Cutest Pets Contest 2025: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Cutest Pets Contest is and who runs it

The Cutest Pets Contest 2025 is a reader photo vote from RI Media Group, the company that publishes The Westerly Sun, the daily newspaper based in Westerly, Rhode Island. It belongs to the pet-photo corner of the newspaper-contest world: readers submit pictures of their pets, the entries go up on a shared ballot, and the audience decides the winner by voting. There is no judging panel in the mechanic; the public vote is the whole decision.

Second Street hosts the ballot at westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com. That host matters for supporters because it is the same address family RI Media Group uses for its other promotions, including the Call & Times Community Choice ballot and the Reader's Choice ballot, so a reader who has voted in one Westerly Sun contest already knows the motion. The 2025 pet ballot lives at https://westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com/Cutest-Pets-Contest-2025.

The market is local. The Westerly Sun serves Westerly and the nearby Rhode Island shoreline towns its news sections cover, and the pet contest draws its entries and its voters from that readership. It is a different animal from the publisher's big community ballots: fewer categories, a single subject, and a gallery you can scroll in one sitting.

Facts at a glance

The dated record for the Cutest Pets Contest

Three editions of the Cutest Pets Contest are confirmed on the Second Street host: 2017, 2021 and 2025. Each has its own ballot address, and the 2017 and 2021 pages remain reachable at westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com/Cutest-Pets-Contest-2017 and westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com/Cutest-Pets-Contest-2021. The spacing between those years is uneven, so the contest recurs when the publisher opens it rather than on a proven every-single-year schedule.

The 2025 edition is the one with a fully dated window. Voting opened on March 20, 2025 and closed on April 11, 2025, a spring run of a little over three weeks. That window is the reference point for anything timing-related on this page, and it is also the reason the ballot currently shows a closed contest rather than live entries.

What the organizer has not published with the ballot is the category structure and the voting rules: no category list, no per-supporter limit, and no eligibility text are carried alongside the confirmed dates, so those details confirm on the live ballot each cycle. The same applies to any entry deadline that may have run before voting opened in March, since the confirmed dates cover the voting window only.

For a supporter, the practical takeaway is simple. The 2025 dates are fixed history, the earlier editions prove the program comes back, and the next round's dates will be printed on whatever new Second Street address RI Media Group opens for that year, exactly as the 2025 address was opened for this one.

How a supporter votes in the Cutest Pets Contest

Voting here is a public poll over a photo gallery. During an open window, the Second Street ballot at westerlysun.secondstreetapp.com/Cutest-Pets-Contest-2025 displays the pet photo entries that readers have submitted. A supporter finds an entry, opens it, and presses the vote control to register support for that pet. No nomination round is part of the confirmed flow; the entries and the voting live on the same ballot.

Because the platform is Second Street, the vote happens in the browser on the ballot page itself. The publisher runs its other promotions, including the Reader's Choice and Call & Times Community Choice ballots, on the same host, so the interface will be familiar to anyone who has voted in a Westerly Sun contest before. The pet contest is simpler than those ballots: one subject, one gallery, one decision per visit.

Two things a supporter should check on the live ballot rather than assume. First, the repeat-vote rule: the published material for this contest does not state how often one supporter may cast a vote, and photo votes on this platform commonly carry some control on repeats, so read what the current round prints. Second, the entry side: the confirmed dates cover voting, and any separate photo-submission deadline for a future round will be stated on that round's own ballot page.

When the window closes, as the 2025 round did on April 11, the ballot stops accepting votes. Support then shifts to waiting for the publisher to open the next edition and checking the new address when it appears.

How this ballot sits beside its Westerly Sun siblings

RI Media Group runs several public votes on the same Second Street host, and the Cutest Pets Contest differs from all of them in subject and shape. The publisher's community ballots, Call & Times Community Choice and Reader's Choice, are multi-category ballots where readers pick favorites across local businesses and services. The Cutest Pets Contest is a single-subject photo vote: pets in, votes cast, cutest pet out.

The contrast with the publisher's sports ballots is even sharper. The Rhode Island high school athlete-of-the-week programs, including the football, baseball, boys basketball and multi-sport editions, rotate a fresh ballot every week during their seasons and name individual nominees. The pet contest instead runs as a standalone event with its own address and a multi-week window, like the March 20 to April 11, 2025 run.

For readers comparing options in this market, the sibling pages cover the other side of the publisher's contest calendar: Best of Rhode Island for the broad community ballot, and the Rhode Island high school football, baseball and boys basketball athlete-of-the-week ballots for the weekly sports votes. Each has its own organizer, cadence and rules, so a strategy that fits one does not transfer automatically to another.

What the pet contest shares with its siblings is the host and the publisher's habit of opening a fresh address per edition, which is why the 2017, 2021 and 2025 ballots each sit at their own URL.

Strengthening support for a pet photo entry

Support in this contest flows through one motion: a person sees the pet photo on the Second Street ballot and presses its vote control. That shapes what actually helps an entry. The voters who convert are people who already care about the pet or the owner, so the highest value action is getting the entry link in front of Westerly Sun readers and Rhode Island pet lovers directly, rather than broadcasting it to an audience that has no connection to the animal.

Timing matters because the confirmed 2025 window ran just over three weeks, from March 20 to April 11. A push that lands early has the whole window to work with; a push that starts in the final days has to compress the same outreach into a fraction of the time. Since the repeat-vote rule for this ballot is not published, do not build a plan around daily returns until the live round states what is allowed.

On outside help, the organizer has not published a rule for this ballot either way, so the round's own terms are what govern. For readers weighing options, the general guide to getting more votes online covers the organic playbook, and the overview of buying votes explains what purchased support is before anyone decides anything. What no source here can promise is an outcome; a photo vote is won by whichever entry collects the most accepted votes, and nothing on this page changes that.