I pit overzealous pet shelter rules

The BBQ Pit
161

I run a rescue group and the usual adoption fee for all our dogs is $400. We pay pretty much commercial rates for vet costs (desexing, vaccination, microchipping and etc). We don’t include costs for food, worming, defleaing, that’s covered out of our own pockets. For a dog who rehomes quickly we make about $80 after vet costs. For your $400 you’ll get an animal who has been desexed, is fully vaccinated, is microchipped, wormed, deflead and had basic obedience training in the case of dogs. We offer lifetime support to that animal, including always taking one of our animals back if you can’t keep them any longer.

We pretty much lose money on our cats because people won’t pay an adoption fee for cats which would cover our costs, so what we make on the dogs makes up for what we lose on the cats.

If we have something special in the way of dogs (a breed in demand; really cute puppy) we’ll up the price without shame, because to make what we do sustainable we have to try and make some profit somewhere. Not having unlimited private incomes we need to come close to breaking even, or at least that’s our ambition.

We have tried hard to balance our rehoming policy between being intrusive and difficult and making it just a little bit hard so that people have to make a small effort. We figure that if you can’t be bothered filling out our questionnaire, talking to us on the phone or bringing your own dog to meet a potential new dog, then you probably don’t have the patience to take on a dog.

We don’t ask how much you earn or how big your house is, but we do want to know how much time the dog will spend alone, where it is going to sleep, how often it will be walked and what kind of fencing you have, amongst other things.

It’s not about making a judgement about you, it’s about matching you with an appropriate dog. If you live in an inner city apartment then a working breed puppy is probably not a good choice; doesn’t mean that another dog won’t be.

We don’t often refuse an adoption; by the time we’ve worked through our process we’re usually pretty confident that we’ve made a good match and our follow ups suggest that we’ve got it pretty right. But if we don’t think a match is right or we have doubts about the potential adopters we will refuse an adoption.

The bottom line is that the animals we take have all ended up in the pound system once; we take them the day they are slated for euthanasia and our commitment to them is to do our best to ensure that they don’t end up back in the system. We’ve had dogs for months and months until the right home turned up, and then we’ve been overjoyed to see them happily placed.

I’ve had people say that our process is too restrictive; others have been turned down by other rescue groups or shelters but we have been happy to adopt to them. If you don’t like the options look for other groups or explore other shelters with criteria which better suit you.

162

I got my last 3 dogs from a beagle rescue place. They actually just skip the payment and give them to me. We brought our beagle down the first time to approve the adoption of a new beagle. They saw how spoiled and happy Quincy was.
We keep in touch via email and send pictures of our spoiled beagles every now and then.
My cat came from a woman who was going to give it to a shelter. He was de-clawed and a cute kitty. The beagles accepted him and he has been in our home for 5 years or so.

163

The only cat I’ve had since I was 10 years old is getting up there in years, pushing 16 now. She suffers from nothing more than a touch of spinal arthritis (common in Manx) and wants for nothing. She has heated dog beds (she doesn’t like to be cramped in the cat-sized models, you see), heated blankets on my own bed at temperatures that I myself find uncomfortable… Catered breakfasts at obscene hours of the A.M. are hers for the asking. She has me so well trained that I know the difference between a ‘snooze button’ breakfast complaint that can be slept through, and one that means that her water bowl is empty and requires immediate attention. I am a relatively recent (~3yrs) convert to high-protein pet foods and no longer feed my baby any corn. For a while, I went through about half a loaf of bread a day because ducks were wandering up to my apartment’s sliding glass door and their presence appeared to amuse the cat.

What I’m getting at here is that she is spoiled beyond all conception. I love that fucking cat.

It took about 3 years for me to accept that there would be no perfect time in my life to adopt another cat, so I might as well go for it while it would still be another cat and not a replacement cat for then-14-year-old Fuzzball. When I finally decided to adopt at an imperfect time, I drove about 4hrs each way from Washington State to Canada to adopt. He still ran about $120 plus a rabies vaccination to get him across the border, but that was with the “suggested donation” to Science Diet (ugh, but I wasn’t going to split hairs. Now, the corn feed gives him horrendous diarrhea).

This was partly because I fell in love with one of those evil Petfinder mugshots and mostly because I wanted an out-of-season adolescent Manx, but also because every experience I had with a shelter in WA made me feel like a criminal. This includes your bog standard SPCA. I just felt… unwanted there, like a life in a cage was going to be better for their cats than a life in a nice 2-story townhouse with great big windows and visiting ducks.

I called the Canadian shelter to make sure they had no policy against international adoptions. They did call my apartment managers to confirm that my lease allowed pets, and there was a space on the application for vet references, but I don’t know if they bothered with those. I do know that they laughed off the bit on the application about “home visits,” which the shelters in WA took very seriously.

I understand a certain level of intrusiveness for aggressive dogs with special needs, but… cats? After a certain point, the rescue volunteers are just wallowing in their own self-importance. Cat checklist: food, warm place to sleep. Paradise.

At least, my Canuck-cat thinks so.

Some of the stuff like “do you plan to declaw?” I understand but vehemently disagree with the shelters’ chosen methods of enforcement. There are plenty of people who think, often thanks to unscrupulous vets, that declawing is just what you do – usually as part of a package deal with the spay/neuter. For a shelter to look at a tick-mark in the wrong box and say “NO CAT FOR YOU … EVER!” is doing no-one any favors. Why not engage the prospective adoptee in an honest and educational dialog?

My aunt in LA has a ridiculously sleek and happy cat. She looked into adopting a companion for her a few years back, but as she says, “it would be easier to adopt a kid.” So now she just waits until the next stray arrives on her doorstep. That sentiment is so common that I have to wonder whether most of these rescues really want to adopt or not. It’s like the archetypal British bookstore whose proprietor just wants you to go away as quickly as possible, before any of his babies can be taken away.

164

I remember when getting a new kitten was as simple as choosing one out of a cardboard box that had FREE KITTENS written on the side. Our cat Oreo lived 17 years. I got him from young girls in a Target parking lot. He had his own cat door installed in the wall of the house which allowed him to come and go as he pleased. He was loved and very much at home with our family. He is still missed.

My wife has finally agreed to let me get a cat or two when I am back from my deployment. From this thread I have pulled petfinder.com, freecycle, and read about animal hoarders. I hope I find kids with a “box-o-kittens” when I get home.

165

Isn’t it nice when people admit they were trolling?

166

I had a great experience with the Boxer rescue group we got Kaia from. She was young - only about 6 months old so highly in demand and had already been matched with another boxer owner. Unfortunately their dog died suddenly from a medical issue and Kaia had issues that required she be placed in a home with another dog. We had already visited two older boxers to see how they fit with Mojo but he was so high energy it wasn’t working out. We had one visit with Kaia at our doggy daycare (they loaned us one of their fenced fields for the meeting) and then they worked with us since we were just about to head off on vacation when she was approved for us.

I don’t remember a huge questionaire but we met them through the daycare we used for Mojo so I guess we were already prequalified and people who spoil their pets :slight_smile:

They did insist on all of us meeting Kaia before they approved the adoption, even my daughter. I try and take the dogs to their booth at Woofstock each year to say hello but we’ve missed the last two years. I’ll have to make a point to schedule this year.

167

um, where did I do that? Yeah, I wasn’t - I just wasn’t going to keep parroting back my mockery of a certain poster’s position on the topic, because doing so was getting progressively less funnier to me.

Nice try though.

168

A small effort is reasonable. Unfortunately, all too many rescue organizations no longer consider anything but finding ideal homes. I was out of the running of most of the organizations I looked at just because I didn’t have a fenced yard. Dogs I was looking at? Pugs, Frenchies, Boston terriers, and other small, relatively low-energy dogs. And I live about a mile from a huge dog park, where I was already routinely taking my sister’s dog 3 times a week (weather permitting) because I liked it so much.

The other organizations that didn’t knock me out of the running gave me a huge run-around. The only ones willing to actually, you know, get their act together and let me know if I qualified or not in a reasonable timeframe (a month) consistently lied about the problems to entice me in. Yes, more than one - including one who did a home visit. Oh, you can’t have that dog, it’s taken, but there’s this other dog with no eyeballs and three legs and it needs $500 of medications every month. Meanwhile, the first dog was up on the site for months and months after that time. Oh, we forgot to mention, we said it was a purebred but it’s actually just a guess, probably a mix, and also we didn’t mention its aggression problems and the fact that it’s an adult dog that’s never lived in a house so it doesn’t understand potty training at all, and all of our efforts have failed. And so on.

In the end, I did get a rescue, from an individual. I paid a nominal ($200) fee to cover the vet work and to show I wasn’t one of the scumbags reselling free pets on Craigslist. He’s a great dog and I didn’t need to jump through hoops to pay twice as much to a rescue agency that wastes my time and money.

I don’t mind taking on an animal if I know what I’m getting into and can reasonably accept it. My cat was left at the shelter for 8 months due to some digestive issues that the shelter assured me had been medicated and could now be managed with food. He’s a great cat. But I didn’t have to fill out eight pages of forms, wait two months, and get jerked around 8 times to get him.

169

I’m surprised some of your towns’ Freecycle allow you to give up pets. The local Freecycle in my town does not allow such postings.

170

Aren’t a lot of hoarders in denial about their problems?

171

Fluiddruid, the “troubled dog” problem is exactly what happened to us with that second lady - every dog she sent us was either missing an eye, its teeth, a leg, or had some sort of crippling medical condition. I’m not saying that such dogs don’t deserve love or that they can’t make wonderful companions (my brother has a three legged dog that is AWESOME), but they were all WAY more expense and upkeep than we were looking for - and I love her to bits, and know it sounds a little snooty, but my wife really wanted a “prettier” dog. I can’t fault her for that - she let me have my big ugly brute of a Sharprador, but he ain’t winning any beauty contests.

172

I was sent this article today and thought of this thread: Those darn dog rescues with all of their rules.

We foster rescue dogs and this article pretty much sums up why there are so many invasive questions in the application.

173

Of my current two, one was a stray kitten who I was paid $100 to take ( :stuck_out_tongue: ). As he was a whirling dervish of insanity ( still is, years later ), I went searching for an “adopted brother” to keep him busy.

First stop was the SFSPCA where a friend was an experienced volunteer. Picked out a kitten, filled out the paperwork and was denied. Why? I had honestly answered that my twelve week-old stray male was not yet neutered, but I had an appointment to get him de-balled in a few weeks. No go. They won’t send one pet into a household with a second unneutered pet. Which as a general policy makes some sense. But in this case it amused me that I could have a) lied and they’d have been none the wiser, b) we’re talking two male kittens here, c) I was with a long-standing volunteer who could vouch for my honesty when I said d) I’m going to get him neutered and have already set the appointment to do so. Nope, rules are rules.

So I went and adopted from the Berkeley Humane Society instead.

174

I don’t see a single question addressed in that article that is unreasonable. Most of the complaints in this thread are about unreasonable expectations. Asking about the size of your home and safety of your yard and how much time and energy your household can give to an adoptee is important and understandable. What about asking how much money you make, giving potential adopters the run-around for months, insisting a foster home take a disabled animal, lying about the condition or training of a dog, or saying “you can adopt two cats or none at all” (aside from an already closely bonded pair)?

175

Weird but true. Renee talks about it in this thread too.

176

Just an FYI–the Tapatalk app for smartphones will post the linked image right in the thread. Those of us using that to read this thread didn’t get a choice as to whether or not to view that image.

177

I recently was linked to the site of a lady who runs a no-kill shelter.

If you turn an animal in there, you pay $1,000.00 the first month up to a cap of 3K.

She’s, uh, non-profit.

Quite an incentive to keep your pet, wouldn’t you say?

Apparently, if you’ve lost your job, had your house foreclosed on and forced to move into an apartment, well, tough noogies on you.

Quasi

178

Damn, Whack, you’re kind of missing your own point here.

I’m a dog fanatic, seriously, I adore dogs beyond my ability to express. And that is why I’d often rather they were humanely euthanized than kept in no-kill shelters, and I shouldn’t have to explain that, read your own posts.

A dog that is dead doesn’t suffer. A dog cooped up in a tiny run for months, possibly years on end definitely does. No-kill is all about people, not really about dogs. Death is not the worst thing in the world, not by any stretch.

179

This is EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY WHY the “nosy” “intrusive” shelter people are so nosy and intrusive! They are dog people, they know what conditions are likely to lead nice-enough people who think they want a dog to end up neglecting that dog, leading to that dog being destructive or otherwise difficult, leading to those people either abusing or re-abandoning that dog.

So while people may have all the best intentions, the evidence we are drowning in is that boatloads of people with the best intentions turn out to be ignorant, selfish, lazy and impatient. And round up any random sampling of people who have abused, neglected and abandoned dogs and you’ll find they are brimming with ignorance, selfishness, etc.

As someone who has actually done home inspections for a rescue group, I believe that anyone who finds the idea so repugnant that they would buy a pet shop puppy as a “fuck you for being so nosy about me” to the shelter people should absolutely not be allowed to adopt a dog. ABSOLUTELY NOT.

First, if you really give a damn about dogs you’d understand why it’s being done instead of taking it so personally. The fact that you do take it so personally tells me you are both ignorant and narcissistic, two prime ingredients for being very bad at caring properly for a dog. It also tells me that you probably have a reason you are so uptight. I dont’ know what it is, I only know that it exists, yet another strike. It’s also likely that you are aggravated in part because you want to satisfy your impulse to get a dog now, meaning you’re impatient. It’s not really a stretch to see some laziness involved in your desire to skip all the hassle and go straight to the furry payoff, so you’ve managed to hit all four out of four red flags.

Second, even apart from all that, anyone who can come up with the idea of “I’ll show you! I’ll get a PET STORE PUPPY! HA!” has proven that they have no genuine love for dogs, no heartfelt commitment to giving a dog a good home - the dog is just one more accessory for their self-absorption. That you would even consider contributing to the suffering of millions of dogs just to act out your petulance at being inconvenienced says pretty much everything I’d ever need to know.

Taken altogether, Damuri, you couldn’t pay me enough money to let you have a dog; you come across as exactly the kind of person who ends up being filmed by a closed-circuit security camera beating the shit out of a dog because you had a bad day.It’s just a shame you can’t be prevented from getting a dog at all.

***The point entire. ***

180

'fuck outta here with that. Geez.