Good owners are made not born

“Too many pets and not enough homes” is a catchy little ditty heard often in rescue, but while the death toll and suffering are obvious to us, the idea that there are a “lack of homes” makes little sense when compared to the figures of pets acquired from sources other than rescue.


Today Tonight’s story on puppy mills revealed a startling fact; over a half a million dogs are bought from pet shops every year. Add to that, those bought from professional and backyard breeders and you have huge number of pets being purchased… from everyone but us!


Whether we like it or not, the mass production of pets is big business in Australia. For a long time rescue has taken on the responsibility cleaning up the mess left and have pressured the pet industry to change their policies to incorporate a more humane attitude towards our companion animals. It’s unrealistic however, to expect a profit motivated industry that makes its money by freely releasing pets into the community to implement any change that would in any way stem this flow of pets – it’s simply not good business.


We must also understand that people who want pets, get pets. While sentiments such as “a pet is a privilege, not a right” is romantic, it’s unrealistic as anyone is able to go out and get themselves a pet.


Since a lack of owner education, desexing, ongoing support and an options for returning the pet should the relationship fail are the largest factors for pet relinquishment, it seems logical that we’d be trying to replace every “sold” pet with one of ours. We do offer these services and can help owners be better pet-people.

The only way to keep profit motivated sellers from selling is to instead have the pet buying public, adopt from us.

When we fail to provide an adopter with a pet, either directly (a refused adoption application) or indirectly (through bad customer service, unnecessarily complicated adoption procedures or arbitrary rules) we can be quite sure that we have no hope whatsoever in helping that person to ever become a responsible pet guardian… and that they will shortly have a pet regardless.


While it might be reassuring to think “at least they didn’t get a pet from me”, with the multitude of pet purchase options, we must know that when we reject a potential adopter, we have only served to push them back out into the market – to the very places we beg people to avoid because they don’t offer the support that could save the pet from abandonment!


By focusing on saving the individuals animals in our care, we’ve concluded that the only power we have is to prevent uneducated people from acquiring pets, not helping them. But every pet that ends up in the hands of an owner we’ve turned away – who then suffers from their owner being uneducated, is also a pet we’ve failed.


We’ve forgotten we’re not in the business of finding nice people to adopt our pets, rather to create responsible pet guardians. Maybe we should even let the “nice, responsible, good, pet-people” go get their pets from the sources of pets that provide no support at all – after all good pet owners don’t need help!


We rescuers should be loath to send a person away empty handed, when we have the perfect opportunity to educate when dealing with a potential adopter. Rather than trying to find the already perfect, let’s instead lure the uneducated owners to our rescues, find them a pet and use all our resources to make that person a responsible pet guardian.