Adopting Your New Pet
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 baby pets; others find breeders via listings on the internet, while still more may simply purchase a baby pet from a local pet store. Perhaps the best method, however, in terms of being helpful to society in general is to adopt a pet 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 pets in your area. Unless the shelter is a “no kill” facility (and these are sadly few and far between), it will also save a pet’s life. Animal lovers everywhere champion the adoption of pets 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 pets have had their shots
Shelters often have information about a pet’s temperament
Adopting a pet frees space in the shelter for more pets
When you adopt a pet you can be sure that the staff at the shelter has had the pet examined by a vet for diseases and parasites and that the pet has had its shots. This is not always true of pets acquired by other means such as kids giving away “free baby pets” from a box in front of the local grocery store or pet specialty store.
The pets 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 pet as possible, including whether its good with children,, 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 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 pets 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 pets adopted rather than killed. Adopting a pet could very well save its life and allows the shelter to bring in another pet in its place.
We at StayCare have posted animals for adoption on our home page here. However, if you are interested in adopting larger animals, such as equine, we also recommend checking out a non-profit organization in Oregon called "Zebs Wish Equine Sanctuary". The founder, Suzi, can also answer questions or concerns you may have about the process. Their website is http://www.zebswishsanctuary.org/. Other pet adoptions are found at Arf, Pet Food Express and PetCo.
We hope that we have helped you discover some helpful information about such an important decision in adopting a new pet into your family! Please feel free to email us or comment below with questions, comments or photos of your new adopted pet! We would love to hear from you!