What is Ethical Rehoming?

Unethical Animal Welfare societies do not make adoptions, they sell animals

Many animal-welfare societies more or less "shovel animals off the back of a truck". They sell as many animals as they can as fast as they can, no questions asked. Pay your money and you get your dog - or cat, or rabbit.

They sell them sick - with rotten teeth, ear, eye and skin infections, and surgery needed. Large dogs tend to be destroyed if not sold quickly and smaller dog are held onto longer as there is a much larger market for those.

They do no screening at all, or just form filling-out with no home checks, and no follow-up phone calls to see if there are problems that need assistance with.

If the animal's new owner phones to say the animal is sick or has bitten or has separation anxiety, almost never is any assistance offered - just the grim advice that they can "bring it back" with the statement that the animal will be killed or might be killed.

Dogs may be sold to people who will chain them or leave them all day in a yard. Any animal may be sold to an abuser. Double-screening, home checks and many follow-up calls can't absolutely guarantee that a society has not given an animal to a neglectful or abusive owner, but those things narrow the odds greatly in favour of the animal's future happiness and well-being.

Many of these unethical societies have temperament assessment tests that justify killing many hard-to-sell animals: animals which require money and time. These societies use the "adoptable/unadoptable" criteria to determine which animals are killed. Ringworm and upper respiratory syndrome (colds) are reasons to label the animal "unadoptable". The "unadoptable" label is used constantly in these societies' P.R. to explain that it was the animal's fault that it was killed.

The MaxFund - There is no pre-sorting of animals into "adoptable" and "non-adoptable" categories, discarding the so-called "unadoptable."
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Monterey County Animal Control in California - expands the term "unadoptable" to any animal it fails to find a home for! The way the law reads is you can euthanize any unadoptable animal, but it also allows each shelter to come up with its own definition of ''unadoptable.''
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