Elena Delle Donne Wants You to Be a Dog’s MVP

Washington Mystics Forward and Her Dog Team Up for New PETA Campaign

For Immediate Release:
July 30, 2019

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

“Be Their MVP—Adopt, Don’t Shop”: That’s the message of Olympic gold medalist and WNBA star Elena Delle Donne‘s new PETA campaign, which encourages people to save a life by adopting a dog from a local animal shelter.

In an accompanying video spot, Delle Donne shares how her campaign costar, Rasta, came to be part of her family: “My wife had adopted Rasta when she was in college. And I was lucky enough to meet Rasta at age 4, and now she’s my daughter, too.” The couple also shares another dog, named Wrigley, and she adds, “They are the greatest part of our family. Coming home and being able to see their excited faces and their wagging tails—it just kind of erases anything that didn’t go so great in the day.”

Every year, more than 6 million dogs and cats end up in U.S. animal shelters, and half of them have to be euthanized because there aren’t enough good homes for them all. That’s why Delle Donne and PETA encourage caring people to adopt from local animal shelters and not to buy from breeders or pet stores, which only exacerbate the homeless-animal overpopulation crisis.

“There [are] so many animals … in need of homes,” says Delle Donne. “Just look at their sweet little faces and their kind hearts, and you can just make their life by bringing them home and giving them a caring family to be around.” And family always comes first for the basketball star, whose devotion to her sister and the rest of her family was recently highlighted on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

Delle Donne is part of a long list of athletes—including WNBA icon Candace Parker, U.S. women’s national soccer team players Alex Morgan and Christen Press, and Olympians Kara Goucher and Marlen Esparza—who’ve teamed up with PETA to promote kindness to animals.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org.