An animal-loving pizza manager wants her customers to think about rescuing shelter dogs.
Never underestimate the love of New Yorkers for pizza, Buffalo wings and dogs.
Yes, dogs.
Just ask Mary Alloy, the manager of a Just Pizza & Wing Co. franchise in the state's northwest suburb of Amherst. She has started taping adorable mug shots of pups on her pizza boxes. The animals live at a nearby rescue shelter. "Please adopt me!" read the fliers, in letters topping the sweet faces of dogs needing a home.
In the matter of just a few days, Alloy says, she has been buried in phone calls and messages from around town and all over the world. Things got so crazy Wednesday, she closed her shop. "I'm very overwhelmed," she told InsideEdition.com.
She's also overjoyed.
A lifelong animal lover, Alloy has been doing volunteer work with shelters for several years, she said. "I can't even walk into the cat rooms anymore because I already have 13 cats and I know I'll just take another one home — especially the older ones and the special needs" felines, she said.
Since she started affixing the canine posters to pizza boxes on Friday, at least two dogs have found new homes, she said.
Her message mailbox is overflowing with people praising her rescue efforts. One person wrote to her, "Oh my God, I read this and just dropped to my knees," Alloy recanted.
She's a bit perplexed by the outpouring.
"I never thought in a million years people would react like this," she said. Because she's helped the Niagara SPCA in the past, she said "sure" when she was asked to put photos of the shelter's dogs on her delivery containers.
"It's only paper," she said. "It doesn't cost [me] anything." But it's done a lot of good. She's confident the shelter will soon be rid of its canine population. "They're all going to get adopted eventually," she said. Her shop has now started putting cat photos on its boxes as well.
"People are animal lovers. they just are," she said. Her phone hasn't stopped ringing for days, she said — so much so that staff are answering the pizzeria's phones Wednesday by saying, "We're closed," and then hanging up.
A pizzeria operator in Ohio called her, and is coming up to visit. The owner wants to start putting dogs on his pie boxes, too.
"This is where it's going," she said. "It's crazy."
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