Hi {{first_name}} ,
Every week somebody emails me about a dog I posted. I am in Michigan, I will take her. I am in Hawaii, just get her to me.
I turn all of them down, and it makes people angry.
Here is the part nobody wants to hear. The thing that feels like saving a dog is often the thing that puts her into the worst position she has been in yet.
In This Issue
Why the money spent on one transport could have saved three or four dogs
What happened to Gamora four days after she left Los Angeles
The problem with a dog who cost the adopter nothing
Why the dog in the video is not the dog who shows up at the door
Reading time: 4 minutes
The money is the first problem.
It takes real money to get a dog out of a Los Angeles shelter and onto a plane or into a cross-country transport. That same money saves three or four other dogs.
There is a dog in a shelter near you right now who needs a home. The fact that I made a video about this one does not make her the only one. Walk through any municipal shelter in any city in this country and you will find a dog who pulls at your heart the same way. I find several every time I go. Narrowing it down to the ones I film is the hard part.
If you are so set on a particular dog that it has to be that dog, get on a plane or get in your car and come get her. That I understand. Shipping her to a home I have never seen, to people I have never met, is something else.
Gamora.
I was against transporting her. Some volunteers decided to do it anyway.
The woman receiving her said everything you want to hear. She knew German Shepherds, and her late husband had been a police dog handler. The volunteers put Gamora in a car transport and four days later she was in Delaware.
Within a day the woman said she could not keep her. Gamora had gone after her grandson and chased her cat.
Nowhere in that woman's original plea did she mention a grandson or a cat.
So now there is a dog three thousand miles from California living with somebody who does not want her. In that situation she goes to a local shelter, and a dog with that report attached to her name does not come back out of the shelter.
I paid out of my own pocket to move her to a friend who runs a rescue in Nevada. I paid him to keep her and work with her until he could place her. He found her a good home.
People will call me a hypocrite for that. They are right. I said the money should go to other dogs and then I spent several thousand dollars on one. I was invested in her and I was not going to let her die over a decision somebody else made.
Had she stayed here, I would have found her a home eventually, and it would have cost nothing.
A free dog is an easy dog to hand back.
When a person pays a thousand or two thousand dollars to get a dog to where they live, they have something at stake. When the dog shows up free, they have nothing in it. That makes walking away easy the first time something goes sideways, and something goes sideways in almost every first week.
The dog in the video is not the dog who arrives.
A dog in a kennel is not showing you who she is. Once she decompresses, once she settles somewhere and understands that she is staying, she can turn into a much nicer dog. She can also turn into a much less pleasant one. Both happen, and you do not know which you have until she has been there a few weeks. By then she is across the country from everybody who knows her.
What I can do when the dog stays close.
If a dog I advocated for goes to a home in the LA area and it falls apart, I can go get her. It costs less and it is far better for the dog. She comes back to the shelter, and we work on another home for her.
That option is gone the moment she gets on a plane.
I appreciate that you want the one I made the video about. The safety of that dog is what I am weighing, and there is too much risk in it.
Go to a shelter near you. There is a dog sitting in a kennel at that very shelter who will pull at you exactly the same way, if only you will let her. Give that one a chance.
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Until next Tuesday,
- Robert
