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Do I look cool/cute enough to take home?
I have a horrible addiction: I love to look at pictures of dogs and cats on petfinder.com. I know I shouldn’t, but sometimes I just can’t resist. I’ve always been an avid Petfinder follower. I’ve spent time looking at it since I was in high school, and I found the first two pets of my adult life through the site. At this stage I can reasonably say I’m a Petfinder expert.
One thing I’ve learned from Petfinder is the importance of creating a good profile for the pets. I’ve seen some pet listings that just include a blurry shelter photo and little to no description of the animal. Sometimes all it says is the breed, perhaps the approximate age, and where the animal is located.
Such Spartan descriptions are common for pets listed from government facilities like local animal control or state-owned shelters. They’re overcrowded and understaffed, so it makes sense that there just might not be anyone or any time to create a more detailed description or take a better photo.
However, that often hurts the animal’s chances of adoption. And many shelters are beginning to catch on. MSN Today has a report on a new phenomenon of pet photography: photo makeovers. They interviewed pet photographer Seth Casteel, who created some rather glamorous canine pictures for the Dallas-Fort Worth Dachshund Rescue Foundation’s website.
“The pictures I was seeing online were just terrible. This couldn’t be true. These dogs and cats don’t look very good. When you go in to meet them, these are terrific pets,” Casteel said to MSN. “These animals don’t have a voice. They need photos to show how they really are.”
The fuzzy shelter pictures sometimes common on Petfinder not only don’t show the dog or cat’s personality, sometimes they even make the animals look off-putting or angry. They’re taken quickly, sometimes toward the beginning of the animal’s time in the shelter when it still hasn’t had the chance to feel comfortable yet.
Casteel started his homeless animal photography career when working at Sony Pictures Studios. He found five kittens that had been abandoned on a movie lot. He snuck them into a swanky meeting room and took a series of artful photos, which he then sent out in a company-wide email. All of the cats found homes.
Casteel then started a nonprofit called Second Chance Photos, which holds workshops and gives advice to shelters on how to best photograph their pets. And he’s not the only one who’s done such a thing, with other photographers even offering their services to shelters and rescues.
I’d say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but actually I think not. Perhaps it’s just because I’m more of a textual person rather than visual, but when looking at listings on Petfinder the description matters more to me.
When looking to adopt a dog I remember coming across Chihiro’s picture. She had that red reflective glow in her eyes and her head was cocked funnily. She looked strange. But the paragraph about her was loving, and that’s how I knew. I’d sooner forgive a bad photo with an in-depth, ardent characterization of a pet than a gorgeous photo with just a line about the animal.
What the pets really need is both. I contribute my writing skills to the pets from the rescue for which I volunteer. If you’ve an eye for photography, perhaps consider doing what Casteel and his ilk do for your local shelter.
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