Promote Pet Adoptions While Protecting Your Web Site

Many people are familiar with a captcha even if few people have heard the term "captcha". If you have ever filled out a web form and had to decipher "swimming" or otherwise distressed letters and input them into the form to prove that you are a human and not a web robot, you have used a captcha; an acronym trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University that stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". Another commonly used acronym for this technology is HIP, or "Human Interactive Proof".

How can a captcha promote animal adoptions? Thanks to researchers at Microsoft, web form users can now distinguish between dog and cat faces instead of skewed letters to prove their humanness. As computer character recognition software has become more advanced, web robots can read the skewed letters almost as good as humans and, as many people can attest, sometimes those letters are hard to read!

Now, in a joint effort with Petfinder.com, viewers will answer a "test" to select dog or cat faces to prove that they aren't a web robot, as humans are much better than computers at distinguishing between dog and cat faces. This program is called Asirra or "Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access", and viewers will have access to a database of over two million dog and cat faces, each with and "adopt me" link below the photo to take viewers to the Petfinder site to learn more about adoption and helping animals in need.

Additionally, if you are a web designer, you can implement Asirra on your site web forms for free. The installation instructions are available for Python, PHP, C#, VB and Javascript. This would be a fun and valuable addition to a veterinary practice web site!