German animal shelters are overcrowded. But more and more people adopt pets mainly based on superficial criteria, underestimating the animals' needs and personalities. When difficulties arise, they feel overwhelmed quickly and give the animals up to shelters.
As a result, the situation in animal shelters has become increasingly precarious.
Not only is there a lack of space, but also a severe shortage of staff. Unless shelters receive meaningful relief and people fundamentally rethink their approach to adoption,
the German animal welfare system faces the risk of collapsing.
state that appearance was the key factor in choosing a pet.
Pet survey by Appinio,
September 2025
animals per shelter slot – That's how severely overcrowded German animal shelters are.
German Animal Welfare Federation 2024
extra hours is the average overtime per week working as an animal caretaker.
German Animal Welfare Federation 2024
With CALL A PET, we give animals a voice in being adopted. Thanks to AI, we turn four "problem animals" from shelters into ambassadors for a personality-based adoption process.
All four of them can now be dialed directly. In open, genuine, and meaningful conversations, people can get to know the pets’ stories and their personalities.
By asking specific questions, the animal-AI determines whether the human being it is talking to is a perfect match—or not. Because, in the end, only the conversations with a positive outcome will be followed up by the animal shelter. This does not only reduce the workload of the caretakers. They now have more spare time to do what they do best:
Taking care of the shelter animals.
Why talk about CALL A PET when you could talk to a pet right now—dial in right here.
Animal caretakers who have worked with the animals every day for years describe their personalities in great detail. Based on these insights and together with each animal's history and general care information, we train AI agents to form a realistic representation of the animals' personalities.
These agents are brought to life using custom-trained voice models via ElevenLabs. The voices match the animals' gender, age, and character. The animals can be called either through a dedicated phone number or via the campaign’s microsite.
Each conversation is analyzed in the background by a separate AI system, which evaluates the dialogue against predefined, strict criteria. If a successful match is identified and the caller leaves contact details, the shelter will call back the potential new pet buddy. The system is designed to scale flawlessly. So in the future, every shelter animal can be given a similar agent with close to zero effort.
The AI agents are available 24/7 and can engage with far more interested people than human caretakers could ever do. Additionally, they operate at a fraction of the cost.
CALL A PET was a tremendous success. Our animal ambassadors spent hundreds of hours on the phone, leading to open, genuine, and meaningful conversations. Each one of them clearly conveys our message: animals have their own personalities. And they have to be a perfect match with the ones from their future owners. Members of the press, influencers, streamers, and even celebrities were curious to call in, too.
To ensure that even more animals get a voice in their adoption, we automated the creation of our CALL-A-PET AI agents, allowing other shelters to set them up easily for themselves.
CALL A PET is a raving success – we are on the way to make it a fixed feature on Germany's most important pet adoption plattform, Balu.
And last but not least: For each of the four animals, we identified several suitable matches, who are now getting to know the animals through the ongoing adoption process.
