Every year, several thousand people enter their rescue dog in a cuteness contest, and every year the framing gets it slightly wrong. The prize is presented as a win for your dog. It is mostly a win for a shelter.
PEOPLE’s World’s Cutest Rescue Dog Contest, presented by Pedigree, is open now for its ninth year, and entries close on July 24. Here is what is actually at stake, and how to enter in a way that gives you a real shot.
What the winner gets
The grand prize is four things:
- A professional photo shoot
- A feature in PEOPLE magazine and on People.com
- A year’s supply of Pedigree dog food
- A $1,000 donation paid to whichever rescue organization the winner names
That last one is the reason to take this seriously. A thousand dollars is a rounding error to a large national organization and a genuinely meaningful sum to the small, volunteer-run rescue that pulled your dog out of a bad situation. It covers a stack of vet bills. It funds a transport run. If you win, you are handing that to a specific group of people you get to name.
So name them deliberately. And tell them you did.
The timeline
Mark these, because the contest moves in stages and most people forget about it after they hit submit.
- July 1 to July 24 — entries open. Submit a photo, your dog’s adoption story, and your contact information.
- After entries close — PEOPLE’s editors narrow the field, which ran into the thousands last year, down to 10 finalists.
- August 17 — public voting opens. Readers vote the 10 finalists down to a top three.
- October — judges from PEOPLE and Pedigree pick the grand-prize winner from those three.
If your dog makes the top ten, the second stage is a popularity contest, which means it is a mobilization contest. Start telling people now.
Eligibility is genuinely wide open
If your dog is an adoptee, they qualify. Every breed, every size, every shape, every age.
That is not boilerplate. The winners’ circle skews toward dogs a purebred pageant would never look at. The 2023 winner, Hobie, was a one-eyed terrier mix, and he steered his $1,000 to PUP Laguna Beach, the rescue he came from. Margot took the 2024 title and got the full photo-shoot treatment. Nobody is looking for a show dog.
How to write an entry that actually places
The photo gets you read. The story gets you picked. Most people invert that.
On the photo: the editors are choosing a dog they will have to photograph and put in a magazine, so they are looking for a face with something going on in it. Natural light. Eye contact. Whatever your dog’s one strange feature is, the ear that will not stand up, the underbite, the eyebrows, lead with it. Do not send the stiff, posed one. Send the one that makes you laugh.
On the story: the adoption story is where entries win and lose, and almost every submission makes the same mistake, which is writing the story of adoption in general rather than the story of this dog. “He rescued me” appears in a few thousand entries a year. It cannot separate you from anyone.
Give one concrete scene instead. The night you brought her home and she would not come out from behind the toilet. The exact moment on day nine when he made eye contact for the first time. The shelter’s name, and what the volunteers there did. Specificity is the only currency here, and it is the same reason a good photo works: it could only be your dog.
Then decide your rescue before you submit, not after. The whole point of the prize is where that money lands.
And if you don’t win
You almost certainly will not. Thousands of people enter and one dog wins, which is a worse rate than most things you will do this month.
But the contest is free, it takes fifteen minutes, and if your dog somehow lands in the top ten you get to spend a week telling everyone you know to vote for a shelter dog. That is not nothing. Enter at people.com/rescuedogcontest before July 24.
References
- PEOPLE. “World’s Cutest Rescue Dog Contest.” https://people.com/rescuedogcontest
- iHeartDogs. “PEOPLE Announces Return of World’s Cutest Rescue Dog Contest.” https://iheartdogs.com/people-announces-return-of-worlds-cutest-rescue-dog-contest/
