'Huge dog people': brewery puts images of pups in need of homes on beer cans

Two decades after America’s milk carton kids faded into folklore, a Florida brewery has revived the tradition for animals in need of help: printing photographs on its beer cans of dogs seeking a new home.

Managers at Bradenton’s Motorworks craft brewery hope that the idea will catch on in the same way that publicizing missing children’s photographs on milk carton did in the 1980s and 90s, before the practice was overtaken by digital technology.

Already two dogs have been adopted from Manatee county’s animal services department as a result, the brewery selling more than 150 four-packs of Kolsch featuring photos of the four dogs as a “yappy hour” event last weekend.

“We are huge animal lovers here, huge dog people,” Barry Elwonger, Motorworks’ director of sales and marketing, told Florida TV station WFLA.

Two dogs from the original batch, Morton and King, were adopted this week while the others, Candy and Day Day, are still in the county’s shelter in Palmetto, awaiting adoption along with 150 other animals.

“There’s hundreds more dogs that are looking for their homes. We wanted to showcase [that] the shelter has some really wonderful dogs,” Elwonger said.

The tradition of printing photographs of missing children on milk cartons became popular in the 1980s, prompted by the disappearance of a six-year-old-boy, Etan Patz, in New York in 1979. Patz was never found but a New Jersey grocery store clerk was convicted of his murder two years ago.

The practice had faded by the turn of the century, supplanted by technology including the nationwide Amber Alert system that sends information immediately to mobile phones.