Westminster Kennel Club Loses Pedigree Over 'Sad' Pound Pups
The 2012 Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show has come and gone.
If you caught the two-day pooch-a-palooza on television, you glimpsed the prestigious pageantry, where purebred dandies in well coiffed, tailor-made hair suits pranced around the green carpeting of Madison Square Garden.
Had Pedigree been allowed to run its pro-adoption commercials, how many empathic viewers would have picked up the phone and inquired about bringing a shelter dog home to join them on that empty couch?
What you didn’t see were Pedigree commercials featuring emaciated shelter dogs staring at you with their adopt-me-please puppy dog eyes—with a faint underscore of melancholy music running throughout.
The show canned the ads, which encourage shelter dog adoptions, because they were considered “too depressing” for the Westminster TV audience. In doing so they let go of their main sponsor for the past 24 years, Pedigree, which was replaced by Purina. Purina ran ads featuring healthy-looking, smiling, athletic dogs.
“Show me an ad with a dog with a smile; don’t try to shame me,” said David Frei, the club’s director of communications and the host of the show for over two decades, to the Associated Press. “We told them (Pedigree) that, and they ignored us.” Frie went on to say that the feedback that Westminster got from their primary audience was that seeing those commercials “made them want to turn the channel.”
Melissa Martelotti, a spokesperson for Mars Petcare U.S., which makes the Pedigree brand, said that the show was “focused on the purebred mission,” including the adoption of pure breeds as opposed to mixed breeds.
I’d be blind if I didn’t acquiesce that canine optics matter.
Last fall, I interviewed Teresa Berg, a photographer from Texas who “professionalized” online dog adoption photos for the Dallas-Forth Worth Dachshund Rescue Foundation.
She replaced sad-faced, red-eyed, out-of-focus photos of otherwise beautiful dogs with pics of the same dog brushed, bathed, and lit properly.
These simple adjustments were life-changing—the foundation’s adoption rates increased by a staggering 100 percent after her photos hit the web.
As the proud owner of a shelter mutt (my girlfriend and I rescued “Maddie” after she was used as bait in an underground dogfighting ring when she was just days old), I can unequivocally say this about pound pooches: they have dignity and they don’t deserved to be kicked to the curb like some canine underclass by a blue blood kennel club.
Almost three and a half million viewers tuned into the USA Network and CNBC to watch last year’s show and the commercials. I shudder to contemplate how many shelter dogs were not adopted during the two days of this year’s edition. Had Pedigree been allowed to run its pro-adoption commercials, how many empathic viewers would have picked up the phone and inquired about bringing a shelter dog home to join them on that empty couch?
I don’t intend to slam purebreds—no way, no how. My parents own a pair of Havanese. They are great dogs—loyal, fun, and they adore my mixed breed. My ire is solely directed at Westminster. Did it really hurt your brand that much to run these commercials? Would viewership have dropped that much? For a show built primarily on judging a dog’s looks, you had to know that this decision would look awful.
Going forward, what does this mean for the group’s stated charitable affiliation with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)? Is it not cruel to tell shelter dogs that they’re too sad for television?
If the show truly wants to focus on the “purebred mission,” the Pedigree commercials would have aired, since 25 percent of all U.S. shelter dogs are purebreds.
If the show truly wants to focus on the “purebred mission,” they would have thrown a purebred dog a bone and partnered with a group like The Canine Diversity Project to produce a commercial that educates breeders about the pitfalls of inbreeding, which can lead to a lack of genetic diversity and a myriad health problems.
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