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The following ad appeared in a newspaper: (The phone number was the Humane Society and Daisy was an eight week old black Labrador Retriever. They received 643 calls in two days.) We can't say for sure whether anyone has ever used this faux personals ad (attributed to many different newspapers) to lure a lonely man into adopting a homeless canine, but the basic gag is at least several years old and has appeared in many versions with slightly different details.In 1996, for example, an Illinois newspaper reported the following ad had appeared in a Peoria shopper: As recently as late 2003, this joke was still bedeviling the Atlanta Humane Society: While the Peoria version quoted above simply works this gag into the common technique of catching a reader's eye with an ad that initially appears to be one thing but is eventually revealed to be something else (such as the common scheme of printing of SEX in big, bold letters at the head of an ad, followed by copy reading: Now that we've got your attention . . .), the version quoted in the example block at the head of this page is an out-and-out deception. We hope that if anyone ever used an ad like this one to find a home for an ownerless dog, deception wasn't a part of it. Pets should be adopted by people making informed choices after due consideration and forethought, not by those jumping into spur-of-the-moment decisions after having an idea sprung on them by surprise (or by those making hasty choices in attempts to save face or spite those who made them look foolish). We also can't imagine that anyone working for an animal shelter would want to subject himself and his co-workers to the torrent of crank, lewd, and abusive phone calls they'd receive in response to such a deliberately misleading notice. Humane societies so typically struggle with the twin curses of being extremely busy and woefully understaffed that the thought of voluntarily setting up an office to field one loopy phone call after another should be immediately rejected — it takes manpower to staff phones, and that's one of the many resources animal shelters are always short of.
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