To the editor:
I am excited about the trend I’ve seen in recent years where people of conscience and goodwill are rescuing dogs and cats rather than buying them from breeders. In the last five years or so, Hollywood has jumped on this bandwagon in a huge way and it has become “fashionable” to adopt rather than shop for pets. Ellen DeGeneres, in particular, a personality who’s always expressed her love for animals, encourages fans to get their pets from local animal shelters and she leads by example.
Why is this movement to animal shelters happening now? The reasons are varied and many.
First, people are finally realizing shelters have come a long way. They are not the facilities of the 1960s where there were no regulations or protections. Today, shelters are highly regulated. Shelters cannot release or adopt out an animal that they know is sick. Shelters must make sure their animals have all their vaccinations and are clear of parasites. Therefore, the chances of getting an unhealthy animal from a local shelter is practically non-existent.
Secondly, there are over four million animals in shelters every year who have to be euthanized, put down, lives snuffed out, for no other reason than no one is adopting them and shelters only have limited space. Thankfully, people are finally realizing the degree of this holocaust and putting two and two together. In other words, “I can save one of these beautiful shelter animals if I simply adopt one of them rather than spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get a purebreed.
Thirdly, people are slowly realizing that searching the Internet for a “special” dog is what’s keeping puppy mills in business. It’s pretty much know now that well over 90 percent of all Internet sites selling puppies are false fronts for puppy mills. Many of these sites say they are breeders, and most say they’re licensed by government agencies, but they are not and have little to fear from the law because there’s just too many of them.
One puppy mill alone that was recently closed down had over 10,000 Internet sites! So a good rule of thumb, if you still insist on using a breeder: local, local, local. And by local, I mean, that you can visit them several times and can drop by unexpectedly. Even quote, unquote local breeders can be conduits for puppy mills. Buyers beware!
Having said all this about the Internet, there is one major exception: thepetshelterproject.org. This site allows those interested in adopting a shelter animal to see all the possible candidates in all the shelters in the person’s enlarged area. This allows the person to see animals, not just in the immediate local shelters, but in shelters outside an adopter’s usual parameters, giving them a much larger pool of animals from which to choose.
The worm has turned! It is now more popular to adopt and rescue from shelters than to buy. Let this be your first choice. If your immediate local shelters don’t have your forever friend, check out thepetshelterproject.org. Don’t use any other Internet sites! Lastly, if you must, check only local breeders who are well-known and open, transparent.
This trend is exciting, but we have a long way to go to stop the needless killing of all these loving animals. But your choice can make a difference. You alone cannot save all the animals, but you can save one. And to that one, your decision to adopt makes all the difference.
