If you love looking at cute pictures of dogs and cats, check out and follow our Instagram page,  @LoveFamilyRescues !  You will learn more about the benefits of rescuing and adopting pets, and read real stories from people who gave their pets a second chance at life! 

Many people argue that pets are actually family members, and are treated better than human family members most of the time.  Would you intentionally abuse or abandon a family member?  I don’t think so, and the same should not be done to pets.  Unfortunately it is and animal shelters are overflowing with loving animals looking for a second chance to become someone’s new family member.  In our advocacy project, we wanted people to know that you can get the same loving pets from an animal shelter and know you are saving a life, rather than spending hundreds of dollars on animals that are bred simply for the money.

We reached out to family, friends, and strangers looking for people who gratefully adopted a shelter animal instead of buying a fancy, expensive pet.  We wanted to share these honest stories and pictures to show others that just because you don’t have the hottest, most expensive breed of dog, you can still have a loving pet that is happy with a second chance at life.  There are several very popular social media platforms that we could have used to display our project, but we chose to use Instagram as our main site.

I think that Instagram was a great choice for our advocacy project because it enabled us to reach people all around the world, just by posting a picture.  Since our main goal was to have a picture of a rescued or adopted pet with their owner and a short story about them, Instagram was the best option.  It is a platform known for photo-sharing, commenting, and hashtags.  We made our account public so anyone who stumbled upon our page could see all of our pictures.  We also incorporated hashtags with our photos so people from literally anywhere in the world could see our pictures.  The use of hashtags was a major part of our project.  By using certain hashtags, such as #DogsOfInstagram, any person who searched that hashtag came across our pictures and account.  We had many people liking our photos and even following the account.  One of my favorite aspects of Instagram is the use of hashtags to connect people and pictures together.

There are many positives to using Instagram as our main platform for advocacy.  Obviously we are able to connect with people in many different countries, not just our family and local community.  Also, many people already follow animal accounts on Instagram because seeing a cute animal can brighten anyone’s day!  It was created to share photos, and that is what we wanted to do.  One of the limitations is not everyone has an Instagram account.  Many people could’ve wanted to help with our project and see the pictures, but were unable to if they didn’t have an account.

Animals are very dear to my heart.  I love dogs and cats and I am very against any type of animal cruelty.  I rescued both of my cats and gave them the chance to have a loving home and caring owners.  When I started this project, I hoped to achieve a greater appreciation for shelter pets and to reach anyone who was thinking of getting a pet to know they could get a great pet at their local animal shelter.  I do not want to completely condemn buying a dog from a breeder or a pet store because many of my friends have the cutest dogs from those places, but I really wanted people to realize there are already pets that are facing euthanasia who are looking for an owner.  I also hoped to have many people wanting to share their stories with us, because usually people love talking about their pet (just like they’re a member of the family!).  While we did receive about 15 submissions, I was hoping for more.  The ones we did receive were very touching and I’m glad those people wanted to help.

Overall, I am very pleased with this advocacy project.  When I put my accomplishments into perspective, I gained many followers and received a decent amount of stories in only a one month time period.  The most rewarding part of this project was having people reaching out to me and wanting to help in any way they could.  I also loved seeing the many people who loved their pets so much, and didn’t treat them any differently or like them any less just because they are from an animal shelter.  We also got such positive feedback from our classmates, so it is great that many people share the passion for fair treatment of all animals.  One of the challenges of this project was the lack of submissions from people.  When I started this project, I may have had too high of hopes because I was aiming to have about 20-30 submissions and have more followers on our Instagram page.  But, I am very happy with the submissions we received.  I know we worked very hard on this project and I couldn’t be more proud to advocate for animals that do not have a voice to advocate for themselves.

If I had to do another advocacy project in the future, I would definitely use a different approach.  Many people that wanted to help me with the project wanted to know if there was an actual event that went along with our Instagram page, and others didn’t have any pets but still wanted to do their part to help.  In the future, I think it would be great to have an adoption day at a local shelter to raise awareness for the adoption of animals.  This way, people could help with the event, the public could learn about adopting animals, and would hopefully even adopt an animal that day!  I would also want to do some type of fundraiser to support the animals already in local shelters.  Hopefully someday I will be able to make this adoption day idea into a reality!