for the last 3 weeks i’ve been going to animal shelters around manhattan trying to adopt a dog.
and i’ve found it to be an incredibly frustrating experience, and here’s why.
it basically seems as if the shelters do everything in their collective powers to make adopting a dog as difficult as possible.
some shelters won’t even let you look at the dogs until you’ve filled out an extensive security/background check.
so you wait 30 minutes just to fill out the paperwork and then they decide if they’ll let you adopt a dog after filling out tons of paperwork and endlessly waiting around.
a friend of mine went to one shelter and she checked off ‘medium/small’ under what sized dog she was looking for.
she was then told that the shelter had no ‘medium or small’ dogs.
but my friend could see a bunch of ‘medium/small’ dogs through the window, and when she asked why she couldn’t see the medium/small dogs that were obviously there she was told that those dogs were less than a year old and weren’t in the ‘medium/small’ category. so when my friend asked to see the ‘less than a year old’ dogs she was told that because she didn’t check that box on her paperwork she wouldn’t be allowed to see the dogs.
and when my friend said ‘can i check that box on the paperwork, then?’ she was told ‘no’, and wasn’t allowed to see any of the dogs.
in the past 3 weeks i’ve encountered nothing but beaurocracy and unhelpfulness and disinterest on the part of the people working at and running the shelters.
in one shelter i was told that i had looked at too many dogs. in another shelter i was left sitting for 45 minutes waiting to speak to someone about adopting a dog and i eventually just left out of frustration.
thousands of animals are being killed by shelters every week, so you’d think that the people running and working at the shelters would make more of an effort to help and assist the people who are trying to adopt the animals.
as a last resort i might end up going to a pet-store (keep in mind that i hate pet stores…) and buying a dog, just because the shelters have been such depressing and unhelpful places.
you’d think that people in the business of animal welfare wouldn’t be so beaurocratic and unhelpful, but maybe i’m naive in thinking that people who work in trying to help animals would actually care about their jobs.
i don’t know who regulates the shelters in new york city, but they suck.
moby