Before you get excited about hooking up your dog with a cute French Bulldog, let me clarify that the only matching happening through this app is for pets looking for a new home.
To help pets get adopted, pet adoption site AllPaws.com, brilliantly created a new app that asks users to swipe right for puppy love. The reason why this is such a great idea is because any Tinder user knows that a lot of the appeal of the app has to do with looking and deciding which way to swipe. By using this for good–in this case finding pets a new home–means people are more likely to see all the available pets up for adoption.
This also taps into how shallow we are even about adopting pets, so it makes complete sense. According to Stephanie Shain with the Washington Humane Society, pet seekers start out wanting a certain breed, and apps allow shelters to list both purebred and mixed dogs of that breed.
So having apps like AllPaws and Petfinder have had a positive impact in pet adoption.
“Just getting those pictures in front of people is a terrific first step, because you’re halfway there once they’re looking,” Shain told Slate. Getting people through the shelter door has long been the biggest challenge, she said. Once you’re in, the dogs pretty much sell themselves.
Such apps also help tackle the Black Dog Syndrome, where darker dogs are said to take longer to get adopted because they are harder to photograph (I told you we are shallow). So although you go into the shelter looking for one particular dog, you may fall in love with that Rottweiler puppy.