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Adopting a
Dog or Cat
By: Michael McBee
There are lots of ways that people choose a new family pet. Some may
search the newspaper for advertisements from breeders who are
selling new puppies or kittens; others find breeders via listings on
the internet, while still more may simply purchase a new family
friend from a local pet store. Perhaps the best method, however, in
terms of being helpful to society in general is to adopt a dog or
cat from a local animal shelter.
Adopting a pet brings a new friend into your life. It also helps to
reduce the number of unwanted and homeless dogs and cats in your
area. Unless the shelter is a "no kill" facility (and these are
sadly few and far between), it will also save an animals life.
Animal lovers everywhere champion the adoption of dogs and cats 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.
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Adopted pets
have had their shots
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Shelters
often have information about the pet's temperament
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Adopting a
pet frees space in the shelter for more dogs and cats
When you
adopt a dog or cat you can be sure that the staff at the shelter has
had the animal examined by a vet for diseases and parasites and that
your pet has had its shots. This is not always true of dogs and cats
acquired by other means such as kids giving away "free puppies" from
a box in front of the local grocery store or Wal-Mart.
The dogs and cats 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 them 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. In the case of cats, is it litter-trained,
de-clawed, does it like other cats or dogs. While it's true that
this information is only as good as the honesty of the former owner,
most of the time it is fairly 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 or cats 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 animals adopted
rather than killed. Adopting a dog or cat could very well save its
life and allows the shelter to bring in another one in its place.
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