Should You Adopt a Dog?
There are many ways you can choose a new family dog. Probably the most traditional approach is by visiting local pet store. The Internet allows anyone to search using a few simple words to find information and advertisements about particular breeds.
If you want information about dog breeds, we have an ever increasing collection of information about them.
Newspaper often features advertisements from breeders who are selling new puppies. But, perhaps best of all in terms of being helpful to the society in general is to adopt a dog from a local animal shelter.
Adopting a dog brings a new friend and family member into your life. It helps to reduce the number of unwanted and homeless dogs in your area. Unless the shelter is a "no kill" facility (and these are sadly few and far between), it will also save a dog's life.
Animal lovers everywhere champion the adoption of dogs from shelters as opposed to any other method of bringing home a new pet for this reason alone, but there are other reasons to choose the adoption option:
- Adopted dogs have had their shots
- Shelters often have information about a dog’s temperament
- Adopting a pet frees space in the shelter for more dogs
When you adopt a dog you can be sure that the staff at the shelter has had the dog examined by a veterinarian for diseases and parasites and that the dog has had its shots.
This is not always true of dogs acquired by other means such as kids giving away puppies from a box in front of the local grocery store or PetsMart. So, make sure you ask about this information.
The dogs at a shelter are not just strays and often are turned in to the shelter by former owners for various reasons. When this happens, the shelter collects as much information about the dog as possible, including whether its good with children, how much it barks, how playful or obedient it is, whether its housebroken, and other important details.
While it's true that this information is only as good as the honesty of the former owner, most of the time it is quite accurate.
Animal shelters provide a valuable service to the community that they serve by keeping the streets as free of stray animals as possible. Because many of them do this with little or no public funding or governmental support, they are very limited in the number of dogs they can have in the shelter at any given time.
The only way that they can bring in more stray animals is if they remove the ones they currently have. This is done through adoption or euthanasia. Obviously they would prefer to have the dogs adopted rather than killed. Adopting a dog could very well save its life and allows the shelter to bring in another dog in its place.