The ad council has a serious of PSAs about pet adoption.  These PSAs all follow the same general theme.  They focus on a pet, usually a dog or a cat, that have been recently adopted.  In the beginning of the PSAs, they start with a close up of the pet, and the voice of the narrator, establishing that the voice is meant to be from the pets point of view.  The voice of the pet talks about things humans do, and how they look from the pets point of view.  For example, in one PSA, a newly adopted cat talks about how it is weird that a little boy loves to play in a sandbox.  From the cats point of view, this is very wrong.  The voice of the cat says that is embarrassing that the little boy doesn’t know how to properly use the litter box.  The cat says this, because to him, a sandbox just looks like a giant litter box.  The rest of the PSAs in this series go about the same type of banter between pet and owner.  The pet talks about some of the things pet owners do, and how, to the pet, these actions are weird.  The whole premise of these PSAs is based around irony.  They use the premise that things that pet owners would see as normal, things like putting dog toys in a box, or playing in a sandbox, are seen as outside the norm in the eyes of the pet. These themes suggest that there is a whole connected world between animals, one that humans aren’t aware of.  In the PSAs, the pet always talks about how they are new to the family, and that the things they do are weird.  This introduces the irony that the pets think that their way of thinking is the “normal” one, and that the human way of thinking is the weird one.  This is ironic because from the human perspective, our way of thinking is normal, and things pets do are considered different.

Other than the themes of irony that I have noticed in these PSAs, I have also noticed that the pets all seem generally happy.  From the general body language of the animals, and the voices used to narrate for them, they seem like they are happy.  This is because they are trying to spread the thought that an animals life is better when they are adopted into a family.  This theme is brought together by the line that is delivered at the end of all of the PSAs in this series “A person is the best thing to happen to a shelter pet”.