WOOF delivered its September 2 earnings print and the bears — who had been quietly rebuilding positions all week — appear to have had the better read on the setup.
Short interest closed September 1 at 8.3% of the free float, up 4.6% on the week and 6.3% over the past month. The trend has been unambiguous since late July: a slow, steady accumulation of bearish positioning rather than a sudden rush. Days to cover remain extended at 13 — nearly three weeks of average volume to unwind — which adds meaningful friction to any short-term reversal. What keeps this from reading as a crowded short is the lending market: cost to borrow has eased 12% over the week to just 0.56%, and borrow availability, while tighter than a week ago, remains loose at 354% — well above the 52-week floor of 225%. Short sellers are building, but they are doing so cheaply and without stress. The ORTEX short score has jumped to 70.6 — up from 68.0 a week ago — its highest reading in recent months, confirming that the aggregate bearish signal is intensifying.
The options market had been sending a conflicting message heading into the print. The put/call ratio at 0.29 was running a full standard deviation below its 20-day average, reflecting unusually heavy call-side positioning. That call-heavy skew — combined with a rising short base — had framed the earnings print as a genuine two-sided test. After the release, the question now is whether that options optimism unwinds as quickly as it built.
The Street is not uniformly bearish, though few are pounding the table. Evercore ISI raised its target to $4.00 from $3.50 on September 1, maintaining an In-Line rating — an upgrade of the target but not the conviction. The mean analyst target sits at $3.59, roughly 39% above the September 1 close of $2.58, which implies significant latent upside on paper. Citigroup and UBS both hold Neutral ratings, while Jefferies upgraded to Buy back in March with a $5.00 target. The direction of recent analyst moves has been mixed: targets drifted higher through March, then Citigroup cut back in June, and Evercore has been the most active reviser — trimming in February before lifting twice since. The forward EPS recovery story scores in the 93rd percentile on ORTEX's 12-month forward EPS year-on-year increase factor, suggesting the sell-side consensus embeds a meaningful profit rebound. The valuation picture is modest: the stock trades at roughly 10.5x trailing earnings and under 8x EV/EBITDA, with a price-to-book of 0.68 — cheap, but cheap for a company that has been losing comparable sales at a 1.6% annual rate and faces mounting pressure from e-commerce rivals in commoditised pet food.
Ownership adds one notable wrinkle. Scooby Aggregator, LP holds 64.3% of shares — a concentrated private-equity-style block that severely limits the effective free float available to both short sellers and potential buyers. Among institutional holders, Dimensional and BlackRock both added modestly through July, while Holocene trimmed its position by 858,654 shares through June. The insider record is stale — the most recent open-market trade on file dates to December 2025, when the Chief Revenue Officer sold $228,000 worth of stock — so there is no fresh insider signal to weigh against the short-side pressure.
The two prior earnings prints offer thin but consistent precedent: the stock fell 1.8% on the day after the August 2026 release and 1.1% after the June print, with the June decline extending to 8% over the following five trading days. Whether the September 2 print breaks or repeats that pattern, the data to watch now is whether short interest continues to build through next week — and whether the call-heavy options positioning quietly reverses or holds its ground as the dust from earnings settles.
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