Dog Returned To Shelter With Letter From Girl Who Loved Him

I didn't say they were fostering them. But what you described as bad and idiotic is involved in fostering, a practice actively pursued by many rescue and SPCA type organizations. That would be a lot more than just me disagreeing with you. Adopting an animal instead of fostering does not change the impact to the animal: what is good for fostering isn't magically bad for adoption. This is why many adoption agreements have special provisions for the first 6-12 months.

I think your attitude in this situation is actually damaging and can potentially cause harm by pushing an unrealistic view of how rescuing animals can work. The first week or two can tell you a lot about an animal, but people need to be prepared for changes or difficulty on longer timescales. Chiding people that may have been trying very hard to do the right thing isn't helping anyone, unless the goal was to just find someone to call an idiot online for no particular reason.

They weren't fostering him, they adopted him then changed their minds six months later because he had too much energy for their four kids. I think that makes them bad dog owners and idiots, you don't agree. Whoopy doo. Thanks for sharing.

What you describe as being a bad dog owner and "an idiot" is what others describe as fostering, which can involve taking car of a pet for months at a time before they are adopted out to another family. It depends a lot on the animal, but some benefit from exposure to more people and homes instead of fewer.

And return policies with shelters is always been a important thing to discuss when adopting, because it can sometimes take quite a while to figure out how the pet will behave. I've seen animals that take a couple months to settle in enough to show their normal behavior, at which point it can take a couple more months to see how trainable/malleable that behavior is. Outside of more definitive cases, it is very easy to spend 6 or more months before finding out that your newest pet is not going to be compatible with kids or other pets. It is also easy for the shelter to not be able to foresee this without taking care of the animal in an actual home environment for some time (... e.g. fostering it for a couple months).

I don't think there is enough info in the story to say what type of pet owners they were. You can't tell if they neglected and ignored the dog or spent that time unsuccessfully trying to socialize and train it.

Normally I would agree with you but the original article says they had the dog for several months, and if you have a dog that long it begins to bond with you and your family. Plus any good dog owner would have tried to train the dog or do something to curb its rambunctious behavior when they had several months to do so. Plus, you can tell a dog is too active for your family within a week or two, so keeping the dog for that long, and worst of all letting it bond with your family, and then returning it to the shelter makes you a bad dog owner and an idiot IMO.

Yeah, bad ownership is just dumping an animal on the street, or chaining it up outside and ignoring it for the rest of it's life. Responsible ownership is seeing that there is a conflict that can't be overcome and bringing the animal to a shelter that can properly care for it until it can be adopted out again.