Check out the Cat and Dog adoption videos under the Videos section - one cannot agree more. I just had a friend who just went through a horrendous experience with a shelter here in Maryland. She found a lost dog the other day and not knowing what else to do, took it to a local shelter. She would have taken it home but she has to adopted cats herself. She isn't local and thought the shelter would try and place the dog. When she found out that the dog would be killed within 72 hours, she rushed around trying to find a new adopter, and managed to find one. However the shelter had a long list of criteria. When the new adopter asked to come before work at 10 am, they said they didn't open till noon. When he asked if he could come after work, they said that they closed at 6 pm. When my friend gave up, took time off work and went down, they told her the dog couldn't be adopted till the next day - and then they called her to say that they were going to put the dog down the next day and she rushed down.
Eventually the dog went home last night safely - but one wonders. Many shelters 'blame' the people who give up animals - but if their own policies are so terrible, are just the people who give the animals up to blame? It almost seems as if it would be easier for the shelter workers to put the animals down - and then blame the people who brought them in in the first place.
Nathan Winograd makes the same point in his book Redemption, which I blogged about earlier. Why not just make it easier for people to adopt cats and dogs? Shockingly, they just might end up taking more animals home!
1 comment:
It's the same with AVA isn't it. The two ladies had to lie they were owners of the stray dogs they were looking after, so that AVA could FINE them and then release the dogs to them.
SPCA too has been known to be difficult to release stray cats back to the rescuer.
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