[QUOTE=jay-c]
It’s interesting the you mention GPA - we dealt with them at length in trying to adopt our latest. He was in Birmingham, and the GPA kennel there was initially pretty helpful in finding him. However, once we indicated an interest in adopting him and requested they bring him into their kennel, they stopped communicating with us. I don’t know if it was too much work or too complicated to bring him in, but it would have been nice if they had let us know. Two weeks went by without them returning a phone call or email. Since we knew that our boy was already off the track and had been for a while (also that his sister who retired with him had already been put down), we were understandably worried.
We ended up calling the Mobile, AL GPA group, which was the next closest group we could find. They were extremely helpful, and eventually put us in touch directly with our dog’s trainer - between him, us and our local rescue group, we got him up here to Ohio in less than a week. Of course, our situation was somewhat different in that we were seeking a specific dog who was the littermate of a dog we already had, but our GPA experience was both hit and miss. On preview, I see you mentioned that different groups have different “personalities”, and that was definitely the case here.
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Adoption groups are full of humans, who can be anywhere from fallible to seriously f’ed up at times. Almost all adoption group people are also volunteers as well. I mentioned GPA specifically because it’s a) the largest group collectively and one of the oldest, b) a lot of GPA groups are right at tracks, and c) they do try to work with the industry, which makes them pretty successful at getting dogs from people who formerly wouldn’t have dealt with an adoption group at all. Not because I think the people who populate the chapters are all perfect and everyone who contacts them is guaranteed to have a perfect experience. I’m very glad you got your dog, but yours is also a good example of the fact that not everyone is a dream when it comes to working with them, so you work with who works with you. It’s frustrating beyond words when you are all supposed to be in this for the dogs and the dogs end up paying because some human’s ego or vanity or drama gets in the way, but giving up doesn’t help the dogs either.
When I went looking for a relative of Roman’s, I got help from a couple of friends in FL who are involved in adoption groups down there. They helped me find Idol, who turned out to be at the Daytona Beach track and was in the GPA kennel there. When I called the rep there, she very suspiciously asked me why I wanted him. I could have been insulted and hung up I suppose, but I told her why I wanted him - he was a relative of a dog of ours we loved very much and we were looking for a related dog. I’d never seen Idol and knew nothing about him other than the fact that he was related. Turns out he was a beautiful dog and she thought that perhaps I’d seen him race and wanted him just for his looks. When I explained, she immediately relaxed and told me about him - and that he was slated to go on a haul to Indiana, but she said could change him out to go to a group in Raleigh about an hour away from where we live instead. They’d built up quite an amazing network with other groups to move dogs out of FL, where the majority of tracks are, and get them to places where there are no tracks and therefore less greyhounds. So from an initial misunderstanding, we worked out something pretty good - we got Idol, and since that time we’ve done quite a bit of fundraising for that group and I respect the work they do, under some very trying circumstances sometimes.
