There are millions of dogs across the country in need of a good home. Wild One, a pet care startup, is seeking to address that by helping to rescue a dog every day by the year 2024.
What Is Wild One?
Wild One is a pet care brand that was founded in 2018 and sells pet care supplies, including its very popular walking kits. Selling pet care products was never Wild One’s only mission, however. The company also dedicated funds toward getting at least one dog a week rescued.
How Did Wild One Meet Its Goal?
Wild One opened for business only two years before the COVID-19 pandemic began. During the pandemic, dog adoptions rates rose as pet owners, many for the first time, adopted pets during quarantine. This also corresponded with an increase in the amount of money that pet owners were spending on their pets.
How Does Wild One Help Dogs Get Rescued?
Wild One has helped dogs get rescued by making donations to rescue organizations like Brooklyn-based Badass Animal Rescue (BAR). They also cover the costs of adoption for dogs and for the publicity to help get them adopted. On their website, they run promotions that send proceeds to rescue organizations, most recently a buy one give one program, in which every dollar a customer spent would be matched in the form of a donation.
What Is ‘A Dog a Day’?
That all dogs deserve to have safe and comfortable homes is one of Wild One’s core values. To that end, helping a dog a week get rescued wasn’t enough. In 2021, as the company celebrated its third year in business, Wild One announced that it wanted to increase a dog a week to a dog a day. To accomplish this goal, Wild One will continue its partnership with BAR. Working with BAR, Wild One met its original goal of helping a dog a week get rescued.
Wild One’s aim is to start the A Dog a Day program in January of 2022, with the goal of succeeding by 2024.
Who Does Wild One Work With?
In order to help a dog a day get adopted, Wild One is also expanding its network of dog rescues. They’ve carefully vetted every animal rescue so that every partner met their strict criteria. On top of that, they wanted to focus on rescues in areas that have large stray populations or have experienced post-pandemic dog abandonment. They also wanted to work with rescues that raised awareness about issues such as discrimination against black dogs.
Why Is Dog Abandonment Such an Important Issue?
Dog abandonment is an unfortunate problem that shelters and rescue organizations are constantly combating. There was a major increase in the number of pet adoptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, but as things began to go back to normal, some of those pet owners surrendered their pets. Wild One feels strongly about helping rescued organizations deal with pet abandonment all the time, not just during a pandemic, and has purposely sought out organizations to partner with that work to raise awareness about the issue.