Love me for who I am, not what I am is quite a simple concept at its core. Don’t we all want to be loved and judged only for our personality and what we have to offer the world, instead of what we look like or what people perceive when they see us?

One of the biggest challenges our adoption team routinely faces is people who want to pick a dog based on appearance and not personality. We are passionate about finding adopters who want to have a dog not because of the way it looks, but because of its silly or sweet personality, or the way it might play with their other dogs, or be able to go on hikes with them on the weekends, or be a part of their weekly gatherings with friends.

However, we get emails every single day asking for better pictures of our dogs so that people can decide if they want to apply or not. When we talk to people on the phone, they ask when they will be able to pick up their dog without ever having even met them. They want to select a dog based solely on a picture they have seen on the website.

One of the biggest red flags for adoptions is when people say they are not willing to adopt a dog unless we can prove it does not have an aggressive breed in it. Aggressive breeds are not bred that way, people make them that way.

The philosophy of love me for who I am, not what I am, is not only important for a successful life-long adoption, but isn’t it also what we all deserve? Don’t we all just want to be loved for who we are, regardless of how we look or how people perceive us?