Rescue Me! (Rescued Dogs)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Rescued Dogs
Date:	02/12/06 (630 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unconditional Love, saving a dog from a grim fate

Disadvantages: Can be expensive and a HUGE committment!

***Introduction***
Having recently written a piece about “The Dogs Trust” (TDT) I feel kind of qualified to talk about rescued dogs. Well, actually I’m lying because I don’t but being a few months into this experience now, it may be that I can shed *some* light on what adopting a rescued dog is all about and some pros and cons of the whole shebang. In a rhetorical way, adopting our dog was something of a battle of wills for a number of years and from speaking to other people, this seems fairly common place. After all, adopting a dog is not just for Christmas as someone famously coined a phrase once. So why on Earth do people take on this kind of commitment which could bridge up to 20 years of their life and beyond? Maybe it’s our collective conscience? A recent report conducted by GFK NOP on behalf of Dogs Trust showed that 101,586 stray dogs were found in the UK in 2005 and 7,743 dogs were destroyed for want of a home. Certainly, in our case, this was a major factor. Whether the fact that dogs generally give unconditional love back to their owners or even provide a safety valve for the idea that the family home may be empty once the children have left seems to be a generic driver for folks to own dogs although that’s any dogs as opposed to rescued dogs in general.

***Where to find your rescued dog***
In our example, we used “The Dogs Trust” but there are a number of major and not so major charities and organizations that work to rehome dogs. Some have websites including TDT, RSPCA, Battersea Dogs Home (see http://www.dogshome.org/) and Birmingham Dogs Home (http://www.birminghamdogshome.org.uk/). In fact, with the power of the Internet, a simple Google search will call up lots of links to sites like the ones above and more if you fancy a scoot round looking for a rescued pooch. There are more local options available and the details for these are harder to find but they may feature in local magazines, you could find out by word of mouth or even recommendation. We’ve tended to use the larger organizations like TDT, RSPCA and Cat’s Protection League (for cats ooooobviously) as you generally get a package which I’ll cover later. At the websites you will be able to see animals available (although it’s common practice to put the hardest cases to rehome online) and you can glean all kinds of useful information about the process, background information about stray animals in general and so on. In the case of TDT, there is a handy picture feature spelling out a 10-step process to adopting a dog. To kick things off you may need to complete an online questionnaire. Once you’ve managed that then next up is to visit the site you’ve chosen as a possible venue to recruit your new mutt. A tip at this point: don’t necessarily expect to find the dog that matches your needs at the first visit – we certainly didn’t, much to my lot’s chagrin. There can be a lot of emotion tied up with choosing a dog.

***Things to Consider***
Sounding a bit like that Chinese geezer from Gremlins, you know, the one who owns the mysterious Chinese shop, with a new dog comes much responsibility. In a nutshell: a home check/an agreement/fees/vets bills and generally looking after the darned thing! To be able to adopt a rescued dog then most places insist on a home visit i.e. someone comes to make sure that you have a reasonable garden, that you aren’t lying when you that you haven’t got any cats and that you really have only got six kids (eek). In our case, as we lived so far away then they accepted a photograph(s) of our garden proving that we had a fence and it was high enough to prevent the mutt from running amok. All of this palaver with home checks and photographs may mean that you can’t take your new dog home immediately. We had to wait a few days as the dog’s assessment hadn’t been completed. This involved observing it to make that it hadn’t got any violent tendencies that may have been missed; it wasn’t suffering from some horrid disease and generally, that it was safe to be adopted. With all of this and the aftermath of releasing the dog, we had to sign a written agreement with various clauses. One of them was that if we did tire of the dog, then ownership could only be transferred by way of legal deed and we had a deadline in which to get the animal neutered. More often than not, this should already be the case and you will find that the organization concerned will be insistent that the animal is unable to procreate to avoid adding to the existing homeless problem as it stands now.

***My Experience***
Adopting a rescue dog may cost you. Apart from the fact that my home could subsequently be eaten by the darned thing, I paid out a one-off fee of £75 which included a collar and lead, the dog to be micro-chipped in case it got lost and a £50 voucher towards being neutered. We could have had the snip done for nowt by returning to TDT who would have done it for us but ma wifee didn’t want to cart him all the way up to Kenilworth and back with him feeling a bit worse for ware. Our vet charged us £95 for the operation which, I suspect, is about par for the course. We were also given 6 weeks free Pet insurance with PetPlan. It’s worth making sure that the insurance is for lifetime cover as some insurers apply a maximum age to the cover…which is usually when you need it the most! Since writing the piece about TDT, our free 6 weeks has run its course and we have now signed up with PetPlan. To insure our dog we now pay a monthly premium of £15.06 with an excess of £80 for a 6-month old cross-colley. This won’t cover a lot of the routine stuff that crops up and we’ve already had to sort the pooch out re kennel cough but it does protect against the horror stories of paying out thousands of pounds for serious illnesses. My head tells me that saving monthly into a separate savings account is a much more sensible, cost-effective option but we’ve done it now so fingers crossed that we don’t have to claim on it. For an additional £75, we also had our dog registered on a national computer register so that if anything ever did happen e.g. he got run over then a vet could contact us to get consent to treat him. This second fee is optional but we felt it worth paying.

As you can see, your desire to have a rescued dog can suddenly become an expensive pastime and it’s worth putting that myth to bed that going for a mongrel can be a cheap option. Plainly, it isn’t. Since adopting our beloved pooch, we’ve found him to be a lot of work. Things to consider (especially if you’ve never owned a dog before) is the need to take the pooch for regular walks (easier said than done with a young family), the costs involved (i.e. food, vet’s bills, boarding costs when going on holiday etc), the impact on your house and the fact that dogs generally live for approximately 15 to 20 years. They are a huge commitment and rescued dogs can come with the problem of psychological baggage, especially if they’ve been mistreated before. Of course, the flip side is that they are meant to provide a balance to a child’s temperament as he/she grows up, a dog generally loves its owner(s) unconditionally and you can even make new friends in the guise of fellow dog owners. Not that we’ve managed that although fellow passers by seem to like our dog jumping up to say hello to them. Well most apart from the odd one that whips out a shotgun in self defence.

***Summary***
It’s hard to cover every single aspect of owning rescued dogs. I’d strongly recommend giving it serious consideration before making that decision as it’s one that could influence a big part of your life. For further information, it’s well worth visiting the web sites mentioned above which are a gold mine of useful information. The staff at the respective organizations are trained and committed to a standard that would shame many private companies and friends and family are usually a good source to tap although they can be biased if they own animals already themselves. All I can say is that if it is right for you then adopting a rescued dog can be a wonderful experience. However, the massive commitment I expected by owning a dog may have even been underestimated now that we actually own one. With that in mind, making a decision like this can be a disaster if you aren’t committed. Whatever you decide, do it as a family unit and if you do join the massed ranks of pooch-owners then…erm…..good luck!

Thanks for the read

Mara

Summary: My thoughts on rescued dogs