Adam Carolla takes issue with this term. Whenever someone tells him a dog was ‘a rescue’ he sarcastically asks, “Oh, so did you pull him out of a burning building or a sinking ship?!” IOW what exactly did you ‘rescue’ him from.
To be fair, there are cases where it’s a valid term. Taking an animal from an abusive or neglectful situation, or merely taking in a stray. IOW what you rescued them from was likely a very shitty, miserable, and short life. I and members of my family have done this. But none of us ever referred to them as ‘rescues’, just as shelter dogs/cats or strays or as from bad homes or hoarding situations.
‘Rescue’ just has too much of an air of pretension and condescension to it. It’s putting all the emphasis on you, the person, instead of the pet. That woman shouting, “…he’s a rescue dog” to a complete stranger is essentially her shouting, “I rescued this dog! What have you ever done!!”
I volunteered at the local public shelter, (CACC, Chicago Animal Care and Control), and vetoing owners was commonplace. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be allowed to adopt my dog, even though I had been volunteering there for several months. What put me over the top was that I did have training from them in handling the more energetic dogs. Otherwise, I’m pretty certain I would have been rejected.
Yes, and sorry I didn’t intend to denigrate shelters with that remark. (Also notice that after making that description I went on to describe a rescue group operating that way, with shitty return metrics.)
My big worry is that these days the way shelters operate is no longer very public and too many people feel too free to hand animals over to them for frivolous reasons. Specifically, too many people hand them over to the shelter thinking that it will be quickly and easily rehomed, when that’s not likely the case. If the shelter is at capacity, they still have to accept the animals like you say, so they make room for the new animals by killing the old ones. And the definition of “old ones” can be a matter of days, sometimes only 2 or 3 days in really overpopulated shelters. A LOT of very good animals are still killed because of overpopulation but I don’t think many people realize that.
With the increasing popularity of no-kill shelters, more animals are being transported back and forth from one to another as a way to avoid killing them. One of the rescue groups I volunteered for did that, and many others that I know of will pull animals out of the local municipal kill shelter.
Here it was done case-by-case. Before you can get a dog, you had to fill an application with a questionnaire, and an employee (not a volunteer) would sit down and interview you. If you owned previous dogs, they would ask for veterinary records to make sure you at least did the basics. The questionnaire would go over things like your housing situation, your family make-up (if you have kids or not), why you want a dog, previous pet ownership, where you would keep the dog, what would make you possibly return a dog, etc. (It’s been four years, so I can’t remember all the questions.) The kennels themselves also had various codes on them that was known to volunteers and employees. “X” meant “experienced dog owners only.” “NC” (or something like that) meant “no small children,” etc. I think there were some other ones, but those were the most important. There was also temporarily an “orange dog” code, which applied to bigger, stronger, and less well-trained dogs that required a higher experience level. (This is what I was trained for.)
After reading your application and reviewing you, the employee would make a decision whether you qualified to adopt the dog. Volunteers would also sometimes give the employee input if, during their walk-through with the potential owner and the dog, they either thought they would or would not be a good fit. I don’t ever remember personally giving any negative input (well, I think I did once tell the adoption employee to be thorough with a particular applicant), but saying something like “where are the mean dogs at?” (story told to me by another volunteer) or giving indication you are going to keep the dog outside as a working animal instead of inside as a companion animal would pretty much certainly not get you a dog.
I can’t say for certain how many potential adoptees were turned away, but I’d guess somewhere around a third, maybe as much as half. In my case, I was adopting a dog with an “X” (experienced owners only) designation on it, and the interviewer did tell me that my training in handling the “orange dogs” (which is beyond the “X” designation) made him comfortable adopting him out to me, when otherwise I would have been disqualified, not owning a dog before. (This was a pitbull or pit mix, as about 80% of the dogs there are, but not all pits have an “X” designation on them. I’m not exactly sure what gave this particular pit an “X,” as, of all the dogs I worked with there, he was among the calmest. He did not have a “no children” designation, though.)
I foster for a local rescue. I don’t get to choose who my fosters go to when they get adopted, but I do get some input when a home is selected.
I’ve said no to a couple of homes. The first was an older couple with a fat young dog. The dog I was fostering was a high energy, high maintenance working breed, and while she looked sweet, and petite and puppy like, she was more like a Tasmanian devil in a dog suit. Too much dog for them. She was not going to be happy and neither was the couple. Same dog ended up going to a family. Still didn’t work out, and worst case scenario for the dog, she was euthanized after biting someone. Wonder why rescues are picky? This still breaks my heart.
More recently, nice family, nice property, but busy, and has lots of kids coming and going. The dog is timid with strangers and can be nippy. To me, this doesn’t sound like a good match, for this dog at least.
People in rescue have seen the worst of the worst of dog ownership - neglect and cruelty and outright abuse. The one I foster for is just trying to make sure their dogs end up in the right homes.
I should add, and this is putting it diplomatically, that CACC has a bit of a mixed reputation. It is a city shelter, and it is a kill shelter (which, pragmatist that I am, I don’t count as a mark against them. It’s just the sad reality.) Dogs that make it to the adoption floor, though, are generally “safe.” They will be adopted out or go to a rescue. I was a little surprised when I started volunteering there how the process worked. It wasn’t just “come in, pick out a dog, pay $65 and be on your merry way.” There was screening, and the facility wanted to make sure the dogs went somewhere they felt was safe and to an owner who would not be likely to return them. Returns were viewed as failures in the process by the employees and volunteers.
JcWoman, no needfor sorry, except myself if I came across harsh. I do agree with what you said, especially with overpopulation. And I think, as the current situation is in many regions, local shelters are glad there are rescues.
Supply and demand. I volunteer for a beagle rescue group. In the major metropolitan area where I live, beagles are popular. There aren’t a lot of unwanted/unclaimed beagles showing up in local shelters, though. In more rural parts of the state, on the other hand, unwanted/unclaimed beagles are common (mostly discarded hunting dogs or puppy mill breeding stock). So we pull beagles out of those rural shelters, from which they’re unlikely to be adopted, and bring them up to the metropolitan area and suburbs, where there are plenty of adopters.
There’s sort of a reverse flow of small dogs. The shelters here get a LOT of chihuahuas. Not sure why - I think it’s mainly that people buy them because they’re cute and small (perfect for an apartment, right?), then become unhappy when it makes as much noise and requires as much exercise and discipline as a big dog. A couple of states over, there’s a lot of interest in adopting little dogs. Rescues pull chihuahuas, shih tzus, small terriers, etc. from the local shelters and move them to places where demand is high.
Absolutely. We don’t do all that hard work of rescuing the animal, rehabilitating it and finding a home only to put it back in the same situation we rescued it from.
We struggle with this in greyhound adoption, too. We rescue them in the sense that they’ll be destroyed if we don’t take them when the track people hand them over, but in the US today racing greyhounds are pretty well cared for. In the old days, yeah, conditions were just as horrible as all the stories you’ve ever heard. But not any more (except for individual situations). If a racing person hears you say your greyhound is a rescue, they’ll get pretty pissed off.
On the other hand, as you point out, it truly is a rescue if you take the animal out of abusive and/or neglectful situations, so Adam Carolla should shut his mouth. People like to be proud of doing nice things, and many people make it a point to take a rescued animal rather than buying from a breeder.
On the third hand, when strangers on the street thank me for “rescuing” my greyhounds, I feel like they should thank my dogs for blessing my life instead.
