Hopefully you would avoid buying a puppy from a local pet shop, as a large proportion of those dogs come from puppy mills. Perhaps the best method, in terms of being helpful to society in general, is to adopt a dog from a local animal shelter. Adopting a dog brings a new friend in your life, in addition to helping to decrease the amount of homeless and unwanted dogs in your area. Unless the shelter is a no kill facility, it will also save a dog’s life. Animal lovers everywhere champion the adoption of dogs from shelters as opposed to any other means of bringing home a new pet for this reason alone, but there are additional reasons to choose the adoption option.

• Adopted pets have been examined by a vet and have been given a clean bill of health
• shelters can often give impartial information regarding a dog’s history, and its temperament
• Adopting a pet frees space in the shelter for another puppy to be saved and adopted out

When you charity for dogs you can be sure the staff in the shelter has had the puppy examined by a vet for diseases and parasites and that the dog has had its shots. This is not always true of dogs obtained by other means like taking on an older dog from a personal advertisement dog free to good home. The dogs in a shelter do not consist only of strays dogs or dogs which have been cruelly abandoned, but are often turned into the shelter by former owners for a variety of reasons. At these times, the shelter collects as much information about the dog as possible, including whether it is good with kids, how much it barks, how lively or obedient it is, whether it is housebroken, and other significant details.

While it is true that this advice is just as good as the honesty of the previous owner, it is usually reasonably accurate. Although adopted dogs are subject to behavioral difficulties, the majority of these problems are quite common among dogs, adopted or not. These include digging, jumping up on people, jumping fences, barking and nipping. They should not dissuade you from adopting a dog. There are proven, easy-to-follow solutions to all these offences. animal shelters provide a valuable service to the community by maintaining the streets as free of stray animals as possible. Because lots of them do so with minimum public funding or governmental support, they are quite limited in the amount of dogs they could have in the shelter at any given time. The only way they can bring in more stray animals is if they remove the ones they currently have. This is accomplished through adoption or euthanasia. Obviously they would rather have the dogs adopted rather than put to sleep. Adopting a dog may very well not just save the dog’s life, but it allows the shelter to bring in another dog in its place.