Lucchese is not the world’s cutest dog. Picked up as a stray somewhere in Texas, he is scruffy and, as one person aptly observed online, looks a little like Steve Buscemi. (It’s the eyes.)
Isabel Klee, a professional influencer in New York City, had agreed to keep Lucchese, or Luc, until he found a forever home. Fosters such as Klee help move dogs out of loud and stressful shelters so they can relax and socialize before moving into a forever home. (The foster can then take on a new dog, and the process restarts.) Klee began posting about Luc on TikTok, as many dog fosters do. “I fell in love with him, and the internet fell in love with him,” she told me over the phone earlier this month. “Every single video I posted of him went viral.” In one such video, which has attained nearly 4 million views since it was published in October, Klee’s boyfriend strokes Luc, who is curled up into his chest like a human infant. The caption reads, “When your foster dog feels safe with you 🥲🫶.”
Beneath this post are comments such as “this is so special 🥹🥹” and “Wow my heart 😩❤️❤️.” And then there are others: “If this story doesn’t end with you adopting him I’m going to SCREAM FOREVER,” and “If you don’t adopt him already, I will slice you into dozens of pieces.”
The idea behind Klee’s posts, as with any foster’s, is to generate attention to help a rescue dog find their forever home: More eyeballs means more possible adopters. But something strange also tends to happen when these videos are posted. Even when the comment sections are mostly positive, a subset of commenters will insist that the foster dog shouldn’t go anywhere—that people like Klee are doing something wrong by searching for the dog’s forever home. Sure, some of the comments are jokes. (Klee seemed generally unbothered by them in our conversation: “I don’t think people have any ill will toward me or the situation,” she said.) But others don’t seem to be. “We frequently get absurd comments like ‘these dogs are forming lifelong bonds with you, only to be abandoned again and have social anxiety and abandonment PTSD,’” April Butler, another dog foster and content creator, who runs a TikTok account with more than 2 million followers, told me over email.
Becoming a dog foster effectively means signing up to be a pseudo–content creator, if you aren’t, like Klee and Butler, one already: You are actively working to interest your audience in adoption by taking photos and videos of your temporary pup looking as cute as possible. You could opt out of the circus entirely, but doesn’t that sweet, nervous dog deserve every bit of effort you can muster? The whole thing is a neat summary of the odd social-media economy: People post, and audiences feel entitled to weigh in on those posts, even when the conversation becomes completely unmoored from anything resembling reality. Even when the subject at hand is something as inoffensive and apolitical as animal fostering.
nt blocks that the algorithm gobbles up. The content economy cycles onward.