Pet underpopulation Problem

[FrenchKissed]

http://spanieljournal.com/33lbaughan.html

 

[huskyloves]

What an ungodly crock of crap, I've seen this before and it's still WRONG . All the "facts" she states are piecemeal bits of information taken out of context from their original articles and worked to her theory, and as a scientist, that chafes my arse. Not to mention the fact that she and the other miscreants of the NAIA are all for-profit breeders.

Wouldn't want to cut into their margins, now would we .

 

[bubbatd]

What a back @ss forward approach !

 

[elegy]

heh. ever read nathan winograd's book or blog? that's his theme song. we don't need to kill dogs because pet overpopulation is a myth etc etc.

and maybe i could agree if all dogs were created equal, but look at the types of dogs in the shelter vs the types being bought from petstores. there's a vast difference between a baby pocket puppy and an untrained, adolescent lab mix or pit bull.

 

[BostonBanker]

While I think a lot of the way he is presenting it is bull, there is some truth to what he is saying. There are parts of the country where pet overpopulation is basically a non-issue. Here in Vermont, almost none of the dogs being placed in our rescues and shelters are local. I don't remember the exact numbers (I've posted them before), but my friend's rescue, when she reached her 100th dog place, had places something like EIGHT local dogs; every other one was an "import" from the southern US or Puerto Rico. And she is the drop site for many of the towns when they find stray dogs.

Touching on what Elegy said, most of the local un-owned dogs (stray/dumped/unclaimed) are homeless for a reason. Many have behavioral or health issues. Meanwhile, the numerous dogs coming up from the south are young, healthy, family-type dogs. The hounds that were too mellow to hunt or the guard dogs that were too friendly to guard.

I just don't get why it bothers the author. Because Vermont has mostly solved their own pet overpopulation, we should just stop rescuing and start breeding? What is wrong with bringing dogs in from other parts of the country or world to find them life-long homes? Are they less deserving of a family? I love my little West Virginia "import", and would have been hard-pressed to find a dog like her roaming the streets here in Vermont.

 

[huskyloves]

Touching on what Elegy said, most of the local un-owned dogs (stray/dumped/unclaimed) are homeless for a reason. Many have behavioral or health issues. Meanwhile, the numerous dogs coming up from the south are young, healthy, family-type dogs. The hounds that were too mellow to hunt or the guard dogs that were too friendly to guard.

Actually, that really isn't true, the majority of dogs in the northeast are stray pickups, followed closely by owner surrender because of relocation. Any behavioral issues we see from shelter dogs are simply a lack of some basic training, nothing more. And the health issues are from neglect or lack of basic care. The myth that the southern dogs are better in temperament is just that, a myth, I can't begin to tell you the amount of dogs I see with behavioral issues that were trucked up from southern shelters.

And I haven't even touched the issue of the impact that "importing" is doing to the local animals, but that's another subject altogether.

 

[FrenchKissed]

What an ungodly crock of crap, I've seen this before and it's still WRONG . All the "facts" she states are piecemeal bits of information taken out of context from their original articles and worked to her theory, and as a scientist, that chafes my arse. Not to mention the fact that she and the other miscreants of the NAIA are all for-profit breeders.

Wouldn't want to cut into their margins, now would we .

Ah interesting you should mention profit for puppies...another article for your veiwing pleasure.



Pentimento
by DIANE KLUMB
as published in Show Site Magazine September 2002

Hi. My name is Diane, and I am a Breeder.
I am good at it, and I am damned proud of it.
I bought my first show dog in 1969 and whelped my first litter
in April, 1975.
I have, since that inauspicious beginning, in partnership with my long
suffering husband and a few good friends produced a few dozen champions,
some top producers, a handful of Specials, and a lot of superb close-working
grouse dogs and well loved companions. We kept a fair number over the years
and sold the rest. (NOTE: I said sold, not 'placed'...we'll address that
particular idiocy later.) We owned a kennel for many years, and trained gun
dogs. This involved the killing of untold numbers of game birds, all of
which we ate. I have more recipes for pheasant, grouse and woodcock than
you can shake a stick at. We showed our hunting dogs and hunted over our
show dogs.
I do not believe for a minute that the whelping or sale of a
single one of those purebred dogs is in any way responsible of the
euthanization of a million unwanted dogs a year at the shelters around the
country, any more that I believed that cleaning my plate when I was a kid
could in any way benefit all the poor starving children in Africa, no matter
how much the nuns or my mother tried to make me feel guilty about it.
I couldn't see the logic then and I can't see it now (although
today I would maybe refrain from suggesting that we bundle up Sister
Edlita's
meatloaf and actually send it to the poor starving children in Africa.)

Look at it this way:
If I go to a bookstore specifically to buy Matt Ridley's The
Human Genome (which, as it happens, I recently did) and that bookstore does
not have it, I will do one of two things - I will order it, or I will go to
another bookstore the does carry it and purchase it there. What I will NOT
do is take the same money and buy Martha Stewart's latest cookbook instead,
because this is not what I want.
Guilt without logic is dangerous.
Show breeders are simply not responsible for the millions of
unplanned and unwanted mongrels produced in this country. Period. So don't
let anyone make you feel guilty about it.
I do not understand why the top horse farms in this country are
not in the least embarrassed by the fact they make a lot of money doing it,
yet in the world of dogs if one is to be respected, one is to lose one's ass
financially. That is a load of horseshit, pure and simple, yet we accept it
meekly and without question.

Why is that?
Basic economic theory suggests that if we are not turning a
profit, one of two things is wrong - we suffer from poor management, ore we
are not asking enough for our product to cover our production costs. What
are our costs?
Well, if we are breeding good dogs, besides basic food and
veterinary costs
we ought to be adding in the costs of showing these animals, and
advertising, and health testing, which are not expenses incurred by the high
volume breeders (puppy ####).
OK, so we have much higher costs involved in producing our
healthier, sounder animals. Yet the average pet shop puppy sells for about
the same as the average well bred pet from show stock, and often they sell
for much more.
What's wrong with this picture?
We're stupid that's what's wrong.

Q. Why does a Jaguar sell for ten times more than a
Hundai?
A. Because it's worth more and everyone knows it.

"And everyone knows it" is the key phrase here, folks. But
somehow no one knows our puppies are worth more and we're embarrassed to
tell them.
Why is that?
The difference between the sale price of a multi million dollar
stallion and what he's worth as horsemeat on any given day at a livestock
auction is
quality. Yet we cannot address this issue in dogs because we are embarrassed
to talk about money and dogs in the same breath.

Why is that?
OK, I'll tell you, because someone has to come out and say this
sooner or later.
There is a war going on.
Unlike most wars, however, this one actually has three sides
rather than two.
We have Show breeders, who are producing a small number of
purebred dogs.
We have High-Volume breeders who are producing a large number of
purebred dogs.
We have Animal Rights Activists, who believe that neither group
has the right to breed or even own purebred dogs, much less make a profit at
it.
While the first group is busy trying to get rid of
the second group because they don't like the way they breed dogs (which by
the way ain't gonna happen as long as the American public wants purebred
dogs and the first group won't produce them) the third group is winning the
war.
You think I'm making this up?
Then how come we've started saying we "placed" our puppies
instead of sold them?
We talk about the new "adoptive homes" instead of their new
owners.
What's next? Instead of price of a puppy, we'll charge an
"adoption fee?"
What's wrong with this new language?

I'll tell you -
We didn't come up with it, the Animal Rights Activists did - we
are just stupid enough to use it.
We are stupid because it's based on the premise that we have
no right to own dogs.
It is based on the premise that dog ownership is the moral
equivalent of human slavery, and that the species homo sapien has no right
to use any other species for any purpose whatsoever, be it food, clothing,
medical research, recreation or involuntary companionship.

Now, I don't know about you, but my politically incorrect
opinion is:
Our species did not spend the last million years clawing our way
to the top of the food chain to eat tofu. The stuff tastes like #### no
matter how you
cook it, and there is absolutely no sense pretending otherwise.

Zoology 101:

Animals who kill other animals for their primary food source are
called predators. Their eyes are generally on the front of their skulls,
they have teeth designed to tear flesh from bone, and a digestive system
designed to digest meat (like us). Animals that live primarily off
vegetation are called herbivores. They have better peripheral vision, flat
teeth for grinding, and the most efficient of them have multiple stomachs,
which we do not (like cows). And lastly, Animals who live primarily off what
other have killed (carrion) are called scavengers (think about that one long
and hard.)
Man like the canid, is a pack-hunting predator, which is
probably why we get along so well. (If that fact bothers you, get over it.)

How did we get to the top of the food chain?
We are the most intelligent and efficient pack-hunters ever
to suck oxygen from the atmosphere, that's how.
We are certainly intelligent enough to understand that
maintaining that position on this small planet depends on responsible
stewardship, not guilt.
And we are so damned efficient that we can support a
tremendous number of scavengers in our midst. Like the Animal Rights
Activists, for instance.
(Me, I think we should dump the whole lot of them buck naked
in the Boundary Waters and see how well this equalitarian philosophy of
theirs plays out, but that's probably too politically incorrect for anybody
else to consider. Sigh.)

So what do we do?
Well, to begin with we need to regain control. The first way we
do this is with language, which is the tool they have been using on us.
These people who don't want us to "own" dogs are likening
themselves to Abolitionists. That's a fallacy, unless you accept the premise
that dogs are really little humans in fur coats, which frankly is an insult
to a species that has never waged war on the basis of religious differences.
No, the group they really resemble is the
Prohibitionists-remember them?
A particularly annoying bunch of zealots who firmly believed and somehow
managed
to convince our duly elected representatives that alcohol was a bad thing,
and any beverage containing it should be illegal in these United States of
America.
Very few Americans actually agreed with this, by the way, but by the time
Congress got its head out of its collective you-know-what, a whole new
industry had developed-
Organized Crime.

We look back at that whole debacle now and wonder how anything
that stupid and wrongheaded ever happened.

Well, boys and girls, in the inimitable words of the great Yogi
Berra: Its's Déjà vu all over again. The Prohibitionists are back.

And once again, we are buying it. Amazing.

 

[elegy]

We have a local rescue that pulls a large number of puppies from rural shelters, mostly in WV, and adopts them out locally. There are lots of dogs dying in our local shelters, but pups are snapped up in an instant. There's a much bigger market for pups, so this rescue caters to it. To be honest, I don't have a problem with that. I'd much rather see somebody adopt a homeless WV pup than toss their bucks in the coffers of some miller or puppyfarmer, which we have aplenty.

It is not remotely that there's an "underpopulation" problem here, but rather the shelters don't have what people want.

 

[HoundedByHounds]

AC's are not above "raiding" local breeders to take their dogs and then adopt them out far and above the normal adoption fee. Yeah...lots of things AC/shelters do...makes me wonder who's interests exactly...they are serving.

 

[huskyloves]

Sigh, whatever happened to getting a job and not making a living off of another being's uterus?

I see a few fallacies in that article, too. Every top notch breeder I know (and yes, I do know quite a few, I'm not entirely anti-breeding ) produces a relatively small amount of puppies. Now, say you breed by the book, OFA/Penn, CERF, hips, elbows, eyes, etc, show your dogs, work them in their particular fields to show they're able to do their job, yada, yada, yada. They produce one litter a year, say 7 puppies. How many of those pups are going to be show quality? Very few, and sometimes none at all, eugenics are a funny thing, and even the best laid plans can get you a bunch of roachybacked, under/overbiting, temperamentally tweaky pups. So if you're a good breeder, you sell them to all pet quality homes, preferably microchipped and pediatrically speutered, and voila, you've not added to the overpopulation problem.

Howver, that being said, how many breeders actually do that? How many can actually say that they've NEVER sold a dog that wasn't bred by it's new owners without permission? And why does that account for the amount of purebred dogs sitting in shelters? Hell, my rescue alone has 17, count 'em 17, PB Siberians, with more waiting to be pulled everyday. So those beautiful PB dogs had to come from somewhere, right? Yeah, they came from what was supposed to be a GOOD breeder who sold a dog to a moron who thought their roachybacked, underbiting, pet quality dog was so special that it needed to have just one litter.

And that's how it snowballed, and if they can't see it, then it's time to take the blinders off.

 

[lizzybeth727]

There's a shelter near me that this week took in over 900 dogs, and euthanized over 500. IN ONE WEEK. That's nearly 100 a day, imagine how in the world they dispose of 500 dogs bodies in a week. I've seen the numbers as high as 700, AND that's just at one shelter. Only 200 dogs were adopted or released to rescue groups this week.

I guess I'm imagining the pet overpopulation???

And I haven't even touched the issue of the impact that "importing" is doing to the local animals, but that's another subject altogether.

I would really love to hear about this "issue" - especially considering the vaccinations and spay/neuter that all dogs coming from rescues routinely have. Please do explain.

 

[Laurelin]

I must be imagining it too. Of course I work at a shelter in central Texas as well. I have a hard time buying the pet underpopulation theory while we're over here euthanizing adoptable dogs. We don't have a horrible adoption rate nor hundreds of dogs but there's still more dogs than homes especially dogs of certain breeds/types.

 

[huskyloves]

I would really love to hear about this "issue" - especially considering the vaccinations and spay/neuter that all dogs coming from rescues routinely have. Please do explain.

Gladly .

What we're dealing with here (tri-state area, NY/NJ/PA/CT, well, that would four states now, wouldn't it, lol) are "rescues" popping up all over and taking in nothing but dogs from high kill shelters in the south. While that is all fine and dandy and many will argue that "rescue is rescue, no matter where the dog comes from", it is starting to have some serious ramifications that are affecting the local established legitimate rescues and shelters.

My rescue, like many of the other legit rescues, takes in dogs from high kill shelters right here in NY and NJ. We keep them for several weeks to evaluate temperament, vaccinate, HW, Lyme and erlichia test, spay and neuter (NO contracts, they're worthless) and microchip every dog that comes in. Like a good rescue, the microchips are first registered to the rescue and the new adopters are listed as the secondary contact. This ensures that we can get the dog back if it ever does end up in a shelter.

Good policies, no?

Now take these other rescues who import. They are bringing up truckloads of pups and young dogs into the area. They are adopting them out without proper quarantine periods, minimal vaccinations, on speuter contracts, and no microchips. There is no way for these groups to keep track of these dogs, how many of them are ending back up in the shelters here?

The answer is, a lot.

We just had an incident here with a "rescuer" who brought up 34 puppies from a puppy mill bust, all purebred, mostly toy and small breeds. She adopted them out within 5 days of their arrival, and guess what? Every dog had Parvo, most of them ended up dying, but not until their new families spent thousands trying to care for them. Now that's 36 families who cannot bring a new young dog to their home for the next 10 months, and 36 families that I could have maybe adopted a dog to. Another rescue is bringing up dogs by the dozens, many of them pitties and pit mixes. Like we have a shortage of them here in NJ and CT . And they take these dogs to adoption events right off the transport, with the president yelling through a bullhorn to "come see our dogs, saved from the gas chambers of the south!".
Like the dogs right here in the north aren't worthy of homes too, just because they get euthanized with a needle?

I'm sorry, but not all rescue is good rescue, and if I end up taking in a dog that someone else brought up here just to say they saved it from a gas chamber, then I start taking it personally. Not to mention the fact that for every dog brought into this area form the south that gets adopted out, that's one less home for one of MY dogs, and that just plain sucks.

 

[FrenchKissed]

Sigh, whatever happened to getting a job and not making a living off of another being's uterus?

Farming, or "living off of another animals uterus" has been done since the dawn of man. I would like to know why is it different for dogs.
Have you ever worked in a kennel. Anyone who has would never say it's "easy" work or not "a real job". You get up in the morning, and you take care of the dogs, maybe around noon you get a cup of coffee. You groom, bathe, clean, wash clothes, beds, towels, you feed puppies you play with puppies, you groom puppies, you stack puppies, you clean kennels, you water, you feed, you exercise, you train your newest prospect, some where in there you grab some lunch, maybe get a chance to go to the post, but usually the vet is running late so you have to wait till tomorrow instead. You go home, you collapse in bed, after you have fed, watered and exercised the house dogs, you get up in the middle of the night to do a night feeding on puppies, you go back to sleep for a couple hours and get up and start all over again. You NEVER get to go on vacation, you NEVER get to go out of town, there is no such thing as a "family holiday"...and before you say that's not what breeders who breed for money do, I beg to differ, it is what they do, and like good pet owners who make sure that their animals are looked after when they are away or sick, the good dog breeders work in the fashion as well, be they show breeders or commercial breeders.
Horse breeders make money off of the show horses they produce, cattle breeders make money off the SHOW COWS they produce (some go for $30,000 or more for a "juniors" cow) why is it that dog breeders, who put just as much love and care if not MORE should not make money off of their dogs.
Some don't, some do, and if the some who do do right by the dog how is that wrong? Just because those who don't can't manage their money why should those who do get the short end of the stick.
Making money off of dogs does not mean that the dogs live in squalor, it does not mean that the dogs go without.
Some people could breed 1 litter every 2-3 years and "live" off of their dogs solely because 1) they manage their money and 2) their dogs are that freaking good that people will pay tens of thousands to own them.
The problem is too many people associate "bad breeder" with "profit" and that is by FAR the case. What about the breeder who sells a champion for $250,000 are you telling me that they aren't making money? Are you kidding me? And yes this DOES happen a lot more ofteh than you would think, they just don't advertise it.
We live in a capitalist society. We make money on EVERYTHING. We make money saving human lives, doctors don't work for free. We make lives on creating human life OGYN and fertility specialist don't work for free. Vets make money off of your dogs/cats, they don't work for free. Pet food companies make money off of YOUR dogs/cats they don't work for free.
So why is it a dog breeder or cat breeder has to work for free? That doesn't even make sense. It would seem to me that the ones "working for free" would be the ones short changing their animals. How are they going to afford the best care? How are they going to afford the vet bills? How are they going to afford food, toys, leashes, etc? The fact is unless you are inherently wealthy you can't...but then maybe some of you think that only the wealthy should own pets. So what classifies people as wealthy? 50,000 a year? 100,000? Or maby 500,000? Don't make nearly that? Are you sure you're still good enough to own a pet?

 

[FrenchKissed]

There's a shelter near me that this week took in over 900 dogs, and euthanized over 500. IN ONE WEEK. That's nearly 100 a day, imagine how in the world they dispose of 500 dogs bodies in a week. I've seen the numbers as high as 700, AND that's just at one shelter. Only 200 dogs were adopted or released to rescue groups this week.

I guess I'm imagining the pet overpopulation???

I would really love to hear about this "issue" - especially considering the vaccinations and spay/neuter that all dogs coming from rescues routinely have. Please do explain.

I wonder what this shelter has done by the way of networking to reduce the number of needed kills. And there will always be needed kills. Not every dog and cat is adoptable or suitable for a pet (which can be delt with in cats with spay/neuter and release programs)...dogs are not as lucky.

As for all rescue dogs being spayed/neutered, not so. My local shelter spays/neuters NOTHING before it leaves. And all the time adopters are "forgetting" to have it done or "the dog ran away"...they are usually the ones who come back with a bucket of puppies 6 months later to drop off.

 

[FrenchKissed]

Gladly .

Now that's 36 families who cannot bring a new young dog to their home for the next 10 months, and 36 families that I could have maybe adopted a dog to.

One thing I can advise on this. First, parvo does not have a lifespan of 10 months, more like years and years. If you want to sure fire prevent a dog from getting parvo use a hightiter vaccine such as neopar. It can be given to very tiny puppies at a very young age and will stop the spread of parvo dead on.
I personally would have never believed it until a golden breeder that I know in FL lost nearly every dog she had and the Florida state univeristy advised her to speak to Dr. Page (the creator of the vaccine). With his consultation she stopped the dying (and many of these were adult previously vaccinated dogs) and saved her animals. She now uses neopar without fail and has never seen parvo again.

 

[huskyloves]

First, parvo does not have a lifespan of 10 months, more like years and years.

When I say a lifespan of 10 months, I mean as it pertains to the environment in which it was spread from the original host. As a virus, yes it can be carried and spread for years, but not from the original host. And this isn't debatable with me, my career was in this very field.
Parvo's lifespan depends on the amount of "shedding" the virus does, as in how much contaminated stool was spread. On hard surfaces, i.e. indoors, can survive up to two months. In outside areas, it can live in the soil for up to one year, depending on the freezing cycles (CPV-2b is actually protected by permafrost, as you stated, unlike distemper which cannot withstand temps below 29 degrees.). However, once the permafrost cycle ends and the infected earth gets sunlight for approximately 5 hours a day, the virus will die out in a matter of months.

As long as the proper protocols are taken with disinfection, 10 months is the AMVA guideline (on the outside parameters) for acceptable containment levels of CPV-2b.

The only way an original viral cell can live for years and years is for a new host to pick it up, incubate it, and start the cycle anew.

 

[huskyloves]

Farming, or "living off of another animals uterus" has been done since the dawn of man. I would like to know why is it different for dogs.
Have you ever worked in a kennel. Anyone who has would never say it's "easy" work or not "a real job".

The difference is that dogs are companion animals, livestock is not, and I cannot remember the last time I saw a herd of homeless cattle clogging up a shelter for becoming unuseful.
And yes, as a matter of fact, I have indeed worked in a kennel, except it wasn't a for profit one, it was a program for assistance dogs.

Some people could breed 1 litter every 2-3 years and "live" off of their dogs solely because 1) they manage their money and 2) their dogs are that freaking good that people will pay tens of thousands to own them

.

I have yet to see a dog that was worth tens of thousands dollars, and if people do pay that kind of money, then PT Barnum was indeed correct. A service dog from the Seeing Eye might be worth that, but that's about the only worthy one I can think of. And those lucky people don't pay a dime for those dogs.

I can see you and I are going to never see eye to eye on this, so I will have to just agree to disagree .

 

[noludoru]

I would really love to hear about this "issue" - especially considering the vaccinations and spay/neuter that all dogs coming from rescues routinely have. Please do explain.

Gladly .

What we're dealing with here (tri-state area, NY/NJ/PA/CT, well, that would four states now, wouldn't it, lol) are "rescues" popping up all over and taking in nothing but dogs from high kill shelters in the south. While that is all fine and dandy and many will argue that "rescue is rescue, no matter where the dog comes from", it is starting to have some serious ramifications that are affecting the local established legitimate rescues and shelters.

My rescue, like many of the other legit rescues, takes in dogs from high kill shelters right here in NY and NJ. We keep them for several weeks to evaluate temperament, vaccinate, HW, Lyme and erlichia test, spay and neuter (NO contracts, they're worthless) and microchip every dog that comes in. Like a good rescue, the microchips are first registered to the rescue and the new adopters are listed as the secondary contact. This ensures that we can get the dog back if it ever does end up in a shelter.

Good policies, no?

Now take these other rescues who import. They are bringing up truckloads of pups and young dogs into the area. They are adopting them out without proper quarantine periods, minimal vaccinations, on speuter contracts, and no microchips. There is no way for these groups to keep track of these dogs, how many of them are ending back up in the shelters here?

The answer is, a lot.

Ditto. My problem with it is the bolded part. It's spreading disease. I also have a BIG problem with importing dogs from other countries when we have plenty here. Hello? Let's clean our OWN house before we bring the mop and buckets over to our neighbors, because it's sure not getting ours cleaned faster! Once we more or less have our disgusting overpopulation problem solved, or at least at more than manageable numbers, THEN we can go to other countries and rescue animals from there PROPERLY.

As far as rescuing from other states goes, I have no problem with that as long as it is done in a sanitary fashion, and, as Elegy said, catering to the 'market' I guess. If you have hundreds of lab mixes in your county sitting in shelters, the LAST thing I want to see is lab mixes coming in. Go for small fluffy dogs, hounds, pitties, poodles, whatever they don't have that the public will adopt. But once again, do it right.

I see a few fallacies in that article, too. Every top notch breeder I know (and yes, I do know quite a few, I'm not entirely anti-breeding ) produces a relatively small amount of puppies. Now, say you breed by the book, OFA/Penn, CERF, hips, elbows, eyes, etc, show your dogs, work them in their particular fields to show they're able to do their job, yada, yada, yada. They produce one litter a year, say 7 puppies. How many of those pups are going to be show quality? Very few, and sometimes none at all, eugenics are a funny thing, and even the best laid plans can get you a bunch of roachybacked, under/overbiting, temperamentally tweaky pups. So if you're a good breeder, you sell them to all pet quality homes, preferably microchipped and pediatrically speutered, and voila, you've not added to the overpopulation problem.
*SNIP*
And that's how it snowballed, and if they can't see it, then it's time to take the blinders off.

I agree with you to some extent, that more or less is how these sorts of problems started. Here and now, more rather than less. The implications I am getting from your post is that you would like everyone to stop breeding. Please correct me if I am wrong, though. If we do that then where will we get our future well-bred dogs? I believe in education, I've seen it work. And that's JUST the breeders themselves, not even if the public were to shun the bad breeders.

AC's are not above "raiding" local breeders to take their dogs and then adopt them out far and above the normal adoption fee. Yeah...lots of things AC/shelters do...makes me wonder who's interests exactly...they are serving.

Sources? It's not that I don't believe you, I'm just interested in reading them.

 

[jess2416]

I would really love to hear about this "issue" - especially considering the vaccinations and spay/neuter that all dogs coming from rescues routinely have. Please do explain.

I dont know about everywhere else, but in a few shelters/rescues that I know of in NC and SC.. they do NOT neuter/spay the dogs they send them out with a contract saying that you will do this on such and such a day and thats it...