If you're not sure where to start looking for shelters, PetFinder.com is the perfect place to start. You can choose what breed, type of animal, sex and size pet you are looking for, and then put in your zip code and VOILA! It does all the legwork for you. Once you start seeing photos of all those poor, homeless animals, you will be wishing you could adopt them all (I know I do).

When you do find a potential animal, go visit it at the shelter to see if it will be compatible with your family members (including other pets). Find out if it's been trained as a lot of shelters train their pets in order for them to become more adoptable. Also, make sure to find out if it has any special health needs. If it does and you know you won't have the time to devote to the pet's needs, you will need to find a more acceptable pet to fit with your lifestyle and schedule. This will be hard to do once you fall in love with that fluff ball, but it's in the pet's best interest so it doesn't wind up back in the shelter.

If the dog does need to be trained, there are many places you can go for that training. Personally, I took both of my dogs to PetSmart® for 6-week obedience training classes which were well-worth both my money and my time. My dogs started out as the worst behaved dogs (thanks to previous owners) to "Top Dogs", which was super cool. I invested a lot of my time and energy training them and it showed - they are both very well behaved. Just like children, dogs want and need to have rules and boundaries.

And I must briefly touch upon the subject of puppy mills (visit StopPuppyMills.org for disturbing facts about puppy mills). I never have, and refuse to, purchase a cat or dog at a pet shop. It's just so sad that the majority of these animals were bred in puppy or kitten mills and have been subjected to deplorable living conditions. I know you're probably thinking, "but why not save one of these animals and give it a good home?" Well, this is part of the vicious cycle involving pet shops as well as "backyard breeders."

Many people buy pets from these shops because of guilty feelings, the shop owners and mills make lots of money, and the purchase of the pet leaves space to accommodate yet another mill animal. To add insult to injury, many of these mill animals are so sick because of serious in-breeding, starvation, and other disgusting living situations. Sadly, many pet owners end up euthanizing their animals after a few months of purchasing them just because the animals are so sick. Will this disgusting cycle ever end?

My article was not meant to be a sad and depressing one. Rather, I just wanted to enlighten future pet owners of the miserable situations these animals are placed in every day and just hoping that more and more people will adopt loving pets from shelters and help end the vicious cycle of puppy and kitten mills once and for all.

So, if you are planning on getting a pet, please, please, please check your local shelter first. And please realize that whether these animals are pure or mixed breeds, they all have one thing in common: they just want to love and be loved. And that's all that really should matter.

7/19/07

 

Some links about puppy mills and pet euthanasia facts:

American Humane Society

ASPCA

MSN.com - Beware of Buying a Dog Online

MSN.com - States Cracking Down on Puppy Mills

PetPopulation.org

StopPuppyMills.org