• Shelter animals regularly go viral because the internet loves badly behaved, chonky, and adorable pets.
• Animals that hit the sweet spot between weird and cute, often with some sort of defining personality trait or physical quirk, tend to grab our attention.
• Cats like Quilty, who was kept in a room by himself after he repeatedly let his feline comrades out, and Narwhal, a puppy with a "tail" on his forehead, are prime examples.
• While there are some strange aspects to virality, the animal rescue experts who spoke with Insider agreed that it's a serendipitous outcome for both animal and shelter.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

When Rochelle Steffen logged into Facebook in November 2019 and posted a photo of a fluffy 10-week-old old beagle puppy, it was business as usual. As the founder of Mac's Mission, a special needs dog rescue operation based in Missouri, Steffen often posts about dogs who need homes and funds for medical care.

But this particular puppy had a tail on his head — a short and stubby growth right between his eyes, like a fluffy horn. And so Steffen dubbed him "Narwhal the Little Magical Furry Unicorn," a nod to the Arctic sea creature.

People started liking and sharing Steffen's post, and they didn't stop. The engagement began snowballing, and soon The Today Show and TMZ came calling, asking to interview Steffen about the newly internet-mythic unicorn puppy. Thousands of dollars in donations started flooding into Mac's Mission, along with hundreds of adoption applications for Narwhal. 

He had reached that most mysterious and powerful plane of internet phenomenona: virality.

There's no guaranteed formula for virality, but for animals like Narwhal, it often comes from a strange alchemy of factors that form an internet-friendly profile: a kind of sweet spot between weird and cute, with a story that's sad, but not too sad. It frequently involves some sort of anomaly — an extra tail, maybe, or a personality quirk — that makes the creature odd enough to stand out, yet normal enough to be your next pet. 

Social media has changed the animal rescue landscape, but virality has supercharged it

As Gray Chapman reported for Buzzfeed in 2018, social media has increasingly influenced the way rescue animals find homes, and shelters are investing heavily in it, hiring full-time social media managers and on-site photographers. Shelters in the crowded attention landscape, Chapman wrote, need to "learn to think like marketers and advertisers."

But virality is something else altogether. It can completely transform the operations of an animal rescue shelter, especially one like Mac's Mission, which functions on a low budget and works with animals who can be exceedingly difficult to care for and place. "For me and the volunteers who have worked so hard to get this thing going, there had been very little publicity, and now here we were," Steffen told Insider. "It was like the culmination of it all."

That much attention can have downsides. Some commenters thought Narwhal was the devil incarnate; others just hated the tail, and threatened the shelter or the puppy himself. Steffen had to invest in new security cameras and, she says, keep Narwhal "under lock and key." There's also something a little off-putting about the amount of attention Narwhal and his fellow viral animals receive. It can feel like surface-level objectification; the animal becomes secondary to what it represents. 

Yet those working in animal rescue who spoke with Insider all agreed that virality is a serendipitous outcome: hard to predict, but fruitful if it happens. 

The way shelters tell any animal's story can be a make or break decision

As Nathan Heller wrote in a piece for the New Yorker about medical GoFundMes, "storytelling" has become increasingly crucial to medical crowdfunding. Though the stakes may be lower and the factors different, this emphasis on storytelling largely holds true in animal rescue. Some posts aim to be heartrending, but many are upbeat, more in the mode of creating a #brand for a puppy than pleading for someone to save it.  

Lisa Zambacca, a member of the board of directors for Angels Among Us, which focuses on connecting cats and dogs from high-kill shelters in north Georgia with foster and permanent homes, told Insider that they frequently post an animal's story from rescue to shelter to vet visit and try to imagine how that animal is feeling. In these posts, she said, the dog will often have "its ears flapping and smiling because truly they know they're safe." 

This emphasis on the upward trajectory marks a departure from the kinds of old-school ASPCA ads that featured distressed-looking animals in cages, begging for a home. The sad aesthetic is out. Or, at the very least, the aesthetic shouldn't be too sad; rays of hope are good. 

We love to see our own habits and characteristics in these animals

 Social media posts playing up human-like traits or personal habits do particularly well. Quilty, a cat who was up for adoption at Friends for Life Animal Shelter in Houston last year, went viral for being a Very Bad Cat. A series of Facebook posts presented him as an escape artist who busted out of his confines and then set his fellow cats free. Jennifer Hopkins, the communications lead at the shelter, posted about his proclivities, calling him a "spicy a-hole." (Remember, sanitized language only on social media.)

When Quilty was placed in a room by himself, the shelter posted a photograph of his forlorn-looking face peering out from behind the window. Soon, #freequilty was trending, and Friends for Life embraced it. Quilty became a meme and adoption applications poured in. He eventually found a home with a family outside Houston. "You know, a cat that opens doors, in my home that sounds terrible, but people really connected with that part of him," Hopkins said.

Animals like Quilty echo earlier internet-famous creatures like Grumpy Cat, who took on second lives as memes that express something about the human condition, like "ugh, Monday." 

The anthropomorphic attraction is certainly part of the formula. In 2015, Angels Among Us, the organization in Georgia, shared a photo of an 11-month-old hound mix named Kala and a 15-month-old boxer mix locked in what looked like a hug. The two pups were scheduled to be euthanized, but the photo saved them, first connecting them with a foster home and then permanent homes. 

"It's funny how people latch onto one thing," Zambacca said. "It was two dogs literally on top of each other, who knows what they were doing, but it looked like they were hugging each other." Ultimately, in what felt like an ending almost too good to be true, they were adopted by human best friends and roommates, whose dogs had both recently passed away. 

Physical abnormalities like Narwhal's "tail" are endearing — but there's a limit

Sometimes internet fame can grow out of a physical anomaly, like Narwhal's extra tail. For Mr. B, a cat who went viral last year, it was chonk — internet slang for heftiness. The Morris Animal Refuge in Philadelphia posted a photo of the 26-pound cat in the arms of a volunteer, looking like a leopard, his rolls hanging out. The internet, where chonky cats reign supreme, fell in love. He was quickly adopted by a couple, Sarah and Chris (they declined to give last names), who already had a relationship with the shelter and had multiple cats. 

Sarah told Insider that she was drawn to him because of something in his face, and because she thought she could help him. As it turned out, the "chonk" factor that was attractive online — the very thing that ignited his virality — worried her.

"The chonk thing is popular on social media, but I do stress, it is not healthy for animals to be that overweight," she said. Post-adoption, Sarah and Chris helped him lose a few pounds and kept him active on Instagram — his handle, @chonkymrb, is squarely in line with his early fame — where his 15,000 followers watch his exploits. 

But the attractiveness of physical anomalies has limits. It can be very hard to get traction online for more severely disabled animals who don't neatly transform into memes. More serious animal disabilities may not find internet fame quite so easily. It is both too commonplace and too sad to translate into virality. 

"We end up with lots of animals who may be a little bit wonky or have additional needs," Jennifer Hopkins said, describing a paraplegic cat named Lisa who requires twice-daily bladder expression, and had been at the shelter for more than two years. "Animals like her may be more difficult to find a forever home." But the post-Quilty levels of interest and engagement helped animals who did not have his knack for virality — Lisa was adopted recently by her foster mom. 

What happens with these rescue animals online amplifies the inequities of the pet adoption process writ large 

Virality depends on millions of split-second connections between animal and viewer; objectification and surface-level judgments are inevitable. People are similarly impulsive and instinctive about pets in person. 

Clive Wynne, a researcher and author of "Dog Is Love: Why And How Your Dog Loves You," once followed people around at an animal shelter in Florida and observed their decision-making process. 

Surprisingly, people spent very little time looking at each dog; on average, they stuck around for about 60 seconds before moving on. "Then people would usually say, let me interact with this one dog, and they either would go home with that one dog or with no dog at all," he told Insider. He was surprised in general by the swiftness of the decision. "This selection was made superficially and so quickly," he said. "People were treating it only a little more seriously than buying a toaster oven."

Animals who go viral occupy an odd space, but it's not alway a bad one

Eventually, Rochelle Steffen decided to adopt Narwhal herself, partly because she'd fallen in love with him, and partly because she wasn't sure how to vet potential applicants and guarantee him a safe environment elsewhere. (She estimated that one-third simply wanted to make money off his tail; someone even offered $2 million for him.) 

Narwhal is now living a normal puppy childhood and playing with her three other dogs. But she also wishes all the rescue dogs could get the kind of attention that would lead to homes. "I think all of our dogs deserve a major motion picture. They've gone through the fires of hell just to end up here," she said. 

And while the formula is far from foolproof — sometimes the popularity of a post can be affected by something as arbitrary as the timing of posts or tweaks in the Facebook algorithm — Steffen is grateful lightning struck her corner of the rescue world. Despite the hassle, she estimated that his moment in the internet lights led to about $10,000 in donations and thousands of new followers, some of whom might be interested in adopting one of the organization's other dogs. 

There's a certain ickiness to all of this—to the branding and storytelling, to the meme-ification of animals, to the way certain anomalies are attractive and others aren't, to the way we want animals that behave like humans. 

But strange as it may all seem, it may well be making things better. It's a path forward for shelters: posting, inventing, trying new tricks to grab people's attention in the ever-crowded battle for it. 

"In rescue, people are always saying, 'Oh my God it's so terrible out there and it's not getting any better,'" Lisa Zambacca said. "I always think, well, before social media, we may not have known it, but it was probably a whole lot worse."

Sophie Haigney is a freelance journalist who often writes about technology and art. She has written for The New York Times, New York Magazine, Slate, and others.

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