I think THIS is more reasonable. Place the dog with me and you can come visit the dog whenever you like, but don’t make the process so frustrating that Petland starts to look good.
It takes a couple of years to get a dog well-trained, though many of the basics can be covered in the first couple of months. I am not thinking in terms of a couple of months. Last I heard, if parental leave is offered in the US, it’s generally limited to six weeks, at best, though I could be wrong. And yeah, a newborn ISN’T going to hit a dog…but an infant of six months or so is perfectly capable of doing so, and a puppy of six months will probably take this action as aggression. Many adult dogs might take it as aggression, too, and react accordingly. Many other adult dogs seem to understand that babies are babies, and will simply move away if they think that the baby is too aggressive right now.
I wouldn’t get a new puppy or kitten if there’s a newborn human in the house, and I’ve been a stay-at-home mom to an infant. Have you? My cats were a couple of years old when I had my daughter, and one of them would put up with my daughter pulling her tail and whiskers, and one of them scratched her. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to hover over an infant 24/7, and it’s also a bad idea to try. So eventually, the baby WILL maul the animal, unless the animal is kept outside. Newborns do sleep a lot, but babies and toddlers are soon active for at least a few hours a day, and can get into a lot of mischief, especially when they learn to walk.
My wife and I thought long and hard about getting a rescue, but ultimately decided that with a small child expected to be in the house at some point (turned out to be sooner than we expected!), we’d start out with a puppy; we both felt a bit more comfortable knowing we’d have full responsibility and knowledge of how the puppy was being raised. Obviously no guarantee that there won’t be problems with a dog raised from puppyhood. And not all rescue dogs are problem dogs. But just one less thing to worry about - if it’s our dog from puppyhood, we can see the parents, we know about potential health problems, and we’ll know about all experiences the dog has. (Also, I tend to go with proper breeders to avoid possible health problems, which is a particular problem with medium- and large-sized dogs such as golden retrievers).
It took me months to finally find our pet. Wasn’t cheap, and wasn’t easy - but we both considered it time well-spent given that we’re deciding on a family member that will be living with us for up to 15 years. I don’t quite get the ‘better off dead’ argument - that makes no sense - but I’d fully expect and in fact welcome any well-intentioned intrusiveness. (That said - any center using the ‘we’re taking care of cute dogs’ as a pretense for going on massive power trips would definitely tick me off - and yes, I’ve met the type…)
We love our dog to death, he has the patience of an angel while our baby boy crawls all over him, and I’d bet a year’s salary that our dog would never harm our baby intentionally…but I wouldn’t bet my kid’s life on it, which is why we never leave the two in a room alone together.
Yeah, they kind of do. Because dogs who are underexercised and left alone a lot are often hyperactive, destructive, and generally shitty to have around. So people either take them back to the shelter or try to give them away on Craigslist or whatever. Only now the dog is older and has known behavior issues, which makes it a hell of a lot harder to adopt them out. And if the next home is an equally bad fit, they wind up at the shelter again, and the cycle continues until they get old enough or ill-behaved enough that they can’t be adopted out again. At which point, they get the blue shot anyway.
Same ultimate result, but with a lot of pain and upheaval for the dog and extra strain on the shelter’s limited resources in the interim.
Does it make sense when you see this? (WARNING! Gruesome photo: http://www.petpalsshelter.com/graphics2008/sunnyneck1.jpg)
That is a chain that was so tight the dog’s neck grew around the chain. That is not one moment of abuse, that dog had to grow into it so months at the least.
Think that is a one-off? I can link more if you want (unfortunately).
There are other, personal experience, anecdotes in this thread as well.
No one is saying Fido is better off dead if they are denied a squeaky toy.
I guess the easiest way to think about what the shelters are doing would be if you had a dearly beloved family dog that for some reason you had to get rid of (e.g. your child became terribly allergic to the dog). You have no other family or friends who can take the dog so you decide to put an ad in the paper.
Would you scrutinize the future owner of your dog or just hand it to the first Yahoo that showed up?
Depends what other options there are for the “existing dog”, I guess. If I had to choose among lots of families clamoring to adopt my dog, I’d want to pick the one that would give it the best home. Family X saying “Well yeah, it’s true that we might decide to dump the dog after a few years, but if you don’t let us adopt him then we’ll be forced to patronize one of those horrible puppy mills instead and it will be your fault!!” would not cut a lot of ice with me.
It looks as though adoptable dogs are at a premium in your area. In itself this is a terrific thing, of course, because it means that local pet owners are being responsible and caring. But one of the side effects is that it makes adopting a dog a more competitive process, and pet adoption agencies can afford to be more picky in their requirements.
I definitely sympathize with you about the extra hassle and difficulty this puts in the way of perfectly good pet owners like yourself. But I can’t quite agree with you that it’s automatically a bad thing for the shelter to be so picky about adopters. If the supply and demand situation is such that they can get lots of qualified adopters to take their pets even with the picky rules and requirements, then their pickiness is not doing any harm to the pets they’re caring for.
And the welfare of the pets they’re caring for is the only thing I really expect them to be concerned with. Hypothetical speculations about how the pickiness of their adoption requirements might affect the supply and demand situation at the local puppy mills are kind of extraneous to their core mission.
I have met animal “rescue” people that are a front for animal hoarders. No person or situation is ever good enough for them, or they can’t let go of the animal. I know not every rescue group is like this, but it happens more than you think.
I agree, if the goal is to shut down puppy mills, people (even abusers) will simply get a DIFFERENT DOG from a different source. It isn’t hard to get a dog. It isn’t any cheaper to get a rescue dog. Rescue agencies who engage in restrictive adoption simply drive people to mills making them much more viable.
So the agency MIGHT keep THIS dog from getting abused. But if someone is determined to get a dog, and then going to keep him in abusive conditions, he’ll find a dog. So you’ve simply condemned a different dog.
We were turned down by a rescue agency. We don’t have a fenced yard and I wasn’t willing to say that if the dog was aggressive to the kids, I wouldn’t put him down. We got a dog through a different agency. The dog has been yard trained. Not a big deal.
Eh?
Doesn’t make much sense. If you want to hoard animals why pretend to allow adoptions?
Most of the ones we’d recognize such as the Humane Society or Anti Cruelty Society are legitimate organizations, their policies for adoption clearly laid out and they truly want to find cats and dogs good homes.
It’s a big world so I suppose there may be some weird “organizations” doing odd things but on the whole I think adoption agencies want to see the animals in good homes.
Remember, though, the agency’s primary responsibility is to the well-being of THIS dog. I don’t see how the agency is to blame for “condemning” a hypothetical “different dog” just because it rejects an applicant as unsuitable to adopt THIS dog.
Seems to me that prospective pet owners are responsible for their own decisions when it comes to acquiring pets. If they knowingly patronize commercial pet stores whose business practices they disapprove of, that’s their own choice, and I don’t think they should try to shove it off on the pet adoption agency for “making it too difficult” for them to adopt.
I also think that this hypothetical “market distortion” argument about how restrictive pet adoption agency rules are driving potential adopters to puppy mills, based on zero empirical data, sounds pretty specious.
Sure, having less restrictive adoption rules makes it more likely that a given prospective pet owner will qualify to adopt a pet. But it ALSO makes it more likely that the pet will have been adopted by somebody else before the given prospective owner gets there. And then that given owner will be faced with the same dilemma about whether to patronize a puppy mill, try to figure out a different adoption strategy, or go dogless.
In short, AFAICT, the “overzealous” adoption agency rules generally seem to be a response to a shortage of adoptable pets rather than a cause of it. Loosening the restrictions would increase the pool of qualified potential adopters, but it wouldn’t necessarily increase any one of those potential adopters’ chances of actually getting to adopt a pet. And therefore it wouldn’t necessarily decrease their incentive for buying a pet from some unethical commercial pet farm instead of adopting one.
I also wonder if some of these groups are, in fact, breeders or people just trying to sell animals – especially some of the breed specific ones on Petfinder. Maybe some of these organizations are small and in desperate need of funds, but when I see $450 for a ‘rehoming fee’, I’m a little :dubious:.
OP, I just adopted from a city pound. I signed a bunch of papers saying I would take care of the animal, not sell him, fight him, tie him outside, etc., and I would agree to a theoretical home visit. No family interviews, no third degree, it was all very easy. The cost was $50 (half price special because they are presently overcrowded), which included his neuter, shots and a free vet visit. He had kennel cough, which he’s almost over, but otherwise he is absolutely awesome! I’ll always start with the pound.
Good luck.
You’re welcome. I’ve read about military personnel needing to find alternate homes for their pets after being activated but hadn’t realized a matchmaking service exists until that came up in a search.
You could easily be talking about my next-door neighbors, who treat their dogs that way. I hate dogs and will never own one, and yet I treated them when they last escaped, simply out of sympathy.
Can we ease up on the exaggeration? The questions they ask have absolutely nothing to do with “Will you choke your dog half to death” or “Will you deny your dog a squeeky toy.” They’re in-between, like “Do you have a fenced-in yard? How many square feet is it? How many hours a day are you going to be away at work? Will you walk the dog 3 times a day?”
Do these shelters have some kind of statistics to indicate that people without a fence are x% more likely to choke their dogs? Are people who work 10 hours a day more prone to dog fighting than people who work 8 hours a day? Are these questions really relevant? Or are they just being ultra picky on behalf a dog who probably just wants not to die and maybe eat a few meals a day. In no cases would a dog rather be killed than sit in a crate for 10 hours a day.
FTR I had the same experience as the OP. My first dog came from a no-questions asked shelter. For my second dog, I went to a questions-asked, multiple home visit shelter, and didn’t like the vibe of the place. Plus they told me I wasn’t an ideal candidate due to not having a fence and the fact that both me and my wife worked. So I went back to the no-questions shelter.
This is my experience, though it required us to travel to a different county shelter that had less “nanny” overhead. There are some shelters that will literally keep a dog on death row rather than adopt to someone who doesn’t meet a specific yard footage + walk schedule + income level formula. “Sparky might get left alone for two hours if you work overtime? Sorry, we’d rather gas him than adopt to you.”
Why doesn’t it make sense? If you spend a lot of time around animals, surely you have met someone who believes they are running a sanctuary, that their animals have special physical or emotional needs that only they can meet, takes in animals with no intention of letting go, and is in complete denial about the conditions the animals are in. In order to solicit donations, they pretend to put animals up for adoption.
I’m a very actice HSUS member, and believe that there are legitimate rescues and rescue networks, but I have also personally dealt with more than one b.s rescue group while trying to adopt a pet. They were very misguided, intrusive and more than a little bit offensive.
That’s cruel to the collar.
This doesn’t make sense to me. The puppies you buy in mall pet stores do not come pre-spayed or neutered. You still have to take it to the vet and pay for that surgery. Generally, they might have had some of their early shots, but there are still rounds of immunizations you have to give at an older age. Pet store dogs are not completely pre-vaccinated either.
So what you are telling me is it’s such a PITA to get a rescued dog that comes pre-vaccinated, pre-spayed/neutered, and could also possibly be pre-housebroken that it’s much easier and more convenient to purchase a puppy mill dog for which you still have to take to several veterinary appointments and spend another few hundred dollars getting it in the same shape as the rescue dog?
Ohhhhhkay. Good luck with that puppy.
Whack-a-mole is killing me. Listen. Just admit that the strict application process isn’t there to weed out psycho animal abusers with a choke collar fetish. It is weeding out the people that have too-small yards or whatever. Posting pics of graphic images of abuse is weak. Might as well just walk right up to Rumor and pin the Debate Blue Ribbon on her collar.
I don’t adopt cats. They invariably adopt me.
Oh, wait. That’s not true. I was actively looking for a cat at one point, and went so far as to visit a shelter. They wanted to be able to come to my house, and inspect my property to ascertain whether it was up to their standard. I laughed in their faces.
A week or so later, I was adopted by my beloved Porkchop kitty, who has never known a moment of ill treatment or neglect in her entire spoiled, pampered life.