In the press · December 2025 · 4 min read
On KTLA 5: a shelter dog makeover, live on the morning news.
When KTLA 5 News brought their cameras to one of our mobile spa events, they captured something we see every week — but Los Angeles got to watch it live: a frightened, matted shelter dog walking into the van, and a confident, photo-ready one walking out.
The KTLA team arrived at sunrise. By 7 a.m., they were inside one of our vans with a camera, capturing every step of the transformation: the first careful brush-out, the bath with shampoo gentle enough for a stressed shelter dog, the moment when the matted fur came off and you could finally see the animal underneath.
The dog walked into our van that morning timid, smelly, and almost invisible to the families touring the shelter. He walked out two hours later looking like the dog he was meant to be all along — bright-eyed, soft-coated, and ready for his close-up.
Within a week, he was adopted.
Why TV coverage matters for shelter dogs
The audience for a KTLA morning broadcast is enormous. A two-minute segment puts our work in front of more eyes than a year of social media posts. And every viewer who finishes that segment thinking "I had no idea a bath could do that" is one step closer to becoming a donor, a volunteer, or an adopter.
Local press is the single highest-leverage marketing channel for a small nonprofit like ours. Every KTLA mention has measurable downstream effects:
- Donations spike the day a segment airs — usually with a note in the comment field like "I just saw you on KTLA."
- Shelter directors who didn't know about our program reach out for partnership.
- Professional groomers in LA learn that they can donate their skills, and our volunteer roster grows.
- Adopters visit our partner shelters specifically asking for "the dog from the KTLA segment."
The story behind the makeover
What the segment couldn't fully show is what makes the work possible: a long-standing partnership between a for-profit grooming company and the 501(c)(3) Foundation it spun off.
For nearly twenty-five years, Go Hollywood Grooming has been LA's premier mobile pet grooming service. Every booking with the for-profit indirectly supports the Foundation. When professional groomers learn about us through Hollywood Grooming, many of them volunteer their off-day to ride with us into a shelter. That's the engine behind the work KTLA's cameras captured.
Watching the segment back
If we had to point to a single image that captures why we do this, it's the moment the dog stepped off the van's grooming table at the end. The shelter staff laughed — they didn't recognize him. He looked like a brand-new dog.
That's the moment we get to recreate every single week. And every donation makes one more of them possible.