It hasn’t even been 48 hours since I had to put Haplo to sleep, and already I’ve been slyly looking at what Pets Inc. has to offer in the way of adoptable dogs. I’ve never gotten a dog from a shelter, though - I had Hap for 16 years, and he was the third of three Westies we had. I don’t think it even occurred to my parents to go to a shelter to pick a dog out.
The thing is, Hap had problems. Boy did he have problems! He had a nasty habit of biting people and we seriously think he may have been actually batshit crazy. Also, and this is our fault, he was never quite 100% housebroken. (I don’t think we’re responsible for the crazy, as that came on when he was an adult.) I loved him dearly, but I do not want another Haplo, and it ain’t just because he’s dead.
So. We have two shelter cats and one tamed feral, but it seems somehow different to pick a dog out. (For one thing, a cat that bites probably isn’t going to kill anybody.) We ended up with three of the sweetest, most dear cats in the world, but was that luck or our good judgement? Only Dewey was chosen as an adult - Edison was a kitten and Stokie was a friendly feral who let you pet him, so he was obviously self-selecting for sweet. And although we liked Dewey and Eddles at the shelter, they were completely different once we got them home anyway.
I want an adult dog, housebroken, not a danger to cats, gentle, and calm. I’d also like to run with the dog. And nothing yappy. Any advice? (And no, “you’ll just know” isn’t really very helpful advice. I mean, yeah, maybe you get there and just know, but in that case you won’t need the advice anyway. And every time we get a cat I think, god, maybe there was a better cat there, maybe there was a cat more in danger of not getting adopted, etc., etc., etc. I do that anxiety/remorse thing.)
I think that rescue groups often have the animals for a longer time and are more familiar with their habits and behavior, especially around other animals. The dog are are usually older and so they’re housebroken too. You can search for any breed that you’re interested in and you’ll get lots of hits. Petfinders lets you put in your zip code and breed if you want to and you’ll get dogs from all over your area. There are links from Petfinders to the rescue groups themselves.
My dog is still hanging in there on a day to day basis and hasn’t had any more seizures, but I think that’s how I’ll get my next one. Any dog that isn’t a pit bull or chihuahua gets adopted very quickly at the local shelter.
Most shelters have an area where you can play with the dogs before making a decision. That’s a pretty good way to see if its too skittish, snaps at you, yapping, etc. Of course, they could be quite well behaved until you get home, but it lets you see how the dog reacts to strangers. And I think most shelters evaluate the dogs for aggression, friendliness to cats and children, and leash behavior. They should be able to tell you if this is a dog you can take for a walk/run without being afraid of what it will do.
Our local city shelter is a terrible place to adopt a dog - the cat room is friendly and comfortable and the cats are all chillin’. The dog room is chain link cages in concrete and when you get close to the door to the room they all start barking and howling and you couldn’t tell a nice dog from Cujo if you wanted to. However, there’s a really great private no-kill shelter that I looked at cats at once - the cat room was only so so but I noticed the dogs were in a really great situation, and I think they tend to have quite a lot of them. I intended to go there. I sort of promised not to go and get one until we get back from Vegas, but that may not be a promise I can keep.
If you make friends with a rescue and let them know what you are looking for, they will often look out for you. Friends of ours just did that - they let a friend who does rescues know that they were looking for “medium sized, well tempered, housebroken” and they eventually got the “we got this really sweet dog that needs a home and seems to be what you are looking for” call.
I just went through this myself. I got my first dog through a rescue group (which involved endless phone conversations). We wanted to adopt another, so we went to shelters, but just today picked one we found through a rescue group.
The shelters didn’t work for me because I find I can’t pick a dog by looks, I want to know a bit about their personality. Dogs in shelters don’t get much opportunity to express their personality, for one thing, and when I went there weren’t people around who knew the dogs really well. I also don’t always trust the motivations of people in shelters, who are often overworked and (if I may say) sometimes rather sketchy.
I have twice now found success through rescue organizations. Talk to vets, dog walkers, and people you know who have rescued dogs, to find out the names of rescue organizations in your area. (There are some on Petfinder but probably lots more that aren’t there.) There are lots of groups that aren’t physical “shelters” but who arrange foster homes for dogs. Those foster parents get to know the dogs pretty well, and the rescue people tend to know more about the individual dogs too. In many cases they know about some of the dogs in shelters as well.
ETA - I should add that we just found our new pack member today (at a city shelter through a rescue org), and we’re picking her up next weekend! I’m so excited!
As a first cut, Petfinder is good at marking dogs that don’t get along with kids or cats or other dogs. You may wish to avoid animals marked as such, though you’ll probably reject a few perfectly nice ones along with the potentially problem pets.
I worked for a shelter for six years in their education and admin departments. My advice:
Choose your shelter carefully. Find out how they select animals for adoption placement. Some shelters give every animal except the obvious meanies/sickies a certain time period in the adoption room; others, when there’s a vacancy in adoptions, choose the nicest animal from in back to place in adoptions, and then keep the animal there as long as necessary to find it a home (unless it gets really sick or turns mean). The latter variety would be my preference. Ask how they temperament test; they should have a multi-stage process, including testing around other dogs, testing for food aggression, touching the dog’s feet, etc. Ask around for references to the shelter, maybe calling a couple of local humane societies for ideas. We used to have a wretched shelter in town that could occasionally put on a good show for a visitor, but their animals were always getting sick, and they did no screening, and they eventually were shut down by multiple charges of animal cruelty IIRC.
Breed groups are a good idea. Those folks are crazy, in a good way: they’ll drive an animal hundreds of miles to place it in a good home. Be prepared for some awfully judgmental questions if you go this route. Crazy, remember.
Petfinder is an excellent suggestion. They’re a fantastic group, coordinating tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of animals across North America.
Look soon! When spring comes around, it’ll be puppy season, and many shelters will put as many puppies out for adoption as they can. The blunt truth is that most folks who adopt want a young animal (at our shelter, it was upwards of 90% of folks, IIRC), so if you put mostly puppies out in the adoption room, you’ll get more animals adopted more quickly, making room for more animals from in back, saving more lives. Fewer puppies are born in winter, meaning that more adult dogs will get a chance in the adoption room. THis is a good time to be looking.
I really want to emphasize asking questions about the shelter. You definitely don’t want to end up with an animal that’s been mistreated, that’s caught a disease, or that’s been inadequately screened because you ended up at a subpar shelter.
I think the Spartanburg Humane Society is one of the better ones in SC.
We just went through this same thing. As many of you know, we lost our Golden Retriever and our Beagle within a month of each other. We wanted a dog that was not like either of them. Not because there was anything wrong with them, but because we did not want to feel like we were replacing them.
We went through Petfinders & after a month of looking, we saw a dog that we thought would be a good fit. The rescue group that had her kind of jerked us around for a couple weeks - not returning calls or emails, then having us fill out an application, more unreturned phone calls & emails, and finally “oh, we are adopting her to someone else”. We were less than pleased. Then we saw another dog - a puppy this time - and a poodle mix at that. Definitely not what we were looking for, but she had something about her. We took her home a week ago & she has brought laughter to our home. (Something that was noticeably missing over the past several months). She will do well here I think. Her name is Dakota.
I guess the morale of the story is to keep looking until you find a good match. They can be most unexpected.
Our shelter (in Ga.) has an overcrowding problem, as do most shelters nationwide, and because of this, whatever dogs are brought in sick cause the others to be at risk as well.
We do the best we can with anti-biotics (which a bunch of us volunteers get from our docs, have filled for 4 dollars and take to the shelter), but it’s a losing battle, and because we are a county-run shelter and we (in the Humane Society) are only volunteers, we can’t adopt them all out, which means that unfortunately many unwanted animals are euthanized.
I wish we could guarantee that all our pets are disease-free, but we get so many every day that we just can’t.
As I said, we do the best we can with the space and the funds we have, and I’m just talking about treating, feeding and housing them, not spaying and neutering, which is a huge problem in itself. Our humane society will absorb the cost to spay and neuter and even pick up and deliver the animal, but we aren’t making much progress even with that.
As much as I hate to say it to the OP, find yourself a rescue organization or a private individual who needs their dog adopted if you want one that’s well-behaved and/or disease free, unless of course you have the means to pay a vet to make them that way.
The animal shelter in my city (it’s actually a farm) loves to have people just come in and volunteer to play with the dogs and take them for walks on the property, without neccesarily wanting to takeone home right away, or ever. Could you see if a shelter near you has a similar policy? That way, you could spend some time with the dogs and pick out whichever one is just right.
When I got my Ghosthere I went to the local pound and told myself I’d pick the biggest, dirtiest dog there. I said I’d pick the one nobody else would take. And there he was, the biggest, filthiest mud covered brown and black dog ever, with some kind of intestinal problem where he couldn’t control his bowels. He messed up the car pretty bad on the way to PetCo, where I had him bathed. He came out a dalmatian–I thought the girl was trying to give me the wrong dog! He turned out to be special needs, in fact he just had surgery last week to remove a bladder stone the size of an egg. So be aware that the pound may not be aware of any given dog’s medical needs.
One thing that’s nice about rescue groups (and I definitely have my gripes about them, as well) is that most of them offer a trial period. The one I volunteer for does a 2 week trial period for any dog adopted, and will happily take a dog back if it isn’t working out. However, there is an invasive questionnaire and adoption contract, so it’s a trade-off.
We got our wonderful dog Mirabel from the pound. I walked down the isle of cages, and every single dog was going nuts barking and jumping on their cage doors, except Mira, who was so depressed she only looked up at me, without lifting her head off the ground. She was calm and sweet, and only about a year old. We took her home, and that dog is absolutely perfect. No barking, wonderful with people, never once had an accident in the house, sleeps late in the morning. It’s freaky.
I’m not sure how helpful this is, but I think if you want a calm dog from the pound, look for a dog, that, despite the ruckus, is calm. They exist. And good luck! It’s wonderful that you want to rescue an older dog–it’s definitely the way to go.
We knew we wanted a Newfoundland and used Petfinder. At a shelter across the state, we found Bill, then known as Wilcox; he was full-grown and apparently people found his size intimidating. After our application was approved we set a date to meet him and potentially take him home. We spent some time alone in a room with him, and although he had clearly bonded with the shelter staff (he would try to leave the room with them, as we were strangers) he allowed us to pet him and talk to him without snapping or growling or showing fear, so we took him home that day. We were told that he was about to be adopted by one of the shelter volunteers although we would be given first choice, so we didn’t feel it was a ‘take this dog or he’s gonna die’ situation.
Before we left, we spent more time with the shelter staff and one thing I liked was their insistence that we didn’t feed him just ‘any’ food; they had specific brands they recommended that were better for his health. They also really would have preferred that we were local as they liked to do follow-up visits, but agreed to phone consultations to help with any problems we might have.
I would recommend a shelter that requests to be involved and available for consultation if needed. It really did help during our first few weeks of adjustment. Bill has settled well into the family and a shelter was a good choice for us.
Talk to the shelter workers and volunteers- they’ll know their dogs, and they’ll be able to point you to a calm one if they have one. The shelter I volunteer at has a classification system, grouping dogs by personality so that you can tell at a glance how friendly, active, or social any given dog or cat is.
Don’t believe everything the shelter tells you about the breeding of the dog. I was looking for a medium-sized dog to live loutside at my mom’s house, to be a general watchdog for the farm. I brought home a mutt with lovely coloring that was supposed to be half sheltie and half German shepherd. He was great, but unfortunately my mom had to give him to a local farmer when he topped 100 pounds at 1 year old and stood taller than us on his hind legs. There was some Irish wolfhound in that sucker, I bet.
I took my last dog from our shelter – she had run out of time in the county she was from, and they were going to put her to sleep. I played with her, walked her, and aggression tested her. She is the best, but not many people would give a half Rottweiler, half pitbull a chance.
appleciders, sounds like you have a great volunteer base.
Unfortunately for us, we have 3 officers on the road and 2 officers in-house. One of them answers the phone and the other does the receiving/adopting.
In February of 2008 we took in 245 animals of which only 46 were reclaimed by their owners. 93 were euthanized.
Our volunteers are in very short supply, but if we weren’t there there would be many more pets that would never again see anything other than a cage or the incinerator.
There are only two volunteers on any given day. Two days a week one of us helps load and transport dogs and cats for spay neuter, and , as I mentioned we also pick up and deliver those animals in our private vehicles, if need be.
We use prison labor to clean cages and feed - otherwise we’d be in big trouble.
Sorry for the hijack, but I wanted to show y’all what a problem overcrowding and understaffing is at many of our shelters nationwide, and we cannot always guarantee what temperament a particular pet will be.
Last night, in my ER, I had to help hold a little 6 year old who was bitten on the head and ear by a dog her family adopted from us. It took 15 staples and 7 stitches and I felt like shit, because the family knew me as a volunteer.
We try to teach spay, neuter and adopt, but in our area, no one seems to be getting it.
We have two shelters here. One is the county-run animal control services that has the responsibility for enforcing all pet ordinances and dealing with all abandoned, surrendered or confiscated animals. They’re overwhelmed and underfunded most of the time, and they end up with all of the pit bulls that no one wants and few volunteers. The other is the SPCA no-kill shelter that is privately run and gets lots of volunteers and donations, and they take all of the dogs that are likely to be adoptable from animal services and keep them at their shelter. It frees up space so that fewer pit bulls are euthanized.
I tell people that the tidal wave of homeless animals means there’s really no reason to buy, because you’re supporting breeding-for-pay, or, especially, to allow one’s own pet to breed, but no one wants to hear this. Everybody likes the thought of puppies in the house.
Before anyone gets offended, let me add that I honestly believe it’s probably true what some folks insist – that there are some “ethical” breeders who are keeping bloodlines alive and who carefully spend time and money preparing and placing each puppy.
But such people are vastly outnumbered by shady moneymakers who breed for profit and pay as little attention as possible to health, socialization, training, medical expense, and quality of the home to which the puppies go. And all such breeding exacerbates the crisis. And of course every shady breeder says he or she is super-careful, ethical, etc. Many of them look respectable, at least long enough to move product.
I know everyone who buys from a breeder thinks that he or she has that rara avis, an “ethical” or “heirloom” breeder. But the sheer odds are against it. Massively.
