Why Adopt or Rescue A Pet ?

So you’ve decided to bring another dog or cat into your home. You know where and how you’ve found animals before so you tend to gravitate to what has worked for you in the past. If you haven’t cared for a pet before, you may take advice from friends or family members on how best to proceed. There are plenty of options out there. You can buy from breeder, you can search through newspaper ads or you can go to a local pet store. Or you can take a long, hard look at why you really want to bring an animal into your home and into your life and find that adoption from a shelter or a rescue group is your only option.

We Americans say we love our companion animals. We spend billions of dollars each year for their care. We travel with them. We celebrate their birthdays and we include them in our holiday celebrations. We take time off of work to care for them when they’re sick. And when we lose them to tragedy, disease or to advanced age, we grieve for them as members of our families.

In spite of our obvious devotion to our pets, our behavior often does not reflect what we say we value. In any given year, approximately 6 to 8 million animals end up in buildings we call “shelters” which are funded by our tax dollars or by our private donations. Some of those animals will be reunited with their families and some will be adopted. Most, close to 4 million of them, are destroyed every year. Because the word “euthanasia” is often used to describe this process, it leads to a type of deductive reasoning that goes something like this: animals die in shelters so it must be that

1) they are suffering; or

2) they are so aggressive that they are truly dangerous; or

3) we simply have too many of them

It is inconceivable to most of us that the very animals we claim to love, and who are unfortunate enough to end up in a shelter, are destroyed because they are homeless. That is exactly what happens in communities across the country each and every day. A very small number of the animals we destroy are actually suffering or are truly dangerous (as opposed to just being incredibly scared). The vast majority of animals killed each year are considered “savable,” meaning that they are healthy and treatable.

We have been told over and over that we have a pet overpopulation problem and so we believe it. Research conducted by the No Kill Advocacy Center shows that in spite what you may have been led to believe, we do not have a pet overpopulation problem; we have a marketing problem. There are more than enough homes for the animals in our shelters. We just tend to get our animals from other sources for a variety of reasons; shelter animals must be damaged, a purebred animal from a breeder must be superior, the shelter isn’t open hours which make adoption convenient. The overwhelming majority of animals who end up in our shelters are victims of circumstance and of our poor choices such as failing to microchip them to make them easily identifiable. Twenty-five to thirty percent of them are purebred.

It has been said that “adoption could in theory replace all population control killing right now – if the animals and potential adopters were better introduced.” When the time comes for you to bring a "new to you" animal into your life, consider making adoption your only option. We are capable of bringing an abrupt end to the systematic killing of homeless animals. We say we love them and it’s up to us to show it through our actions.

To learn more, please visit these web sites:

No Kill Advocacy Center

PetFinder

AdoptAPet

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt