Cool Cat Creates Dog Testing Program At Muttville Senior Dog Rescue

Muttville Senior Dog Rescue in San Francisco was struggling to match senior dogs with adopters who also had cats — about 40% of applicants do — because the nonprofit only knew a handful of truly cat-tolerant dogs at any one time. Long waits built up for people who wanted reassurance that a new dog would live peacefully with their feline family members, and only a few fosters lived with cats so testing opportunities were limited. Volunteer Missy Dominguez offered a simple solution: bring her calm, social cat Mustache to Muttville to meet dogs and let staff assess their reactions. Over the past few months the shelter has run short, controlled introductions in which a leashed dog spends two to four minutes in a room with the cat while team members watch canine body language closely. Dogs that stay loose, acknowledge the cat (for example, by sniffing) and then go about their business are marked as cat-friendly; dogs that freeze, fixate, track the cat with a hard stare or show piloerection are pulled out and do not pass. Kimberly Benjamin, Muttville’s director of adoptions and community engagement, explained that these brief encounters are revealing: the team conducts around 20 to 30 dog testings every other Friday and typically only one or two dogs fail. The new protocol dramatically increased the number of dogs they could certify as safe for homes with cats, and Benjamin estimates that hundreds of senior dogs have been adopted into cat-owning households faster than would have been possible before the program. Mustache, who had been an office cat at Hopalong Animal Rescue before Dominguez adopted him, became the program’s star tester because of his calm temperament. He was technically a hospice cat because of a large abdominal mass, and he loved the job so much he would willingly hop into his carrier to go to Muttville. Tragically, Mustache died suddenly on June 10; Dominguez and the Muttville community are mourning him, but his trainee Little Dude has stepped in to carry on the work. The program’s impact is visible in individual adoptions: for example, Paige Emery and her partner adopted Subway, a 14-year-old miniature long-haired Dachshund mix, after that dog passed a Mustache test and has since settled in alongside their cat. Dominguez and Muttville hope other shelters will replicate the cat-volunteer testing model and that the story encourages people with cats to consider fostering or adopting a senior dog, a population that often adapts well and benefits greatly from being placed in loving homes.