Abandoned animals

I don't see how someone can give up a pet unless it's a danger to your family. Who are these people who do this?

• People who do that are beneath contempt, OP.

• This is my sister-in-law, to a T. I have known her for six years, and she is now on her seventh pet. She has previously had four different dogs and two cats. She got rid of all of them for various reasons. Now she thinks she has the "perfect" one. She's pissed off at half the family because we've all told her to her face that she shouldn't get any more animals. Her one cousin told her at a family get together that she was "fucking sick" for getting another animal. The other problem is that she gets an animal, realizes she's in over her head, and tries to pawn the animal off on us, because she knows my partner and I are animal lovers. This is also a reflection of her life in general. She is the most inconstant woman I know. New furniture, different jobs, trading in vehicles, getting new gadgets. It's constant, and kind of disturbing, since she has no money. Oh yeah, and she has a four year old son. I feel really bad for him. This kind of behavior is sick, but you can't ever tell a person like this that they're fucking things up; they'll shut you out. She's not talking to half the family right now, because they're all "haters".

• r2, sympathy for you. I'd want to kill the bitch. She is cold-hearted and dead inside. Steal your nephew! If he isn't "perfect", he will pain for the rest of his life. Trust me, I know. Be there for him. Tell him he is ok.

• A shame there isn't a registered animal abuse database like there is for people.

• OP, it's because they don't really understand the suffering of animals like you do. Really, no one understands what a big, deep heart you have. That's why you'll never find a human to spend the rest of your life with and you'll fill that void with animals.

• Ummmmm r5 ...I have a partner of 13 years and we have a 17 year old dog and an 18 year old cat so I think I have both covered.

• R6 is OP BTW

• Heartless and Ignorant!!!

  Anonymous

• I am thinking about getting a new home for one of my two dogs because the other one won't stop attacking her and being a psycho lunatic toward her. Lots of time and $$ spent on training for naught. So, I will give the good, sweet dog a new home if I find a good one (they have to be gay I think, and connected enough to me that she could come visit if they need to have her dog sat). But what's the alternative? Let my good dog be attacked? Give away the bad dog (who's only bad in this narrow context) so someone else will have her put down or beat her?

• Sophie's Choice, r9.

• There are some cases where owners have no choice -- or even death of the owner. True, there are SOME who should never own animals. Every dog or cat I have owned were rescues. I can honestly say each of them have been loving and loyal so the likelihood that they were abused by their former owners is unlikely.

• Some people are total assholes when it comes to pets.

• R9, I would find a new home for the aggressive dog and keep the nice one. Its aggressive context can't be all that narrow if you know it will have problems in another home. I had a cat like that. I took her in because her owner's son got a dog and they fought constantly; they thought the dog was the problem but it turned out the cat was the aggressor. She barely tolerated the animals who lived in my home before she got here. A friend brought her puppy over for me to meet and I had to put the Tasmanian devil in a crate while they were here. She finally went to the Happy Hunting Ground a couple of months ago, to my immense relief. Never again.

• I live on the shoreline in CT and you would not believe how many assholes think it is perfectly OK to get a dog or cat for a month or two while you are renting a beach house and at the end of your lease abandon the animal and go home. They do this at Yale too. Kids get a pet for the school term and dump it on the streets when they go back home at end of term. Total selfish fuckwads.

• Because it's just a dog or cat. I don't advocate cruelty but it is an animal. It's humans that make Fluffy and Tiger into people.

• It's heartbreaking to run across an abandoned animal. We once had a dog that just wasn't working out. She would bark throughout the night, and nothing we did could get her to stop. I decided to take her to the pound, and never regretted it. Even though it isn't easy, it's much more humane to take an unwanted animal to the pound or a shelter.

  Anonymous

• Yeah it 's just a dog or cat so it is ok to abandon them and let them be hungry or sick until they eventually get killed or just die. If we can do that with animals why not do it with poor people or crazy people? Or kids who needs them anyway.

• I work in a shelter and it's really, really hard on them. First they're angry and will growl or hiss for days, then they get extremely depressed. Some even refuse to eat, which I never knew happened to the abandoned until I started working there. The cats hide under their beds and won't come out. The dogs shake and shiver in fear in a corner. It's very hard to witness. I really wish every dog and cat had a loving home. It's really hard to see the older ones come in and were surrendered when their owner passed away. They are so confused and sad. We try to give them as much love and attention as we can. They get upset when you let them out for a play session and then you put them back in their cage. Some of the cats are so afraid they won't leave their cage so we visit them with the door open and talk, sing, to them.

• My Golden Retreiver of 15 years passed away recently. I told her every single day that I loved her and she was the best girl in the world. That is my only solice.

• I have an aunt like R2's relative. She's 77 now, and the most recent time it happened was with a dog she took in two or three years ago and then gave away about a year later. But she has spent her entire adult life doing that with both dogs and cats. She will decide she loves a breed of animal, like a bullmastiff or a Himalayan cat, and then get one, and when the dog is more than she can handle or the cat sheds too much, she gives them away, often to inappropriate homes where the anti-social cat will scratch a young child and be given to yet another home or to a shelter. She always blames the animal, too, like the Rottweiler puppy she got that was unmanageable and aggressive. It was bad breeding and a bad breed, she told everyone, not that she was a clueless fucking moron who drove the dog insane because she was so inconsistent in the way she treated it. She also hates all dogs except her own, and has a long list of reasons why Shelties, for example, are horrible dogs, because she once had a neighbor with a Shelty that she hated because it wouldn't be friendly to her. When my grandfather was elderly, after my grandmother died, someone had given him a little terrier that he loved and that gave him a lot of happiness and companionship, but one day after she had been there, the dog disappeared. Everyone in the family demanded she tell them what she had done with it, and finally she admitted she had taken it, because she hated the dog and didn't think my grandfather needed it, because it was too much trouble for him to take care of. She wouldn't say where she took it, only that she found a good home for it, which probably means the kill shelter in her town. The only dog she ever had for its entire life was a boxer she bought as a puppy that lived to be 12 or 13, but after he died, she bought three or four more boxer puppies, one after the other, trying to replace him, and when each of them turned out to have a different personality than her old dog, she would give them away and start looking for another one. She has also been extremely critical and unkind to people who acquired an adult rescue dog, because, in her opinion, if you don't get a dog as a puppy, it won't bond to you. The cunt is too stupid to know her dogs never bond to her even if they are puppies, because she's a fucking maniac who should never be allowed near a dog or cat. Oh, and she also treated her children the same way. Three of her four kids were kicked out of the house when they were teenagers, one when he was 14. And two of her four kids don't speak to her at all, and have children who have never met her. The third one finally made up with her and comes around her again, but she calls her by her first name instead of Mom.

• R16, did you ever feel like you bonded with that dog? Did you exercise the dog to stop the barking? What did you do before taking the dog to the pound? What breed was your dog?

• Bless you R18!

• R21, to answer your questions. I tried bonding with the dog, even taking her to obedience training and spending hours with her, but ultimately I would say that there was no bonding. The dog got plenty of exercise. We live on a working farm, and she ran free. That turned out to be the problem -- she would chase the animals and bark at them all day and in the middle of the night, even if she was tied up at night. She was a hyper dog and we needed a docile dog. She was a collie mix. I don't think I would never want a collie again.

  Anonymous

• Fucking breeders.

  and%20I%20don%27t%20mean%20dog%20breeders

• Get a fucking life, r19.

• R5 and R19 are ignorant, ugly, worthless pieces of shit. I hope you both die, slowly and painfully.

• I live in a slummy area of my city and see abandoned cats all the time. It's almost always natives who do this, the ones who only have children because they're too stupid and greedy to use birth control. Their child brings home a kitten or puppy, and the parent doesn't want to, you know, actually BE a parent and tell the child that no, they can't have a pet. Instead, the cunts will allow their child to adopt the animal but after a few days/weeks/months, when it gets to be inconvenient, they "accidentally" let the animal outside so it "runs away". They ALWAYS do this when the kids are at school. Particularly cruel parents will even lie and blame the kid for the loss of its pet, claiming the child left the door open when it went to school and that's how the pet got out. My elderly neighbour and I feed outdoor/stray cats and try to either rehome them or turn them in to the Humane Society. In the 5 years that we've been working together, we've rescued probably 50 cats. But there's always more. Every few months, like clockwork, we'll see neighbourhood kids with kittens, and then end up feeding the poor creatures once they're abandoned.

• LOL R26 is why I like animals more than people. Thank you for proving my point, sweetie.

• I got a house from an exiting president of a small liberal art college. He abondened his cat. it took about a year for the cat to get close to me. And it turns out to be the sweetest, most affectionate and smart cat I have ever had. I found out that the cat didn't mind to be bathed (to lessen hair ball) and didn't mind to be on a leash to be walked. I also taught him to play hide and seek. I had the cat for ten years before he passed away in a stroke. I am still sad when I think about the cat. I also learned, educators are merely prostitutes of the mind who sell their time and the opening on the face (instead time and opening down there like the real prostitutes). They have no morals and will abandon anything for their convenience.

• Agree with r4. I've adopted three rescues and every one of them has been great. I don't understand how someone could just "dump" an animal.

• R16, because of the economy a lot of shelters/pounds/ rescue organizations are so full that they won't take animals. My friend lost her job and had to go live with relatives who wouldn't let her take her 3 cats. She called every type of animal shelter/ rescue organization in the 100 mile vicinity of Atlanta. None of them were accepting "turn ins". She was so desperate and she didn't want to abandon them. She even called veterinarians trying to see if they could be euthanized. And at least 20 vets said they wouldn't put down a healthy animal. She was so upset she thought about killing herself. She didn't care that she was in the worst financial situation of her life, she just didn't know what to do with her animals. We felt so bad for her that we took them in for 8 months until she got back on her feet

• Of course, people will grizzle about animals being able to exist in the wild and athropomorphising animals. That's the whole point- pets are domesticated and through doing so, they are part of humanity, so abandoning them really is not the same as returning them to the wild.

• That's quite touching R31

• I have a friend who goes "critter hunting" every couple of week. Drives around bad neighborhoods, dumps, vacant lots, and shoots homeless animals as a service to the city, he says. He says that the budget is so low and the staff so overwhelmed that the abandoned dogs and cats situation is out of control, and they're starving and sick, and he's doing the hard job of putting them out of their misery. He says cats are suspicious but if he leaves bait for a week or so it's easier, because they come running. Dogs are a breeze. I've wondered if I should call someone. He loads them onto the back of his truck and drives them out to some land he has about 40 miles out. The coyotes and the rest take care of them, so it's not like he's leaving a mess.

• I hope he's very well trained R34, otherwise his vigilante actions are just adding to the situation.

• I don't know what to make of your post R34. It sounds so brutal but given the financial straits of some municipalities, he might be performing a necessary service. We all go on about no-kill shelters, but are pretty aware that they don't exist everywhere due to financial constraints. It's not a stretch to go one step further and see retrieval and euthanizing of strays as too expensive for some communities. Was he raised on a farm? What R35 said

• I watched my trashy neighbor go through 4 pitbull mixes. When they grew out of the cute puppy stage, she'd open the gate and let the old one run the neighborhood, no doubt hoping it would disappear (she had no car to haul them to the pound).

• unlike cats, dogs bond to the owner,not one particular home.they give love and only ask for a little food ,shelter and a little affection. at some point in life they may get so ill that they are beyond the means of the owner to pay the vet bill. this forces the owner into making choices that should be in the best interest of the dog. the choices become wiser if the owner recognizes that the most painful thing dogs endure is to be rejected and abandoned by the owner they love. the most unselfish act may be to be next to the dog comforting it as it is being painlessly euthanized. we all die,it is the quality of life ,not the quantity of years which is more important.

  barry