People Who Dump Animals At A Shelter

In my industry, there are many caring people. After all, it is a caring industry. We care for humans and animals. We post about abandoned, neglected, and abused animals on social media. We do our best to raise awareness. I do wonder, however, about the people who dump their animals at a shelter.

On the one hand, it is important to stress the need for that animal to be rescued. This is an animal who has been most probably very much loved and cared for for years. It has most probably spent most of its life with its human family or human companion. This is not a wild animal who can find love, affection, family, food, and shelter on its own. And to top it all, this is a very distressed animal who is grieving the loss of its human family or companion. And it is at risk of being euthanized if not adopted by a certain time, depending on the shelter policy. Therefore, it is crucially important for the caring people of this world to spread the word about this animal and get it adopted as soon as possible. A sad picture and heart-rending words on social media are essential to capturing the attention of a potential adopter.

This attracts a flurry of strong emotion condemning the human element that abandoned this previously beloved pet. People chirp in, with heart-felt indignation, shock, and disgust. Yes, this is disgusting, it is shocking, it is tragic, it is wrong. But what if the dumped animal is not purposely callously dumped but lovingly left?

There is a very thin line between lovingly leaving a pet and callously dumping them. So where do we draw the line?

Well, there are many extenuating circumstances in which the human person or family get into a position where it is perceived that there is no other way out. A few examples include a landlord or building management team having a strict no pets policy and the human or humans finding nowhere else to live; family breakup and ensuing poverty that mean the human carer is no longer able to buy pet food; illness putting the human in a financial, housing, or physical disability where they can no longer think of a way to look after the pet; death of the human carer, with the carer's family unable to adopt the pet, perhaps because they have a no-pet policy where they live, are unable to look after a big dog in a small property, or cannot see how to pay to fly the pet over to where they live; and the human family having a member that develops serious allergic reactions to the pet and not knowing what effective treatments are available. These are just a few reasons that I could think of from memory. Of course, when we are more resourceful, we can find a way even when the care for a pet seems impossible. But we are not talking about people in a resourceful state of mind.

None of us are 100% immune from getting a devastating disease or accident. We are all certainly going to die at some point. None of us are 100% able to find a reliable human to take over - for example, what if the reliable humans of our choice all died in the same accident that we suffered?

We are all capable of loving an animal enough though to leave it in the trusted hands of an appropriate pet shelter. Then the pictures and heart-rending messages can reach out on social media, to a human more fortunate, in whose caring arms the pet finds the love it so deserves