For the shelter ppl.. what to do with an animal you can't keep?

[Hangin Wit My Peeps]

What is wrong is people who buy, or take in a dog then dump it when "it doesn't housetrain itself." When it does dog things like bark and shed. When they KNOW they have a no-pets clause in their rental or lease agreement, and do it anyway. When they actually have no time to train or exercise, or groom a pet. When they buy or take in, again and again and when the animal becomes inconvenient, or mature and not so cute any more, dump it on a shelter.

SO VERY TRUE...some people DO expect a dog to "train itself" and that's just not going to happen. It takes MONTHS to train a dog...some dogs are harder to train than others but I do know that I have always succeeded in house training my dogs. My golden was trained in a week...my boxer, close to a year for him to "get it" but now he's totally trained! It comes with owning a pet...you have to be willing to put in the work to train it IF you want a nice family pet...you will be WELL rewarded for your efforts. Our boxer is the BEST dog we ever had because we took the time to work with him. I recently found a home for my pom who gets trampled by my boxer (now 80 lbs) BIG TIME and I worked hard to find a good home for him and asked for references. I offered the new owners the option to return him to me if they for any reason change their minds. I want to know where my dog is and that he is taken care of. He was returned to me last week because her landlord changed her mind and decided they could not have pets. It sure does help when you KNOW your situation BEFORE you get the pet. That is very true! Now I'm not sure I want to try again to re-home him or not

 

[arlee453]

Picking up a dog that has been abandoned or is a stray and taking it to the shelter is an act of kindness and showing more humanity for the dog than whoever dumped it in the first place. Anything above and beyond that is icing on the cake....fostering, rehoming, rescue org, whatever.

You can't allow yourself to feel GUILT for OTHER PEOPLE's bad decisions. You can feel BAD for the dog, feel moved to help, feel SAD because you can't save them all.... but not GUILT.

Dumping the dog in the first place is someone elses guilt...not yours. Don't feel guilty that you stopped to help. Even if helping means taking the dog to the animal control shelter.

 

[cyanne]

I've taken in quite a few strays and dumped animals over the years, kept them for varying lengths of time depending on whether they needed to put on weight, be treated for illness or injury, etc and then found them homes. I think that the situation you described is a very different one from the people who buy animals with little or no thought and then dump them at the first sign of trouble.

Unfortunately, I think that a lot of the shelter and rescue people have seen so much of the worst side of people that they tend to become bitter and suspicious.

I once had a nasty run-in with a shelter worker...made me so mad I wanted to slap her. I was still in college, barely scraping by and managing to feed myself, my cat and my little dog in a tiny 410 sq ft apartment at the time. Someone dumped a pregnant siamese manx kitty by just leaving it behind after they moved out of a neighboring apartment. She was really sweet, and I felt terrible for her so I put food out for her until she had her kittens, then I put them up for adoption when they were old enough. I found good homes for all of the kittens, but nobody wanted the momma.

I would have kept her, but neither of my pets were pleased with the situation and I couldn't even bring her inside without a fight starting.

I tried the best I could, but even though I spent money I could not afford to have her wormed and vaccinated, nobody would take her. I finally decided to take her to the local shelter, because I couldn't afford the extra food, litter, etc. Plus I was worried she would get pregnant again or get hit by a car or something.

Anyway, when I got there this shelter worker was really snotty with me and accused me of abandoning 'my cat.' I explained that she was a stray that someone left behind to starve and I had been feeding her and trying to find her a home, but she said, "if you've been feeding it, then it belongs to you."

That statement still bugs me..if it's true then I own a LOT of animals because everywhere I've lived I try to feed any strays I see and catch them if I can to find homes for them.

 

[texasreb]

cyanne,

The issue of ownership and/or guardianship is a big legal and moral gray area. Different states have different laws. I believe the law in Texas states that if you care for an animal for a month or more, then that animal is legally considered yours. The shelter worker wasn't wrong, but she certainly could have been nicer. You showed kindness and compassion to that cat and her kittens. In my book that makes you part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

It really gets complicated when you care for stray (friendly and formerly owned) and feral (un-friendly and never owned) colonies. I belong to a TNR group that is a totally separate from my volunteer work at the shelter. We capture, alter, vaccinate and return the cats to their colonies. We also provide them with food water and shelter. Does that mean we own them? It's a gray area.

Anyway, here is a link from the Cat Fancier's Association that has a lot of legal information about cat ownership. It's a great resource with lots of good (slightly biased) information. I hope it helps. The article displayed is a good one as are the links to the left.

http://www.cfainc.org/articles/legislative/who-owns-my-strays.html

 

[walkswithdog]

Yeah the shelter worker was wrong, but that's a sign of burnout. You have to remember that MOST people that bring an animal in are LIARS. Not my dog, not my cat, not my problem, not my fault. Most people LIE through their teeth when bringing in THEIR dog or cat. Why? Well, inside they really are ashamed.

They make up a thousand excuses, they blame the animal, they lie. So no shelter worker is going to take everyone's word for it. Burnout is when you no longer care to make the distinction between the liars and the truth. It happens. It may have been just a very bad day for that one worker or it may have been career ending burnout. You can't know. But a BAD DAY at an animal shelter can be a very bad thing. If that worker just put down 40 or 60 cats and kittens, you might just have struck a nerve.

I will say ... from a shelter stand point. You'd have done the shelter and the community a better service to have had that cat immediately spayed and not let it have kittens. Just from a sheer practical numbers perspective, you let that cat have kittens, that's a few more kittens already at that shelter that might have had homes. You also will never know if the people you adopted to spayed or neutered them, unless you did it before you passed them on. In which case, despite good intentions, you actually added to the problems in your area.

It really is a numbers game. With very real meaning. Every cat or dog allowed to reproduce affects the community and not well. Every animal adopted out intact affects the community and not well. Too many people use exceedingly poor excuses for breeding a litter.

Good intentions sometimes have long term consequences. You tried. I commend you. But if ever there's a next time. Spay the pregnant animal, and spend all your resources on finding that animal a home. Plenty in the shelters already need adoption. Cutting down the numbers in the world is the only way to stop killing 12 million of them a year.

There's a reason shelter workers burn out. It's that number up there. At the height of the puppy and kitten season the shelter I started working at would intake 400-500 dogs, cats, puppies and kittens a day.

She was wrong about you and you tried. That's a good thing, at least you CARED. How many other people walked past that cat on a daily basis?

You did fine.

 

[herechickchick]

Quote:
BINGO this is what the other thread was about.

OP you did the right thing.

 

[cyanne]

Yeah, I realize she was burnt out, but it still made me mad knowing how much effort and money that I had spent when I couldn't really afford it.

At the time I could not have afforded to have her spayed. Heck, I could barely afford to put food in my mouth back then! Plus, she was already hugely pregnant at the time she showed up at my door and delivered her kittens not long after that so it was kind of a moot point.

Of course I'm a lot older now (not telling how much older) and more financially secure with my own house instead of a tiny apartment. If something similar happened now, it's easy for me to do the best thing, which is to spay before adopting out and then charge an adoption fee to cover some of the cost (and to weed out creepy people searching through free dog ads for nefarious purposes). At the time, I did what I could by seeing that she didn't starve after her owners dumped her.

 

[walkswithdog]

Hey when we are poor, young and unestablished we do what we can at the time.

At least you gave a darn, and there's a LOT of people who just walk on by.

And yeah, we won't talk about older, except to say that I worked at the first shelter over 20 years ago...

I still volunteer to shuttle dogs that are preggers to vets to get them spayed (local shelter no on site vet). At least it helps keep the numbers down and gives those already with us another chance. When I have it I donate the spay fee, cuz spaying a pregnant dog isn't cheap. Usually I also foster the spayed grump for a day or two to keep an eye on things. I don't have room for more dogs but I try to do my bits.

 

[cyanne]

I lived on Guam for my last 2 yrs of H.S., and the stray problem there is AWFUL. Much worse than it is here. For every mile you drive down the rd you will see 20+ stray dogs, usually hairless because mange is so bad there. You see the cats less often, though there are just as many, they hide in the jungle.

Anywho, because it's such a huge problem there they are also big on the 'spay while pregnant' thing. We found a stray once that was hugely preggers and we called to get prices for spaying for after she gave birth. They practically ordered us to bring her in right away and gave us a discount just so we'd get her spayed before she had her kittens. It was kind of a sad thought, killing the little ones before they'd even been born, but not nearly as sad as all of the stray animals that had bred out of control thanks to careless pet owners on the island.

If I ever win the lottery, I'd like to go back there and do what I could to fix the problem. Only way to do it would be a massive spay/neuter program combined with a round-up of all of the strays for adoption or human euthanasia AND a change in the local laws and education of the public. It would take a ton of cash and volunteers, though.

 

[go-veggie]

Quote:
I agree with arlee here, and that previous thread was not about people like you. Your post confused me a little to be honest.