Long Beach's Posh Pets stays celebrating ‘big dog energy’

A lot of times, dogs and puppies at adoption centers and pet stores have a greater chance of finding a home if they’re a smaller breed. With this being the case all too often, Posh Pets in Long Beach spent a day earlier this month celebrating “big dog energy.”

The shelter, which is somewhat tucked away at 770 Park Pl., wanted to have a special adoption day dedicated to the larger breeds — golden retrievers, Bernese Mountain dogs, Labradors, golden doodles, Pitbulls and more. So, Saturday, July 15 was a day for the big dogs to shine.

“We started doing this last year because we found that the larger dogs that are, maybe, 40 pounds or more, they don’t get as much attention as smaller dogs,” said Melissa McClellan, shelter director and secretary. “So, this way, our larger dogs that don’t get as much attention would be able to be seen by people.”

The shelter has been doing some off-site adoption events at PetSmart in Farmingdale a couple of times a month, but they’re sometimes tough to do because they don’t have enough handlers to bring all the dogs. Since they don’t have enough handlers to bring all of the larger dogs for those events, they decided to just host them at the shelter.

McClellan said about 10 applications were submitted that day for potential adoptions. She said two of them panned out well and one of the dogs actually did go to foster. She was hoping for some more applications, but said any amount is a good thing.

“I really would like to see some more adoptions of the larger dogs,” McClellan said. “It’s kind of disconcerting because the small dogs will get, as soon as we put them up on social media, probably 100 applications within 24 hours. A large sum of our large dogs have received maybe one or two applications and they’ve been with us for a year. There’s a huge difference in the amount of interest in the larger dogs versus the smaller dogs.”

McClellan attributes the differing interest levels to a few things. She says it isn’t always just the size but since they’re there for longer, the age could be an issue. She said that sometimes people think the older dogs have something wrong with them or attitude issues, which is “rarely the case.”

McClellan hopes to host more of these big dog adoption days in the future and is testing the waters with this one. The shelter held its first one last year, but it was completely rained out and no one came. They’re thinking of doing it once a month, weather permitting. It’s hard to have it indoors because the facility is so small, so they need to have nice weather so that we can set everything up outdoors for the dogs to have enough room.

“We’re hoping to have enough volunteers that are able to help,” McClellan said. “A lot of it comes down to manpower because we don’t really have a lot of staff. We’re a really small shelter compared to the other shelters on Long Island so we mainly have to rely on volunteers to help us out with a lot of these events.”