Walk along the terraced rice fields of Pana, hike the switchbacks to the 17th-century Cheri Monastery in Thimphu or explore the back alleys of Paro and you see the same thing: dogs. In Bhutan, they are everywhere. Some nap soundly during the day, conked out on median strips and sidewalks and in the centers of traffic roundabouts, oblivious to the people and vehicles swirling around them. Others seem to have busy schedules, heading up to the monastery for the morning, then cruising back down to meet friends in the parking lot and head off on afternoon adventures. Near temples and tourist sites, they follow visitors in hopes of handouts, or seek shade under parked cars.

Look a little closer and you’ll notice something unusual: most of them—in fact, about 75,000 of the country’s estimated 100,000 dogs—have a triangular notch in their left ear. This distinctive mark identifies the dog as having been spayed or neutered as well as vaccinated against rabies. It also represents a huge milestone in the world of animal welfare.

Straddling the Himalayas, tiny Bhutan is perched between China to the north and India to the south. It may be best known for its Gross National Happiness index, in which Buddhist cultural and spiritual values are applied to socioeconomic development. The fact that these Buddhist values extend to all sentient beings is one reason Bhutan is now seven years into the world’s first—and arguably, most successful—nationwide spay-and-neuter effort, the reverberations of which are almost certain to be felt well outside its borders.

In partnership with Humane Society International (HSI), Bhutan has now sterilized about 75 percent of its total estimated canine population, hitting the critical tipping point at which most animal welfare experts believe a population stabilizes (meaning that growth stops and overall numbers decline). Maintaining that percentage will require about 3,200 sterilizations per year. The Bhutanese team, which now consists of highly experienced vets, vet techs, administrators and dogcatchers, intends to do that and more—to reach between 10,000 and 12,000 dogs per year and achieve its dream of both reducing the dog population and improving its overall health.

“Because the Bhutanese government was so welcoming and so supportive, we had a huge opportunity to tackle [canine population management] on a scale that was really unprecedented,” says Kelly O’Meara, director of HSI’s companion animals and engagement department. “Now we have this goldstandard model for a program covering an entire nation that we can use as an example for other governments who are looking for a real solution to their dog overpopulation problems.”

Community Dogs

Dogs in Bhutan aren’t typically owned, as we define it in the United States. But they aren’t really strays either. Although most households have dogs in the yard, these animals don’t go indoors, wear collars or chew on squeaky toys. Furthermore, Bhutan does not have dog breeders; the few purebreds in evidence likely come from India, Thailand or Nepal.

The majority are “community dogs,” meaning that they hang out in a specific locale—a city block, on the grounds of a hotel, at a temple or bus station—and the people who live and work in that area feed them, in accordance with Buddhist practices. The Junction Bookstore in the capital city of Thimphu, for instance, prominently displays a change jar on the counter to collect money to feed the eight dogs in its immediate area, all of whom have notched ears. Most community dogs are a healthy weight and reasonably well socialized, but that doesn’t mean they have easy lives. Among other things, almost no one takes responsibility for them if they’re injured or ill. (See the sidebar for an inspiring exception.)

Prior to 2009, Bhutan’s dog population was exploding. Overall economic development, including a proliferation of meat markets, had resulted in new sources of food scraps and garbage. Females were having multiple litters, and their puppies were wandering into traffic, with predictable results. The sight of so many dead puppies along the roadways upset both the locals and visitors flooding the country as a result of its push to expand tourism. Tourists were also complaining that they couldn’t sleep because of incessant nighttime barking; some tour groups and guides even suggested that their clients bring earplugs. (Unneutered male dogs bark and fight over females.)

Eager to appease the tourists and also to have cleaner streets in preparation for the 2008 coronation of a new king, the government began looking for ways to deal with its dog-population problem. As Buddhists, they rejected widespread killing in favor of impoundment, rounding up thousands of dogs and confining them to facilities in which they mingled freely. The result was dreadful; disease spread quickly, fights and injuries were rampant, and adult dogs routinely slaughtered newborn puppies.

HSI had cautioned against impounding, and about a year into the experiment, Rahul Sehgal, director of HSI Asia, did a status check with the government. He asked to tour the sites with government officials and religious leaders, all of whom were sickened by what they saw. “We knew that if they saw the conditions, it would have an impact,” says O’Meara.

Impounding isn’t just inhumane, it’s also ineffective. So is culling; killing dogs does not control the population in the long term. Both simply provide short-term relief from the symptoms “We really struggled,” recalls Sehgal. “But [then] we started recruiting and training local Bhutanese, people who could breathe easier, for one thing, speak the language and climb mountains. And it all began to take off.”

As part of the program, the Bhutanese government launched a massive public education campaign to explain the goals to its citizens. The national cable television network ran public service announcements about the importance of spay/neuter in decreasing sexually transmitted diseases and reducing injuries from dogfights. In television spots and in the local papers, officials described the meaning of the ear notch and announced that Tuesdays were “Love Your Dog Day.” Every Tuesday, people are encouraged to bring their dogs—however loosely that ownership is practiced—to the local clinic for free sterilization, health checks and vaccinations.

At the end of three years, the HSI/ Bhutan team had reached its goal of 50,000 sterilizations. The only problem was that the team’s field experiences had showed that initial estimates of the population size were way off— rather than 70,000 dogs, there were more like 100,000. With that in mind, both parties agreed to a Phase II extension from 2012 through 2014. Phase III followed and is set to end in 2018. Over the years, the makeup of the teams has shifted until it is now almost entirely Bhutanese; Sehgal provides oversight and can board a plane to Paro at a moment’s notice.

As Phase II began, the Bhutanese vet students were completing their educations in India and starting to join the national campaign. To hone their highvolume sterilization skills, they were all trained by HSI vets from India.

These techniques were on full display one Friday last May at a small clinic in Paro, where veterinarians Sangay Dorji and Bhakta Bdr Gurung made quick work of their 10 patients, who had been netted in the neighborhood that morning and soon thereafter, anesthetized and prepped for surgery, which included ear notching and cauterization. Post-surgery, vet techs placed the dogs on blankets in an outdoor recovery room. Each dog also received a rabies vaccination, ivermectin for parasites and skin problems, and a B complex injection. Once the dogs were back on their feet, the team returned them to the area in which they were originally caught.

Ten patients was actually a slow day. These roundups, which take place in every precinct of Bhutan every Friday, typically net 20 dogs, and Dorji has seen as many as 50 dogs come in a single day. He has performed 5,000 procedures since joining the program in 2013—he can spay a dog in less than 15 minutes and neuter one in less than 10. (Compare that to 45 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively, using a traditional method with a larger incision.) With a female patient on the operating table, he demonstrated a technique for keeping the stitches on the inside of the skin to reduce the likelihood of infection.

Dorji says that he and his team spend a lot of time out in the community, talking about animal health and spay/ neuter at schools, temples and hotels, sometimes even going door to door. They almost always have a receptive audience. “We’ll go to a temple and explain it to the monks, tell them it may take an entire day, but in the long term, it will be much better for everyone,” says Dorji. “Then all the monks work with us to bring us their dogs. Once people understand what we are doing and why it’s important, they always agree to help.”

That may be because animal welfare is already an integral part of Bhutanese culture. “As Buddhists, we believe that a dog could have been your parent in a former life, so we feed them and treat them with compassion,” says Dorji. “If anyone is seen abusing an animal, that person would be immediately challenged by other people.”

By now, most “owned” dogs in Bhutan are sporting notched ears. So, the remaining challenge is to target the dogs who have repeatedly evaded even the most expert dogcatchers. Dorji hopes to engage the community in that effort as well. He thinks that the people who regularly feed dogs in certain areas may have enough of a bond with them to be able to bring them in.

Kunzang Choki, who runs the dogfriendly Junction Bookstore, agrees. She and her coworkers have set up crates for the local dogs to sleep in outside the storefront, and dogs are welcome to lounge inside and partake of an occasional belly rub—not to mention regular meals, courtesy of the change jar. “We’re a small country,” says Choki. “If everyone took the initiative to take care of the dogs in their own area, we could solve this problem.”

Dogs Endure

For anyone worried that this effort is going to deprive Bhutanese of canine companions in the future, never fear. Even an effort as comprehensive as this one isn’t going to catch and neuter every dog in the country. “It will never happen that there won’t be dogs in Bhutan,” says Sehgal. “As long as there is garbage and an ecosystem to support them, there will be dogs, no matter how many we spay and neuter.”

BARNYARD BHUTAN

Jamie Vaughan fell in love with Bhutan on a visit in 2005 and decided she wanted to live there. A native of Virginia, Vaughan had been working for the local water district in Colorado, but figured she could take advantage of Bhutan’s incentives for attracting foreign investment to open a hotel. She just didn’t realize that her “hotel” would have long-term guests and that those guests would be animals.

But, these days, as founder and head of the Maya Foundation, which runs Barnyard Bhutan Animal Rescue & Sanctuary in Paro, she takes care of about 240 dogs, 25 cats, 14 horses and mules, 45 goats, 19 pigs, 18 cows, two mice and a pigeon.

“In the U.S., we just aren’t exposed to this kind of suffering. I started seeing dogs on the streets who had been hit by cars or injured in a fight or had horrific skin conditions, and I couldn’t leave them, so I brought them home,” she explains. “And then one dog turned into seven, which turned into 50, which turned into 100, and then I stopped counting.”

An ardent animal lover with no previous experience in animal welfare,Vaughan taught herself basic first aid, such as cleaning and bandaging wounds. She’s trying to secure Bhutan’s first-ever X-ray machine for animals, and works closely with Animal Ortho Care in Virginia, which makes prosthetic legs for her dogs and equines. She even helps build the new pens and enclosures that are constantly being added.

In a country with no animal shelters (as there is no culture of adoption) and no long-term-care facilities, Barnyard Bhutan serves a critical need. Vaughan collaborates closely with the government vet hospital in Paro, taking over nursing duties for animals who have been seriously injured or have had surgery at the hospital and keeping them at her sanctuary as long as needed—even if that’s for life.

Though she tries to return as many rehabilitated dogs as possible to the sites where they were originally found, that often isn’t possible. Dogs with permanent disabilities—such as amputations or brain damage from distemper or head traumas—can’t fend for themselves on the streets. One of her star residents, a dog who looks like the Himalayan cousin of a Bernese Mountain dog, was found at the iconic Tiger’s Nest Monastery by a filmmaker/tourist named Tim Gorski, who brought him to Bhutan Barnyard. The dog, named Tim in honor of his rescuer, is now the picture of health, with a glorious fur coat. Returning Tim to Tiger’s Nest would require him to exercise skills that he’s likely to have lost during his many months of rehab—namely, establishing himself in the existing pack—and Vaughan doesn’t want to risk it.

For more information about the Maya Foundation’s Barnyard Bhutan Program, or to arrange a visit to meet Tim, find the group on Facebook.

This morning, on my daily run, I came upon a black-and-tan puppy sitting at the edge of the Thu Bồn River. I’ve seen him before, but never in this spot. Upon my approach, the puppy scampered back to his front yard, which is separated from the Thu Bồn by a small lane, traveled by motorbikes and pedestrians, and the occasional car.

It is my fourth week here in Hội An, Vietnam. When I first arrived, this same puppy hovered close to his house. While I didn’t notice anyone keeping an eye out for him, it was clear which house he considered home. Then, the puppy was young enough that his eyes were still that indistinct gray-blue color. He was a bit wobbly on his feet, and sported a rounded puppy belly.

Now, his eyes are focused and a clever brown. He is slimmer and a lot quicker, and he is learning, as most dogs here must, to get out of the way of any person or thing barreling in his direction. Soon, he will be able to distinguish between the people and things that will intersect with his trajectory and those that will not. He will learn to ignore the latter. He must, else he will be one tired puppy, as Hội An is a popular tourist destination for foreigners and Vietnamese alike.

Most puppies in Hội An are raised without leashes or fences. The entire time I’ve been here, I’ve seen only two dogs walked on leash, and one appeared to be visiting from elsewhere (the dog’s people were revolving as they walked, in an attempt to take in a panoramic view).

As a dog trainer in the United States, I’ve had clients who insisted on trying to raise a dog with little to no use of leash or fence. What these clients failed to understand is that it’s not a simple matter of removing restraints. Many factors help shape a puppy into a dog who will not wander from home or family. Among other things, dogs must lead a fulfilling life at home, or they will seek fulfillment elsewhere, whatever “fulfillment” means to a particular dog. And even if home life is fulfilling, dogs will roam if life away from home is equally or more fulfilling. It’s not that different from human behavior. Some of us require quite a bit of enticement to leave the comforts of our own home. Some of us return home only when entirely depleted.

In this area of Hội An, many shopkeepers live behind or above their stores, so their dogs are never alone. The house where I’ve been staying shares a courtyard with a number of other homes. Some of my neighbors disappear off to work at various hours. Others work from home. The dogs who share the courtyard have constant, though rotating, human company. They spend time around a variety of people, making it less likely that they will become hyperattached to a single person.

They also grow up with an understanding of communal space. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve seen only two canine squabbles, and no one was hurt either time. One altercation involved a leashed dog being walked through a pack of canine friends gathered for their morning social. (An imbalance in freedom often results in confrontation, as does the addition of a newcomer to a close-knit pack, which this clearly was.) The other involved a young and overly exuberant dog who interrupted a group already at play. The interrupter was ostracized, but once he mellowed, he was permitted to join in the fun.

Here, one puppy excepted (a very young one, at a shop on a bustling street), all the puppies I’ve seen have been granted complete freedom. Like the little black-and-tan one I see each morning on my run, the puppies learn from the start that safety is found at home or close to it. In this city, if a dog leaves home, he is soon intruding on another’s turf. Neighbor dogs share common space without issue, but may not appreciate a “stranger” dog passing through.

Some of the more confident dogs will cross streets; their navigation of intersections bustling with motorbikes and pedestrians is a sight to behold. I’ve spent many mornings on the patio of a coffee shop watching the same few dogs travel up and down the road with purpose. Sometimes with great purpose, as when carrying a scavenged treasure. (They seem inclined to retreat a good distance from the site of the discovery, perhaps to keep that site secret.)

Certainly, not every dog survives this amount of freedom unscathed. I have sighted one, maybe two, with a noticeable hitch to their gaits, the hitch likely earned in a collision with a motorbike. At the same time, I’ve seen dozens upon dozens of dogs who live very full lives, exploring their corners of the city at will, socializing and exercising in the early dawn as their humans do, when the air is freshest and the traffic lightest. Some do so in the company of people; others seek out canine friends independently.

While there are many loose dogs and swarms of tourists, I have yet to see a single dog react to a person walking by, no matter how close. And given the heavy foot traffic here, passing happens in tight proximity. Yet, while the dogs have no issue whatsoever with being passed, even brushed, by a pedestrian, a number have no interest in interaction beyond the accidental.

How do I know? I’ve heard them growl, usually when a tourist has been so bold as to reach a hand forward to touch without invitation, or moved in purposefully, camera in hand. The dogs communicated their displeasure quite clearly. Unlike in the U.S., in Hội An, dogs are not punished for their display, even in shops where the owners earn their livelihood by catering to tourists.

While here, I’ve been able to relate more closely to the predicament of dogs who are forbidden to express themselves in this way. There is a restaurant east of the marketplace that is owned by a woman who enjoys employing her English language skills. Since the first time I enjoyed a meal there, the owner has taken to shouting after me every time she sees me. When I am within her reach (she surprised me once rather far from her restaurant), she grasps me tightly in a bear hug. I’m not a terribly demonstrative person, especially with people I barely know. Were it socially acceptable (and I wish it were), I would emit a low growl to make clear my preferences.

I would have no more intention of biting than the growling shop dogs do. It’s clear from their body language: they are not about to get off their haunches and into a messy, tiring altercation by sinking their teeth into someone, especially not while the heat index is well over 100; they have no reason to. They have learned that a single clear communication gets them what they want: a bit of personal space.

Why is it that in the U.S., we consider such a reasonable request to be rude? As in humans, in dogs, bottled-up emotions tend to lead not to dissipation, but rather, to explosion. Imagine if every new person I encountered decided to give me a bear hug. You don’t have to know me personally to guess where this might eventually lead.

Rather than allow a dog to express his discomfort in a given situation, in the U.S., we tend to think it proper to forbid, and even punish, a dog for barking—let alone, horror of horrors, growling—at a person. This is unfortunate, as even children who haven’t been taught proper behavior around dogs understand the meaning of a growl.

As I prepare to sign off, one of the Chihuahuas who lives across from my house is telling an unfamiliar Cavalier mix in no uncertain terms to move it along. The courtyard is buzzing with neighbors newly returned from work. No one is telling the Chihuahua to put a lid on it. People recognize that she has a right to say what she’s saying.

I’ve heard, and read, many a complaint about the treatment of dogs in Asia. Here in Hội An, it’s been a joy to witness so many dogs leading full, wellbalanced lives, including enjoyment of the freedom of expression we hold dearly—for humans, if not canines— in the United States.

In journalist Kim Kavin’s book, The Dog Merchants, she investigates the complex businesses and networks involved in the buying and selling and “homing” of dogs: breeders, pet stores, pet brokers, the AKC, local shelters and rescue organizations. It is her goal to advance the conversation on how dogs are treated, from puppy mills to high-kill shelters. In the following excerpt, Kavin explains how rebranding shelter dogs can make them more desirable and, therefore, adoptable.

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 with 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, caring for more than 31,000 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 8 ’til 9 a.m. in central business district train stations the week of the event, and they 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 5,000 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 U.S. 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-brand foods at the supermarket or new-brand cars 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 multimilliondollar facility, one of Europe’s largest at 163,000 square feet (more than 15,000 square meters, about the size of the largest Target retail store on the U.S. East Coast). The Berlin shelter holds about 1,400 animals at a time and cares for about 12,000 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 house-train prior to sending them home, in the hopes of making each pairing more likely to stick.

Underlying Dietrich Bangert’s futuristic, geometric design for Tierheim Berlin is the architect’s commitment to creating maximum physical and emotional comfort for the approximately 1,400 animals it shelters, as well as its workers and visitors. A 163,000- square-foot, glass-andconcrete facility, its circular pavilions, with their cantilevered overhangs and splayed walls, incorporate fresh air and natural light. Each pavilion consists of three spherical structures arranged around an enclosed open space, rather like petals on a daisy.

Yet another example is in Costa Rica, where the Territorio de Zaguates shelter had nearly all mixed-breed dogs while adopters primarily wanted purebreds, so it worked with the San Jose–based creative agency Garnier BBDO to launch a marketing campaign around the idea of “unique breeds.” Instead of calling the dogs mutts, they followed the same branding convention long used by breeders, labeling the dogs as things that sounded surprisingly like kennel club– recognized Dandle Dinmont Terriers and Finnish Laphunds: Chubby-Tailed German Dobernauzers, Fire-Tailed Border Cockers, Alaskan Collie Fluffyterriers, White-Chested Dachweilers, and Brown-Eyed Australian Dalmapointers. (Is it really any different from inventing a German Blabrador?)

Watercolor artists painted renderings that mimicked the design of the purebred standard drawings, then added the unique breed names in a highfalutin, royal wedding–worthy typeface. The posters created a visual way for people to process the message that breed names, when it comes to choosing a pet, are often no more than a line of marketing copy.

By the end of the Territorio de Zaguates campaign— “When You Adopt a Mutt, You Adopt a Unique Breed”—the shelter’s dogs had received more than $450,000 in news and public-relations coverage. More than a half-million people had discussed and shared the dogs on Facebook. Adoptions went up 1,400 percent, and the shelter got sponsors who now cover the whole of its operating expenses.

All in all, the teams in Costa Rica and Germany experienced the same thing organizers of the Human Walking Program saw in Australia: Working with professional marketers and designers made a huge impact on people’s perceptions about the dogs, who were suddenly in demand and welcomed into people’s homes en masse—even though the pooches themselves hadn’t changed at all.

“We have been inundated with interest from shelters from South Africa to the USA, which leads us to believe that shelters across the world generally share the same priority of changing the public’s perception of shelter pets,” Coro says from Melbourne, “and now there is a tried and tested plan that can help us all do that.”

Mike Arms is a business-minded advocate who saves dogs without making any excuses for raising their value along with the professional value of the people working with them. Since 1999, he has been president of the Helen Woodward Animal Center in California, where he tripled adoption rates while charging some of the highest dog-adoption fees in America and recruiting employees for their business and marketing savvy. (As of 2013, according to an independent auditor’s report, the center’s management salaries and benefits totaled $373,420. Arms’ pay was not itemized.) Nobody can buy a dog from the center for less than $399. A couple of Labrador puppies sold recently for $500 apiece, and a six-month-old Goldendoodle went for $1,000 not long ago. Arms has no problem telling adopters they should pay fair market value because his dogs have just as much intrinsic value, and make just as fabulous pets, as the purebreds going for similar prices from breeders. “Why is it,” he asks, “that somebody can go out and spend $2,000 or $3,000 on a pet and after thirty days realize it’s not for them, and they take it to their local facility, and the minute it crosses that threshold, the value is gone?”

His approach leaves many shelter operators with mouths agape, especially the ones who can’t even give their dogs away for free. Arms believes that their failure has nothing to do with the quality of the dogs, but instead with the quality of the dogs in people’s minds, which he sees as the job of shelter directors to manage. The problem isn’t the dogs. The problem is the marketing.

“I’m getting more and more frustrated with my peers as I get older,” he says. “It just seems like they’re going backwards in time now. They think the way to increase adoptions is to lower fees and come up with gimmicks. That doesn’t increase adoptions at all. All that does is devalue the pets. How in the world can we change the public’s perception of these beautiful pets if we’re the one doing this?”

The root of the problem with homeless dogs and pricing, he says, goes back to the way many rescue organizations got started. It’s usually a woman who finds a puppy in the street and gets him into a loving home. The woman likes the feeling of having done right by the pup, so she helps more dogs, and then more dogs, until she decides to form an organization along the lines of a humane society. “They weren’t getting paid for it,” Arms says. “They just liked doing it as a hobby. So they felt, ‘If I’m not doing it for pay, nobody else should be doing it for pay.’”

Try telling a breeder he should care for all the dogs for free and give them away out of the goodness of his heart. Rescuers often have a completely different mentality, Arms says, one that devalues their own worth as well as the worth of the dogs.

Arms regularly finds himself standing on stage in front of a room filled with rescuers who fit that mold, most of them women, even today. He tells a particular story again and again, one that seems to make the message clear. It starts when he asks them what they would do if they were invited to a formal dinner banquet at a high-end restaurant. What is the very next thing you’d do, he asks, after you accepted the invitation?

To a person, they answer that they’d go out and buy a new dress. “Now, human nature is that a lot of people will put a budget on what they’re going to spend on that outfit,” he tells them. “You go out in the department store and start trying on outfits and none of them fit you right. The color’s not right. You get depressed and you’re going to walk out, and then on your way out you see a dress that’s a hundred dollars more. And it fits. And you buy it. You’re willing to spend three hundred or four hundred dollars on that dress that you’re going to wear three or four times, but you’re not willing to spend it on a dog. What are we teaching the public about value?”

Arms loves dogs just as much as the rescuers in the audience do, but he treats the pooches far more like products than most of his colleagues might—because he believes that’s what gets them into homes. He’s had courtesy shoppers from the department store Macy’s come through his shelter to tell him what he can do better in terms of staffing and displays. He brought in BMW salesmen to train his staff. (“Nobody is a better salesman than a car salesman,” he says.) As of this writing, Bruce Nordstrom, former chairman of the upscale retailer Nordstrom Inc., was scheduled to do training at the center, all because Arms believes the sales techniques in the dog-rescue business need a swift reboot into the modern era of retail sales. He wants to be the BMW of the used-pooch industry, the place where buyers can go and know they’re getting a top-quality product worth every penny of the extra money, not unlike a pre-owned luxury sedan.

“They can call it adoptions or rehoming or whatever they want,” Arms says of rescuers, “but they’re in the business of selling used dogs. And they’d better be good at it, because those lives are on the line.”

Arms has been invited to speak to shelter directors everywhere from British Columbia in Canada to multiple cities in New Zealand, preaching the philosophy that shelters should be run by the savviest marketing and sales people, raising their prices and preaching the overall value of every great pup. Shelter directors should have a heart for dogs, but first and foremost, a mind for business—because that’s the only thing that breaks through stereotypes and helps dog lovers understand what they’re really getting for their money.

“We have to change the public’s perception,” he says. “The public believes the pets in pet facilities are there because there’s something wrong with the pet. We have to teach them that the pet is there because there’s something wrong with the person who had the pet. That’s the reality.”

We just read a wonderful story about another inventive and humane way to save shelter dogs and to showcase their many charms and talents. This story is from the Brazil Open tennis tournament being held in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Shelter dogs Frida, Costela, Mel and Isabelle, all sporting orange bandannas, wowed the onlookers by their ball “handling” abilities. In their previous life these four ball-dogs were street dogs in Brazil largest city. But now, as trained by Andrea Beckert, from the Association of Animal Wellbeing, they are retrieving the out-of-bounds tennis balls, and bringing them back, joyfully, to their trainer and, at times, to the players.

As Beckert noted—she trained them for months before this appearance—they were hoping to make the animals more confident and playful to “win” attention and hopefully new homes. “These are dogs that were mistreated. We have to make them adapt, feel the environment, the court, the noise of the balls and the noise of the people. Some are doing well, others are still a little scared,” she related. The basic commands that the dogs learned were ‘pick the ball,’ ‘let it go,’ ‘stay’ and ‘come.’”

All four still live in the shelter, said Marli Scaramella, the organizer of the ball-dog program, “The idea is to show people that a well-fed and well-treated animal can be very happy. We have more than 1,000 dogs in our care,” she said. Let’s hope this worked and will inspire other sporting events in other countries.