Tired of looking at shots of Jacob Zuma? Perhaps the numerous photos of Helen Zille on the campaign trail are getting too much for you poor eyes. Shame. How about some fluffies?
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It’s possible, thanks to a nifty browser extension called Vote for Pets, which swaps out images of South African politicians with snapshots of rescue animals from Barking Mad. Released in the run up to the country’s presidential elections, the tool aims to identify shots of politicians on everything from Facebook pages to Wikipedia and news sites, and seamlessly switch them with photos of adoptable cats and dogs from the animal organisation’s website.
It’s a pretty simple process, regardless of which web browser you’re using. The extension, which is the product of a collaboration between Velvet Digital, Weekday Heroes and I Heart PR, is available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari at present with Opera Mini support coming soon. Once you install the add on, a nice political story will be comically transformed into something like this:
According to Vote for Pets, “this browser extension delivers on its promises. It won’t, for example, spend your hard earned cash on a chicken run or amphitheatre. You can uninstall it at any time.” It does, however, hope to do some good by raising awareness of the rehabilitation shelter for so called “problem dogs” by making it easy to donate a bowl of food with a click or sponsor an individual animal.
If it sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of switch extensions like Rather or maybe even this one from the UK, which replaces photos of Tony Abbot with kittens, and inspired the folks behind Vote for Pets. Still, we’d take a puppy over a red beret any day.
