that don't even have a facility to showcase their animals are the outfits relying most heavily on the Web, giving the idea of the "virtual storefront" a whole new impetus. "The Web site is our main way of adopting out animals," says Astrid Dahlman, rescue coordinator for Home at Last Rescue in Berkeley, Calif. She used to place animal ads in newspapers, but no longer.
Hopalong Animal Rescue is currently caring for 140 cats and 48 dogs. The center used to rely on "mobile adoption events" at fairs and festivals as the primary means of finding new owners. Like many rescue groups that accept strays before they are euthanized from pounds or shelters, the small organization doesn't have a facility where would-be pet owners can come to meet the animals. But over the last few years, listings on Petfinder.com, Virtual Pet Adoptions and Hopalong's own home page have inspired most new adoptions.
Veterans of the online human personals scene will recognize some similarities. For instance, the photo that accompanies a pet's profile is crucial.
"I don't know anyone who will take a pet sight unseen. You fall in love with the picture," says Hopalong director Brown. "There've been times when we've gotten 50 applications for one puppy."
The adoption trade has led to the rise of a whole new subgenre of animal photography. Animal eye contact is inviting, but with cats that can be hard to achieve. There's also an art to making a dog look friendly, instead of an aggressive monster about to take a bite out of the camera.
"Some dogs look really cute with their tongue out, but on some dogs that can look menacing," says Virginia Tiger -- yes, that's her real name -- the "virtual pet adoptions associate," for Virtual Pet Adoptions. Virtual Pet Adoptions features pets from San Francisco East Bay shelters and pounds, and lets visitors sort by age, gender and activity level. But it purposely doesn't let them search by breed, in order to give ordinary mutts a chance.
