Humane Society’s Brilliant Puppy Drone Stunt Achieves Viral Success

Last week, the Humane Society of the United States, with help from Rokkan, released an unbranded video entitled Same Day Pups: Puppy Drone Delivery. It was both cute and horrifying. Cute because, well, puppies. Horrifying because it envisions a world in which pets are plucked from Amazon-style warehouses and shipped as if they were a piece of unfeeling cardboard.

The hoax video, which has achieved close to 400,000 views on YouTube and 2.2 million on Facebook since April 30, was designed to raise awareness of puppy mills. In the video, a family is seen ordering a puppy from a website called samedaypups.com. The selected puppy is then delivered by drone.

On the SameDayPups site, a headline screams, “Drone delivery from trusted breeders.” If you click the “Find A Puppy Button,” or anywhere else for that matter, you are met with a message that reads:

[blockquote]”Puppy drone delivery does not exist. But ordering puppies like a product is real. 99 percent of puppies sold online come from puppy mills where they are caged as commodities, farmed for profit, discounted and discarded. Don’t buy into puppy mills. That’s the first step in shutting down mills.”[/blockquote]

Once the Humane Society revealed it was behind the campaign, it launched another site, A Puppy Is Not A Product, on which it shares information about puppy mills along with tips on how to properly seek a pet puppy from a trusted source.

Visitors to the site, can share the site’s message to their social media followers with pre-populated messages like this one:

The Humane Society promoted the puppy drone video on its social channels:

Puppy Drone Delivery via http://t.co/7b1nGUmhm9: https://t.co/oLqIZZgM6k

— The Humane Society of the United States (@HumaneSociety) May 7, 2015