The Art of Pet Adoption Videos
By Mike Pursley
Photos from Cat Town Cafe & Adoption Center, Oakland
Who else watches pet adoption videos on YouTube for kicks? Just me? While keeping up with dispatches from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, my birthplace and homeland, I found a cache of videos on a local newspaper’s YouTube channel. Pet adoption video enthusiasts and aficionados will immediately recognize their greatness.
Each minute-long clip profiles an animal (usually a cat) up for adoption in a way that that is amazing and strange. Like much great art, the videos work off a formula: “There’s an (animal) at Talbot Humane who’s looking for a home,” each will begin. Next comes a description of the pet and an invitation to visit the shelter. Roll credits. Simple enough, but the appeal is in the formula’s variations, notably the subtle peculiarity of how the pets are described. A cat named Apalonia, for instance, “loves to play with toys, especially the little red dot of the laser toy.” Another cat, Sophie, “can be a lounge lizard, or she can be the life of the party…she has a very curious nature,” while Buttercup “has a marshmallow personality and never saw a lap she didn’t like.”
On paper, these quotes don’t exactly pop, but what makes it is the delivery. The narration is eerily calm, heartfelt yet oddly menacing. The videos are good for multiple views, though each viewer will reach a tipping point where the amusement to I-want-to-take-them-all-home ratio inverts. The aim of these videos are to get pets adopted, and I doubt their charms are intentional. They make us question the decency of finding accidental laughs in what a person endeavors to do. Amusement aside, these videos offer something all too rare: expression that is genuine and without artifice. They are calming and beautiful somehow. Not the pets…the clips.
Mike wrote this essay as an homage to the pure artform of amateur youtube videos. The essay was paired with Cat Town Cafe’s instagram, a neighborhood cafe and cat adoption center in downtown Oakland.
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