You Can Now Have a Shelter Pet in Your Zoom Meeting

Conference call apps like Zoom have been more popular than ever during the recent months due to coronavirus pandemic. Many companies and teams needed to adjust quickly and switch from office settings to working from home, and this meant having the meetings virtually as well. Ask anybody who’s ever attended one of those meetings about their favorite moment or story about them, and they’ll most likely tell you that they enjoyed seeing a coworker’s pet on camera at some point. Animal shelter Richmond Animal Care from Virginia now lets you borrow a dog or cat for your next Zoom meeting!

Companies have an option to contact the shelter and arrange a date and time for a homeless animal to come to visit. It’s possible to request a specific animal or its temperament. Whether you prefer a quiet dog or a restless cat, they got you covered. They even do “office backgrounds” which make the animals look like corporate movers and shakers.

“We were just thinking of something we could do that would make people smile,” the shelter’s director Christie Chipps Peters told The Dodo. “We are surrounded by animals every day, and we really do understand the love and comfort that comes from them.”