PUB

I sit on my living room couch with a pillow behind my back and a book in my lap. Draped over my legs is my puppy Chloe, a salt and pepper Schnauzer/Terrier/Poodle mix with a white mo-hawk cutting a line straight between her ears. She and I have conveniently forgotten for the time being that she’s not technically  supposed to be on the couch.

I turn the page and lift my hand to scratch the head of our other companion, Madorie, a fat, black and white cat of the Manx variety - known for their lack of full-length tails - who sleeps sprawled on the back of the couch. Her massive white belly with its single black spot waits to be rubbed (on Madorie’s own time, of course). She lazily lifts an eyelid to see who has disturbed her as my hand touches her head, and gives a satisfied purr before rolling over with a struggle and putting her back to me.

Of the five pets that have joined our family over the years, three of them--Madorie, Chloe, and my mom’s cat Lexi--are rescue animals. It was lucky we found them, too. The American Humane Association estimates that in shelters each year, close to 3.7 million animals will be euthanized. In addition to this, Animal Planet states that the percentage of owners who will reclaim their lost pets is only about 2 to 5 percent for cats and 30 percent for dogs.

The growth in the animal population is important to consider. There just aren’t enough shelters to handle the six to eight million animals brought to them each year or enough families willing to adopt them; because of this overpopulation, millions of loving animals are killed. So sure, a brand-spanking new purebred litter of puppies may be nice to think about, but before you decide to wait for a new puppy to be born with your name on it, maybe you should consider helping out with the overwhelming animal population problem first. You could be saving a life.

There are many reasons why a pet (purebred, designer, or otherwise) may have been abandoned or given up for adoption by its owners, and many of them don’t have to do with the pet’s behavior or temperament. In many instances, the owners may not be able to afford to care for the animal if it becomes ill or injured. Other reasons include lack of time to care for the pet, the death of a previous owner, a move to a nursing home, the birth introduction of children into the equation, or even divorce. It’s sad to think about, but these simple reasons really can become a problem when the animals are taken to shelters or simply left to fend for themselves on the street. There’s nothing wrong with the cats or dogs; their owners just weren’t able to care for them anymore.

Chloe’s story is one of the saddest of all of our pets and provides a perfect example of how an animal can be left on its own for simple reasons. One of our cats had passed away about a year before my sixteenth birthday, and my mom was severely hurting. When my birthday finally did roll around, she thought it might be a good time to introduce a new addition to the family. With the intent of finding a new kitten, she waited until I had left for school, then jumped in her car and headed down to the local animal shelter. She didn’t find what she expected. Instead, there was a locked door with a sign saying that the animal shelter had moved to a different location and a small pink crate that someone had left. It moved when my mom got close to it.

My mom told me later that she had sat in front of the crate and opened the door only to have a gray blur, shaking wildly for fear of being left alone again, dart into her sweater. She sat there for a moment, almost afraid to move, unsure of what was shaking so violently. A cat? A dog? A really big rat? In the end, she was lucky. A little black nose pushed itself out of her sweater, and my mom managed to calm the puppy down enough that she stopped her constant vibrations.

When I got home, I was greeted with a shaggy new puppy. A pink collar had been settled around her neck like a badge of belonging, and she bounded playfully from one end of the room to the other, ecstatic to have found so many people that cared about her. She ran around in her new collar, jumping into everyone’s lap. She sniffed at hands and bent over backwards to lick faces that got close enough. She even danced around on her hind legs as we all leaned over to scratch her head.

Whether it was because of financial problems or simply difficulty in training her (she was a puppy after all, no older than eight or nine months from what the vet told us), her original owners hadn’t been able to care for her any longer, We think they must have dropped her off at night, too, otherwise they might have seen the sign and taken her somewhere else. She still has trouble driving in the car with us at night; you can see the anxiety there, the fear that she will be left again.

We still aren’t sure where Madorie came from, but we suspect she was left in the field that sits behind our house (why anyone would do such a thing is beyond me). Our neighbor actually found her first. Madorie had wandered into her garage and caught the attention of the family’s big Golden Retriever. The dog had decided to corner her under a shelving unit and was barking up a storm, her tail wagging proudly in the air as she tried to stuff her nose into the small space. We managed to get to Madorie before the dog did.

We almost didn’t keep her because we had three pets already--two cats and a dog--and my dad thought that four would be too many. (He had no idea what he was going to get himself into later.) My parents worked to find her a home, but after some time had passed, my mom and I convinced my dad that she was already a part of the family.

After she had been living with us for some time, something weir happened. Originally, my mom thought that someone had been cruel to Madorie and removed her tail. Imagine our surprise when a repairman came into our house and asked whether we would be willing to sell her. He told us that she was a Manx, an odd breed known for its stubby tails and love of water because of its history of hunting rats on ships. Needless to say, we thanked him for the information but refused to sell her.

It may seem odd that my family found an abandoned purebred cat, but this isn’t such an odd occurrence. Of the animals that are brought to shelters, about 25 to 30 percent of them are purebreds; many shelters even have designer dogs such as Labradoodles. So although you might think you cannot get the specific dog you want, with a little extra searching on websites like petrescue.com, or by simply calling the shelter or visiting yourself, you can find a specific breed.

As you can probably tell already, animal overpopulation doesn’t help with keeping pets from being euthanized, and natural reproduction is a major contributor. The Humane Society estimates that about 6-8 million pets are sent to shelters each year. Why is this number so high? Even though there are certain human factors contributing to this, there is also the fact that cats and dogs give birth to litters consisting of more than one animal. This adds up.

Think of it this way. A cat has a litter with four kittens, two of them male and two female. If this pattern of reproduction continues for three more generations, in sixteen months, there will be twenty-nine cats without a home. Let’s drive this point home: the number of puppies and kittens born each day in the United States is 70,000. That’s quite a few of our furry friends without a home.

Our other adopted cat, Lexi, is an example of how this becomes a problem. A friend of my dad’s had been surprised to find that one of his cats had miraculously given birth to a litter of kittens. (This was a miracle because he and his family had thought the new mother was a “he.”) The shocked family decided to send them to a shelter since they couldn’t afford to take care of them. After the kittens had grown a little bit and were about to be sent on their way, we were invited over to see them.

Two orange and white males and a black and white female were passed around to hands eager to feel the soft fluff of a kitten against their fingers. The boys mewed with fright at the number of people handling them, shivering uncontrollably until they were returned to relative safety away from the crowd. Lexi, on the other hand, had yelled angrily at those who tried to deter her from her chosen path to the other end of the room. My mom and I fell in love with the uptight little kitten, and my dad consented to this final (he made this very clear to us) addition to the family.

The simple solution to overpopulation is to have your pet spayed or neutered to prevent them from having more kittens or puppies that could end up on their own somewhere. This keeps you from having to find homes for various baby animals (a time consuming task that requires for you to take care of infants while doing so - i.e. keeping their area clean, at a steady temperature, and making sure all of the animals have food and water) and keeps the population down, preventing the possibility that one of them or their offspring will be one of the unlucky ones to end up in a shelter. In some instances, spaying and neutering is a mandatory process that must be performed before your pet may be taken home from a shelter. For example, Illinois state law requires all animals received from a humane organization to be spayed or neutered.

The pets my family has rescued have been young, but the age of a pet can also be a good reason to adopt rather than purchase a new kitten or puppy from a breeder. Older animals may require less training because many have lived in homes previously where they would have acquired basic manners. Also, adult pets tend to work better with families that have children because they tend to be calmer and more patient. For example, as cats grow older, they usually choose to lounge around the house by themselves and refrain from jumping and climbing, making them good pets for people who have a busy lifestyle and cannot always be at home. Likewise, older dogs need less exercise and will be less active as a result.

I’ll be the first to say that breeders have their perks; my family purchased two pets—Sage, a purebred white Border Collie with reddish-brown spots, and another Manx cat named Zelda. By purchasing a purebred, you know about potential genetic disorders the breed may have, it’s sometimes easier to find the breed you’re looking for, and you know more about its background. However, we have also worked to help other pets who aren’t lucky enough to have distinguishing papers or a loving family to care for them. We’ve been the foster parents of a litter of kittens when the mother died; we’ve taken in dogs off the street when we found them walking along the side of the road; we’ve gotten on our hands and knees to coax cats out from under cars and out of other small spaces. My mom has even gone so far as to take a kitten to someone’s house to be adopted and come back with another cat in tow when she saw the conditions it was living in. We try to help when we can, but we aren’t able to help every animal we find and most of them we don’t find at all.

When faced with the facts concerning why people give up their pets to shelters and the sheer number of those poor animals that are euthanized, why wouldn’t you choose to adopt rather than buy a pet from a breeder? Wouldn’t you like to look into your pet’s eyes and know that you had saved at least one life that could have been extinguished merely because a shelter lacked the space to house them or the food to feed them?

So the next time you decide that you want to add a little furry friend to your family, don’t just run out and sign up for the poodle you’ve been wanting since you were six years old when you saw it in passing while watching 101 Dalmatians. Head down to your nearest shelter and take a look at all the animals who have fallen on hard times but still want a loving home and a special person to call family. You may just find that your next best friend has been waiting for you to find them.

I know mine were.