Sarah McLachlan Says She Finds Her ASPCA Commercials “Brutal” to Watch

Everyone’s heartstrings have been tugged by the ASPCA’s emotional TV commercials, including star Sarah McLachlan.

Set to her emotional 1997 ballad “Angel” and featuring shots of sad-looking pets, the singer exclusively told E! News on Feb. 9 that the long-running ads are “brutal” for an important reason: so that viewers “bring the wallet out.”

“I will do whatever it takes to help,” she told E! News co-hosts Adrienne Bailon-Houghton and Justin Sylvester. “And I think that ad generated like 30 million dollars for the ASPCA in two years, and it still gets played.”

But for as melancholy as they are to watch, the 55-year-old said the ads were anything but hard to film, as the only difficult part was getting her canine co-star to calm down.

“It couldn’t settle,” she said of one of the commercial’s dogs, “so that was challenging.”

The Grammy winner had a similar experience filming with a wolf for her brand-new Super Bowl commercial with Busch Light, which pokes fun at her memorable ASPCA ads.