The Dog Merchants

by Kim Kavin

  Walking into the $6 million, 20,000-square-foot MCSPCA facility—also built without a single tax dollar, Rosenthal says—is like walking into a progressive preschool. It’s light. It’s bright. Ceilings are high, windows are huge, and sunlight is streaming inside. The walls are painted a perky shade of yellowy beige, and where a teacher might have letters of the alphabet bordering the ceiling, MCSPCA has happy messages from donors. Classical music plays in the background, just loudly enough to calm the dogs and the people alike without interfering in conversation. The place is a hive of activity with adults, kids, cats, and dogs in every direction. In lots of places, inspirational quotes are painted onto the fronts of counters, lines such as “Life is a voyage that is homeward bound,” attributed to author Herman Melville.

  Most dogs, even some of the smaller ones, are not kept in anything resembling enclosures or cages. There are enclosures for dogs in the veterinary area and some temporary transit rooms, but where the dogs live full time, the spaces are called “digs.” Each dog gets his own dig, which is about three or four feet wide and another three or four feet long, with the same tall ceilings as the rest of the building, lots of glass to feel less confining, and individual air supplies to prevent the spread of airborne diseases. The digs are bigger than the largest crates most pet stores sell, and they contain floor beds or other soft places where the dogs can rest. The bottoms are solid, not wire or grated, much like a linoleum floor in a home kitchen. Walking through the digs on an average day in autumn 2014 was like walking through a clean, happy place full of smiling dogs and people alike. A few of the pups were barking, alert, and perhaps slightly stressed, but not a single one was cowering, shaking, or whimpering. Many were napping quietly, as content as could be.

  Every dog gets at least two or three walks outside the digs per day, and the ones who are friendly with other dogs are invited to play groups once a day in Sweetie Park, which is a few steps outside the shelter’s back door. It was donated by a supporter who thought the dogs should have a fresh-air space with artificial turf, agility equipment, fencing, and a roof for shade. Sweetie Park is also where adopters can bring their own dogs to meet potential new adoptees, and where the staff members and volunteers work with dogs on basic training and special needs.

  “We designed the layout of the digs so that when we take a dog out to Sweetie Park, the dog goes past as few other dogs as possible,” Rosenthal says. “We are trying not to cause the dogs stress from seeing other dogs go by. It’s also good for reducing sickness.”

  Every dig has a label with the dog’s name, estimated age, and breed, which MCSPCA lists as “looks like,” since nobody ever knows for sure. Every dog six months or older is behavior tested so adopters will understand the dog’s personality, and in difficult cases, the staff consults with experts at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine to find training techniques that might work. “I’m on their board,” Rosenthal says with a grin. “That makes getting help easier.”

  While shelters in Southern and Midwestern states are often filled with litters of unwanted puppies or with strays, in Mid-Atlantic Monmouth County, where spay/neuter rates are higher, the reason for drop-off is often a behavioral challenge, even if the people surrendering the dog claim something else. Rosenthal has learned to live with that reality, and his staff is trained in how to help most dogs work through whatever behaviors the original owners allowed to develop.

  “I wish people would be more honest when they surrender the dogs,” he says. “They’re afraid if they tell the truth the dog won’t get another home. It’s usually behavior, and we figure it out in a week or two, but if they had told us from the start, we could’ve been working on it immediately.” And again, based on the 97 percent save rate for dogs, the shelter is ultimately able to resolve most of the training issues.

  For the truly challenging dogs, an “at risk” list is created and a meeting is held every Tuesday. Volunteers are allowed to attend and advocate on a dog’s behalf, and at least five people, including Rosenthal, must agree there are no more options before a dog is euthanized. “It’s a tough meeting,” he says, “but unless we have unanimous agreement, we’ll hold off. Somebody might get an idea. We’ve had a couple of cases where we stuck it out and the dog turned around. It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens.”

  Not all of the dogs in the digs are from New Jersey. Some, especially the puppies, are from as far away as Puerto Rico, South Carolina, and Georgia, where spay/neuter rates are lower. The Puerto Rico dogs arrive via Newark Liberty International Airport, while the continental US dogs are brought in a converted Ford E-350 with a box truck enclosure on the back, funded half by donations and half by a grant from the ASPCA. Its colorful sides highlight the MCSPCA logo and the motto “Rescue, Relocate, Renew,” and the inside looks almost identical to, if a bit smaller than, the inside of a semi-trailer transport truck from the Hunte puppy distribution company. There’s a ventilation system, stainless-steel enclosures of various sizes, and lighting to help keep the dogs oriented. The MCSPCA truck can hold thirty dogs, and usually, it’s full of puppies.

  “We primarily bring in puppies because there aren’t a lot of puppies around here,” says Rosenthal, explaining how spay/neuter initiatives throughout the Northeast have all but eliminated unwanted litters being abandoned. “We can see the impact in the South. In Worth County, Georgia, their save rate was something like ten percent. Within a year of working with us and some others, they got it down to something like fifty percent.”

  The other truck MCSPCA owns is used to distribute dog food and supplies to low-income locals, a service that developed as an outgrowth of Superstorm Sandy. When the Jersey Shore was pummeled by one of the costliest hurricanes in US history, nobody save the National Guard troops was getting through to many of the shoreline communities. MCSPCA set up a dog food pantry, similar to human food pantries, where qualifying community members could get supplies for free—so they could keep their dogs even if there was no dog food in the stores. A truck delivering dog food to people in need also allows MCSPCA to have eyes in some of the lowest-income neighborhoods in the county, where dog owners can be told about low-cost spay/neuter clinics and other services the shelter offers.

  Today, MCSPCA is about to break ground on an adjacent building that will be a full-time food pantry, taking this concept to new heights for whatever storms, big or little, dog owners may face in life. “People go through transitioning times,” Rosenthal says, “and sometimes it comes down to a decision of surrendering their animal. The animal is going through enough turmoil, so we started it, and it’s a permanent program now. We’ve helped about a thousand people. We talked to the food bank, and fifty percent of their clients have pets, so we kept our program. We figure we’ve kept about three hundred fifty dogs out of the shelter.”

  The other big form of community outreach at MCSPCA propels the concept of animal rescue full-throttle into the territory formerly dominated by breeders, an example of just how widely some rescue groups are cracking open the old business model of selling dogs. About a thirty-minute drive away from the MCSPCA building in Eatontown is Freehold Raceway Mall, an upscale shopping mecca with department stores such as Lord & Taylor, Macy’s, and Nordstrom, and more than 1,600,000 square feet of leasable space. Like many shopping malls, Freehold used to have a pet store, but with the trend of not wanting to support so-called puppy mills, the mall’s owner decided not to renew the pet store’s lease during the early 2010s.

  “A leasing manager at the mall, coincidentally, had just adopted from us,” says Rosenthal, “so they rented us the space for the cost of utilities. We have puppies and kittens over there.”

  From the outside looking in, the Homeward Bound Adoption Center looks just like an old-school pet shop, right next to the Sears department store. Half the mall shop is retail supplies such as beds, bowls, and dog toys, while half has enclosures filled with puppies and kittens, about twenty of each, in two-tall, upper-and-lower stacks used
as displays. On this particular day, all the puppies were from Puerto Rico—a fact clearly labeled for buyers to see. A few families with children browsed the cages just as they might look at clothes or toys at the mall, and some of the kids played with the puppies inside a movable gate in the center of the store while their moms talked with clerks about everything from the nature of rescue to whether their home might be right for bringing home a puppy.

  The retail outlet is something of a startling sight in the Northeast, where messaging has long encouraged dog lovers never to buy from a pet store, and where pet stores selling puppies are an anomaly in most towns. But Rosenthal—who has an MBA from Columbia University and spent a quarter-century in the financial services industry before taking over the MCSPCA—says retail is rescue’s business wave of the future. In fact, as of this writing, he was putting final touches on a deal to work with a local Petco to create a second 1,200-square-foot retail outlet for homeless pups in space that, a generation ago, might have been used to sell purebreds from breeders.

  “For shelters,” he says, “you have to be more creative. You have to go where the people are. I view it as, how do you impact the community and change people’s thinking? We’re front and center, right by Sears.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  REPACKAGING AND REBRANDING

  “To succeed in business, it is necessary to make others see things as you see them.”

  —Aristotle Onassis

  Her face is pallid, probably not just in the black-and-white photograph, but also in real life. She’s looking back over her right shoulder at the camera with eyes desperately wide and bloodshot. Nobody has to hear her speak to know she needs to be set free. “Chained to a desk with nothing but a mouse to entertain her,” the flier’s big type reads.

  In another flier, it’s a male, also pale-faced and hunched over. He looks as if the air all around has become so thick, so stagnant, that he can no longer bear to rise. The corners of his mouth are turned down, darn near weighted by jowls. “For nine hours a day, he is kept in a tiny box,” it states. “And ignored.”

  These fliers aren’t of dogs. They’re of people—models photographed sitting in office conference rooms and in the glow of a cubicle’s computer screen, wearing the dismayed expressions shared by so many nine-to-five prisoners of concrete jungles, all as part of a groundbreaking campaign called the Human Walking Program.

  It sprang from the brain of Jake Barrow, a creative director in the Melbourne, Australia, office of GPY&R, a creative agency that is 600 people strong and part of a network of 186 global agencies. Barrow and his colleagues typically work on campaigns for big-ticket clients including the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival and Australia’s Defence Force, but he had an idea that had been in the back of his mind for a few years, and no matter how many times he tried to turn it off, it kept lighting him right back up.

  “We were going through a busy period at work, and occasionally, I would walk a friend’s dog just for fun,” Barrow says. “And I thought, ‘Oh, that could be a service for office workers, to go out and walk a dog, completely to benefit the human.’ That was years and years ago, and I just remembered the feeling I got from walking that dog, and it was really good stress relief. It was completely selfish. I’ve been trained to recognize a good idea, and together with my copywriter at the time, we turned it into the Human Walking Program.”

  There was no client. No income was to be made. That didn’t stop Barrow and his partner, who worked pro bono on the concept for six months and built it into a small presentation, sort of a miniature version of what they might do for a regular advertising customer. Then they asked one of the account salesmen at GPY&R to call the local shelter in Melbourne—which happens to be the Lost Dogs Home, founded in 1910 and today serving as Australia’s largest shelter, caring for more than thirty-one thousand dogs and cats each year.

  “I said, ‘Hi, I’m Jake, this is Dan, we have this idea,’” Barrow recalls with a laugh. “They definitely saw the benefit of showing the dogs as the heroes instead of just sad. We did completely flip it around and say, ‘It’s about the humans getting out of their cages.’”

  Shelter workers gave the GPY&R fliers to commuters from eight until nine A.M. in central business district train stations the week of the event and passed them around at all the buildings near the park where the walk would be held. Social media and radio stations were engaged as well, to spread the message that humans needed a break and a stroll—“to go walkies,” as they say Down Under—perhaps even more than the dogs did.

  When the day arrived, the weather was gorgeous. Barrow, like everyone else involved, found himself standing in a park, waiting with a rumbly stomach, wondering what the heck might happen next.

  “We were quite nervous,” he recalls. “Are we going to get the crowds we want? Is it going to be too big of a crowd? Is somebody going to get bitten by a dog? There were a lot of unknowns. You can only do so much planning for these things.”

  During the next few hours, his unease gave way to elation. More than five thousand office workers came outside to stand right alongside him, leaving behind their ergonomically accented desks for a much-needed meander the way nature intended. The Lost Dogs Home paired each participant with a homeless pooch so they could get to know one another in the fresh air, outside the shelter environment, in a way that would all but obliterate any ingrained ideas about the dogs and let them be seen as the happy, friendly pups they had always been inside their enclosures, where most of the people would have never seen them at all, or might have assumed there was something wrong with them.

  “Their negative stereotype still exists, in our experience, because people do not realize that cats and dogs largely end up at shelters as a consequence of a human circumstance,” says Martha Coro, a spokeswoman for the Lost Dogs Home. “The Human Walking Program was first and foremost a creative campaign that challenged people’s intrinsic beliefs about lost and abandoned animals, [and] that also engaged a real-life event to tie it all together.”

  After the three-hour walk, amazing things happened. Every one of the dogs got adopted. Hits on the shelter’s online adoption pages spiked 42 percent. A fund-raising appeal one month later became the shelter’s highest-grossing in nearly a decade.

  Barrow says it was one of the most satisfying days of his life—and even he failed to predict the impact his idea would have next.

  “We did the event and the campaign, and whenever we do something more unusual than a television commercial, we create a case study, and we did that with this event and how successful it was,” he says. “Somehow, the website Upworthy got hold of the case study, and the next thing you know, we had half a million hits on this case-study video, and we’re getting calls from all over the world wanting to do a Human Walking Program in their own cities. We ended up saying we can’t ignore it, so we set up a website that lets people create their own Human Walking Program. People can download all the ads and localize them to their area. It’s a step-by-step guide. I know someone did one all the way over in the US. The calls were coming from everywhere.”

  What’s so great about TheHumanWalkingProgram.org—in addition to the fact that it hands over, for free to the world, what Barrow estimates as an $80,000 to $100,000 creative campaign—is that it also makes clear how to copy the strategy as much as the actual walk.

  “The creative rebranding of adoption dogs came first,” Coro says, “which in a way [was] just as influential as the event.” And she’s right. What sets the Human Walking Program apart on a crucial level is its professional marketing approach. It was developed by seasoned pros, as an advertising initiative that helped people get to know the product—great dogs—instead of making a desperate plea for money to save their tragic little lives. Beliefs about homeless pooches are often so deep-seated that it takes a physical change of space or a professional advertising campaign to knock biases out of people’s thought process, much like getting them to buy generic foods at the supermarket or new
car brands off the lot.

  “The ads with the sad dogs, I guess there was a time and a place for it, but as far as the general public goes, it gets squashed over now,” Barrow says. “We need something else to wake us up and pay attention.”

  More and more shelters around the globe are coming to the same conclusion and partnering their efforts accordingly. Instead of begging people to see the wonderful pooches they know are inside the enclosures, they are looking to leaders in everything from creative design to architecture to retail sales to make new messaging work. It just might be the beginning of an unprecedented rebranding effort, potentially on the scale of what breeders did starting in the mid-1800s when convincing dog lovers that purebreds were the ideal pets in the first place.

  The signs of change are worldwide. In Berlin, Germany, the animal protection society turned to the renowned architect and cat lover Dietrich Bangert to design its multimillion-dollar facility, one of Europe’s largest at 163,000 square feet, about the size of the largest Target retail store on the US East Coast. The Berlin shelter holds about 1,400 animals at a time and cares for about twelve thousand animals a year. Bangert has serious drafting chops and is perhaps best known for his work on an art museum in Bonn and the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven; the result at the Berlin facility was a far different environment than most people imagine as an animal shelter, a modern study in concrete and water so futuristic that it was used as a set for the 2005 Charlize Theron film Aeon Flux, set in the year 2415.

  Creating the architecturally inviting space gave potential dog owners a chance to breathe a bit easier when walking inside, so their brains would take precedence over any bad feelings created by more typical shelter buildings. They looked up instead of feeling down. They intuited that it was okay to relax, because nothing they were about to see would depress them. The professionally designed atmosphere allowed people’s minds to focus not on what they thought a shelter might be like, but instead on what was actually before them: friendly, healthy dogs the volunteers had gone so far as to housetrain prior to sending them home, in the hopes of making each pairing more likely to stick.