Bingo. It’s frankly immoral that any idiot can buy a living thing for cash, without some form of determining if he or she can provide for the animal adequately. It’s immoral on the part of the seller and either immoral or shockingly ignorant on the part of the buyer, or both.
To the OP: Did you just post this on other dog-related boards? I ask because a highly similar rant was just posted on one of my dog boards and, of course, it immediately drew heavy fire.
It’s not clear whether you’re confusing a private rescue operation with a publicly-funded shelter typically run by Animal Control or contracted out to a humane society, but the two tend to have different operating philosophies.
Just for starters, if you think $200 is a lot to pay for a dog, it shows how unprepared you are. A breeder will charge a lot more than that – even a pet store will charge a lot more, for puppy mill output with serious health problems, without batting an eyelash. I’m talking $1500 around here for puppies without pedigrees and with visible eye infections.
Medical care for your prospective dog will cost more than that, and the law requires you to provide it, here in the US, anyway. A $200 adoption fee serves partly to weed out anyone who can’t afford to spend what a dog will require or is wrongheaded enough to think that costs too much for “just an animal.”
Some other bullet points:
Puppy mills were commercially viable long before private rescues became prevalent, and were making money before I ever heard of home visits.
Petland, which you specifically mention as a source of cheap puppies, is known to buy puppy-milled puppies (the one around here uses the infamous Hunte corporation to ship them in bulk tractor-trailer loads from the Missouri and Pennsylvania mills) and has been protested for years for exactly that practice. The local one here has been convicted – on two separate occasions – of failure to provide adequate care. They still charge much more than $200 for the puppies, and they’re getting them dirt-cheap under conditions that do not stand up to public scrutiny. That’s why the truck arrives in the wee hours of the morning, when no one will see.
Possibly because situation #2 is startlingly common, and, without fail, everyone planning to put the dog in situation #2claims they’re going to put the dog in situation #1. So when shelter/rescue people hear “situation #1” they tend to suspect it’s really going to be “situation#2.”
You go to the county pound and very few of the older dogs are very friendly and there are no puppies. The guys at the pound gave me a list of shelters that regularly stop by and pick up the dogs that are immediately adoptable but have run out of time or the dogs that need some rehabilitation. I went to a few of them and the shelters that were well run where the dogs seemed happy had these sort of requirements.
You can apply to be a foster home for dogs to reduce the facility strain on the shelter but you probably need to be beatified to get that gig.
BTW the ASPCA around here charges $325 to adopt a dog, once again money isn’t the issue but wtf?
This surprises me a lot. Different areas of the country and all, but for my area, adoption prices have been going down lately, not up.
Have you checked out petfinder? They’re a phenomenally good website, and they can expand your search significantly.
The other possibility is that this is a less-than-ideal time of year to be looking for a puppy. Check back in May.
Oh, and Karl, the “Interesting” was for the division into no-kill humane society shelters and “kill” public shelters. We were a humane society “kill” shelter. (We preferred the terms “open access” for places like us that take every animal, and “limited access” shelters for places that turn animals away when they’re full or when the animal doesn’t meet their criteria).
I hear you, OP. I gave up on our local Humane Society after they gave us (me and the 3 kids) a VERY hard time because my husband was not present when we picked out our cat. Unbelievable. I was pissed at that. The lady said she was “reluctant” to go ahead, but did against her better judgement. The kids were confused by this (as was I, but I was more ticked than confused). Luckily we picked an orange tabby and not a black cat, since this was October and ye gods, who knew what evil we would perpetrate on a black cat? Black cats were deemed un-adoptable in October. Simon lived for 5 years quite happily with us AND the scary “absent” husband. He died suddenly, cause unknown, but by god it wasn’t neglect or abuse.
So, our next cat (obtained 6 months later) came from a different shelter. I was not about to put up with the Humane Society’s BS. They couldn’t have been nicer, plus our first vet visit was free! Natasha is a wonderful pet and I’ll go back to PAWS any time.
Another Humane Society(downtown Chicago) told a friend (this was years ago, but still) who was a life-long cat lover and owner, that she had to adopt 2 cats because working and being single meant the cat would be alone too much. Huh? they would not let her adopt one. So, she went to a friend and got one of the friend’s older kittens. Then, a year later, she did adopt another cat–but not from the Humane Society.
I support getting pets from shelters, but I agree that some go too far. No shelter has any way of knowing if the adopters will turn out abusive or not. I understand filling out basic info, if for nothing else so it can track how many adoptions are made by one person, but other than that–enough. Yes, abuse happens and it’s horrid, but most potential pet owners are not future abusers. Then again, some pet owners think we’re abusive of our cat because we only have one cat. Poor Natasha–no feline companion. How does she bear it? Oh, yeah–she does just fine. :rolleyes:
You just cannot buy a clue can you? You keep ascribing to me things I did not say.
If you want to go to Petland and drop $800+ for a dog so people don’t all get up in your “bidness” knock yourself out. You deserve what you get.
If you go to the local no-kill shelter you agree to answer their questions if you want a dog. No one is forcing you though but you have no right to demand they hand over a dog without answering their questions to their satisfaction. You don’t even have room to get bitchy about it.
So suck it up buttercup. That’s how it works whether you like it or not.
Given how well you manage to thoroughly fail to track the conversation in this thread I suppose you’d have no chance of tracking the questions being asked of you at a shelter. Must be frustrating to be you.
The Human Society was likely afraid that a single cat would develop separation anxiety; could be that she was interested in one that had already bonded with another.
yes, you did. sorry that you realized that you made an asinine comment, and are now so very evidently desperate to retract it without coming off like a total asshat. i’m sorry… because you failed at your endeavors.
Nope, just encountered this attitude over the weekend. I had always gotten my dogs from friends and neighbors.
I don’t know how many times I’ve said money wasn’t the issue. If I haven’t made that clear by now then you may be hearing what you want to hear.
Yeah, but in a day and age when people are more socially conscious about adopting dogs rather than getting that cute little purebreed puppy, I don’t think they would be viable if the adoption process was limited to an application and a contract that said you can visit my home to check up on the dog.
These shelters are driving people to places like Petland and we end up with people who buy puppies for their kids the same way they buy roller blades and when the amusement value has worn off, they drop the 2 or 3 year old dog off at a shelter, then the shelter makes it so hard for someone to adopt that dog that they go and buy a puppy at Petland…rinse and repeat.
I understand the that their heart is in the right place but they aren’t placing as many dogs in good homes as they could.
I have no idea what the real numbers are like but if you could place 100 dogs a month and have a 5% return rate and a 1% abuse rate and 900 euthanizations or you could place 1000 dogs a month and have a 10% return rate and a 2% abuse rate and NO euthanizations, which would you go for? And as one of the posters have previously stated, a lot of the requirements aren’t about weeding out dog abusers or matching dog temperament to my home environment.
I’m looking for a dog that is older, housebroken and good with kids. I don’t want to benefit from someone else’s misfortune exactly but ideally it will be a dog from a family that is letting the dog go because they are having trouble affording the dog and their kids have largely outgrown the dog.
unless you’re referring to situation #2 as in the plan to put outside on a chain, instead of what I interpreted situation #2 to be - “A life worth living” ?
I don’t even understand why anyone pays for a dog or cat in the first place. Each week there are scores of advertisements in my city, at work, even at the supermarket, for “free kittens”, “free puppies”…sure they need vet checking, inoculations, fixing, etc., but then so does the $$$$ dog from the breeder’s too (or else the breeder throws that on the price with a 25% markup.) Are there not millions of fine, needy animals being sent to the gas chambers every year? I just checked Google, and it looks like that’s still the case. Hm.
So when did the options narrow down to nothing else but “allow someone to ask you nosy and oppressive questions and to inspect your house, or pay $800 at Petland?” Or $1,500+ to a breeder? I’ve never paid a cent for any cat I’ve raised, not one cent (other than the shots and fixing, etc., let’s not be pedantic here). They’ve all lived long, happy, healthy lives, in loving homes where their greatest danger is getting too fat.
I just checked right now, and there’s like 20 cats and dogs “free to good home” on my company’s electronic want-ad space. But I guess they must all be diseased, lice-ridden, and/or beaten like rented mules, since they didn’t come from a shelter, chain-store, or breeder. Right.
:eek: Um, isn’t that kind of an argument in favor of the “overzealous” shelter rules there?
Seems to me that if people who buy a pet because they got fed up with the red tape of the adoption process end up abandoning their pet once the “amusement value has worn off”, then the shelter was indeed justified in screening them out. Screening out potential puppy-dumpers is what the adoption process is supposed to accomplish.
Yeah, I agree that the adoption process can be a pain in the neck, but you’re not offering a very persuasive argument here for making it less rigorous.