"We wanted to give you the same experience of walking into the shelter," says Mark Witriol, head dog-food taster -- his real title -- for Petfood Express, a local pet store chain that developed the site along with the East Bay SPCA. "Because a lot of times people end up adopting a dog that they weren't looking for." The site discreetly does not mention which animals will be euthanized by animal control if no one adopts them in the next 24 hours.

The fact that a person is unlikely to be euthanized if no one cares to respond to his or her personal ad isn't the only difference between online pet personals and the human scene.

"Unlike online dating, it's first-come, first-served," says Kirsten Park, director of marketing for the East Bay SPCA. "The first qualified family who comes in will get that dog or cat. That's where the comparison ends."

And surprisingly, it's often the "special-needs" cases that spark the biggest outpouring of response: "We just had one at the SPCA -- a cat that only had one eye. It was only on the adoption site one hour," says Tiger. "There was [also] a three-legged kitten that people were fighting over to adopt."

She attributes this phenomenon to an overflow of "that nurturing, let me take care of you, oh you poor thing, this animal needs me" sentiment -- something humans seem to lavish on animals a little more than on members of their own species.

Cuteness definitely sells, but sometimes the more woeful the picture, the greater the animal's chances of being chosen. "From a marketing perspective, it's pretty effective to look sad and lonely," says Betsy Saul, the president of Petfinder.com, which is the ABEbooks of strays, serving up a huge database of animals from 6,500 organizations around the country, with some 132,200 currently listed.

Saul says that "the ones that are really pathetic -- the dogs looking woefully from behind bars" -- inspire that "'I have to save you'" response. So, while some small shelters worry that their volunteers don't have the time to take the animals out of their cages and pose them, she always advises: Just take the picture.

As for the profiles, there may be less fibbing than on most online dating sites, since shelter volunteers know that a Siamese cat whose incessant caterwauling goes unmentioned may end up back at the pound in a few days. "We really try to talk up their good qualities as much as possible, but you have to be honest," says Vinnie Spinol, a vice president at Brooklyn's BARK.

In a pet profile, keywords such as "friendly," "affectionate" and "social" are as common as "fun," "easygoing" and "sincere" in online-dating profiles for humans. Tiger, who has written more than 500 of these profiles based on information from volunteers and on her own observations, says: "People want to connect with something. They're looking for a companion, so I try to use really positive words."

Positive can blur into euphemism -- a paunchy dog is "dignified," like Osh, a 70-pound German sheperd mix in Fremont, Calif., who enjoys going on "short walks": "We are working on Osh's weight which should be under 60 pounds," the site apologizes. And Gloria a "perky ball of energy," who is an American shorthair, tabby mix, "can be taught to chew on toys instead of you." Translation: a bit of a biter, but not a lost cause.

Unfortunately, the genre seems all too accommodating to cutesy-poo hyperbole, as praise for one cat's "Bette Davis eyes" suggests. Another feline, a New Jersey female cat, Princess Buttercup, speaks in the treacly first-person about her desire to find a home with lots of "handsome older male cats -- yum!" (She's been altered.) There's even a black cat, Mr. Chips, that's billed, inexplicably, as a good luck charm because he has "lots of extra toes."

In her part-time job, Tiger drives from shelters to animal control facilities in the East Bay, profiling a broad range of animals, including rats, iguanas, rabbits, guinea pigs and dwarf mice. Tiger, like many an online pet sector employee, lost her job in advertising in San Francisco during the dot-com bust. But she took the change in employment status as an opportunity to start volunteering for the East Bay SPCA, a position that ended up turning into a job photographing, profiling and updating the Web site.

She's not the only dot-com refugee to be found in the online pet world. Jaffie, the webmaster for the San Francisco SPCA, says that she started volunteering after being laid off during the bust by her employer, a Web design shop.

Petfinder.com, which started in 1995 as a small, bootstrapped company built by Betsy Saul and her husband, Jared, a programmer, was struggling to make a profit in the boom years when Pets.com and Petopia came calling.

"They all said to us: We're going to buy you or build you. So, you better sell out," remembers Saul, laughing now at the hubris. Today, Petfinder, which didn't accept any venture capital investment, has 18 employees -- all of whom work from home -- and last year was involved in the adoption of more than a million pets. Meanwhile, the ambitious pet portals of dot-com years past are no more than an obscure footnote in the annals of Internet folly.

But, paradoxically, Dahlman from Home at Last Rescue now thinks that the ubiquity of online pet profiles may be flooding the market. "Once all the Web sites started, things got pretty competitive," she says. "Every rescue group has its own Web site now. I feel like in some ways it's gotten a little harder to place dogs."

With so many mournful hounds gazing out from your browser to fall for, so many "friendly" and "affectionate" cats, who can decide which pet is The One?

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