No dog trainers, behaviorists and even an psychic animal communicator could prevent Melissa Bekisz’s two dogs from fighting.

The New York resident inherited her ex-partner’s 4-year-old Australian shepherd Marjoram after he moved out. Marjoram began lashing out at Bekisz’s other dog Louise, a Jack Russell terrier and Chihuahua mix who’d respond to Marjoram’s attacks with more backlash.

“It would stop for three months, and it would happen again,” Bekisz said. “Eventually, my vet said you can’t keep bringing in Louise with injuries. This can’t keep happening.”

Bekisz began reaching out to local rescues to help her find a new home for Marjoram, but the various Facebook adoption group scams and lack of positive matches made the rehoming process difficult.

“I felt guilty about the fact that I was rehoming Marj, but then I felt guilty about the fact that Louise kept getting injured,” Bekisz said. “I felt like it was so taboo to rehome your dog that I felt so guilty that I had to admit to even to do this.”

Fear of judgment is often why clients reach out to Rehome with Love, a service that falls under the umbrella of Joyful Pets Rescue, an Amherst business that has recently relocated to Wendell. Rehome with Love seeks to find new homes for animals whose owners can no longer keep them.

“These are not rescue pets; these are loved pets that are not surrendered to a shelter,” said Lauren McCarron, who founded Joyful Pets Rescue in 2018.

McCarron said she is sensitive to how difficult it is for a person to find a new home for their animal and she wants her clients to feel comfortable throughout the process.

McCarron guided Bekisz through reference checks, phone calls with potential adopters and even meetups between Marjoram and prospective owners. Within two months Marjoram found the perfect home, a lover of Australian shepherds who required an older dog with less energy.

“I would really recommend Rehome with Love because what was nice about it was you were fostering your own dog,” Bekisz said.

McCarron believes that family pets should never enter a shelter but rather move from one home to the next. As owner of Joyful Pets Rescue, McCarron has rehomed many animals over the past 10 years — first through an animal rescue group called Paws Crossed she started in 2014 and then through Joyful Pets Rescue for the last six years — but she’s been moving away from the animal rescue scene to focus full-time on this specific population of surrendered animals.

The Rehome with Love service, launched two years ago, has been used to match over 500 animals with new homes and prevent these furry friends from exposure to stress, illness and possible euthanasia in a shelter.

“A third of the animals in animal shelters are family pets. If we can keep all one -third of them out of shelters, the shelters can do what they do best, which is helping stray and lost animals,” McCarron said.

Rehome with Love operates similarly to other pet adoption websites. Pet owners looking to find new homes for their furry friend fill out an intake form and give any medical information for their animal. Rehome with Love will then gather the remaining health records and look for discrepancies between the form and animal’s medical history.

The service writes a bio for the animal, screens potential adopters, and mediates the adoption between both parties. The cost for this rehoming service is $195 for a standard package or $295 for priority service which enhances a pet’s visibility with targeted social media advertising and active engagement in specialized groups.

The process is detailed and time-consuming. It takes McCarron weeks just to review vet records, since owners can submit over a hundred pages. She’s hired hundreds of writers to help with pet bios, online advertisements and social media posts. All the paperwork and writing detracts from McCarron’s time on the phone, speaking with clients and adopters to find the perfect match.

So to speed up the rehoming process, McCarron recruited 88 artificial intelligence tools to vet forms for discrepancies, summarize a pet’s health history, write a bio, make a promotional video for the animal and generate ads. Other AI programs are used to compare the application of a potential adopter to the current waiting list of pets, and then makes a match based on compatibility.

“We are moving a lot faster. I want to say tenfold,” McCarron said. “All the writing is faster, the reviewing is faster, and the matching faster. I can definitely say what used to take six weeks is now three.”

However, the artificial intelligence’s suggestions do not decide where an animal is rehomed. McCarron said she always talks with prospective adopters and clients about their matches, just as she did with Bekisz.

“That’s the last frontier for us: we will always pick up the phone and talk to our adopters. We will use tech as far as we can, but we believe the human overlay we cannot replace,” she said.