My Wife loves Greyhounds. She has for many years. Over the last few years our living situation has changed and I had always told here that I never felt right having a dog while we still lived in an apartment or in some place we would be moving out of soon. I didn’t feel it was right for the dog. Still, we would attend meet and greets with some of the local Greyhound owners and she would buy books on Greyhounds.
2 Months ago we bought our first house together. It’s a nice single family house in Manassas with a big yard and lots of space. She lit up when I told her that we could look into getting a dog finally.
We contacted the local group, VAGA, and submitted an application to adopt. Shortly afterward we had our initial phone interview. In the phone interview we were very upfront an honest about anything we felt could be considered problem areas. Things like the fence that surrounds our back yard was only a 3 foot chain link fence, but that we had planned to replace it with a full privacy fence. We mentioned that until the privacy fence was in place all outside time would be supervised. Also she and I both work about 20 min away from the house so during work hours we would be gone, but I have a 17 year old son who arrives home from school by 2:30pm. The phone interview went very well and we were told that we should expect to schedule a home inspection soon.
This evening my wife came in very distraught. She had been contacted by a woman on the board for VAGA who, very rudely, told her that “You say you are going to supervise outside time but you really won’t do it” and “We have been told that before and the dog jumped the fence and got hit by a car”. She then went on to say that my teenage son was too Irresponsible to be trusted to take the dog out for a mid day walk. She said we should re-submit when we have the privacy fence in place and have hired a dog walker.
Now, what strikes me as odd was that we NEVER had a home inspection, not one of them has met us in person or seen what our fenced in back yard looks like, yet we were told that 1: We were liars about supervising the dog, we were not to be trusted to walk the dog regularly, and that my teenage son was irresponsible. Did I mention that they had never even met us?
My wife has been dreaming about owning a greyhound for far too many years to let this one go and was extremely upset after this woman berated her over the phone. Is there anyone that could lend some insight on how to handle this situation? Since we just purchased the house, we just don’t have the money to build the fence right now, it’s something we are planning for with the budget.
I really feel like this woman would rather let a greyhound be put to sleep than let a loving home take care of it.
Help?
We had the same sort of thing happen when we were looking to adopt a golden retriever here in Ohio. We've got a yard (though not all that big) and we had another dog (Hugo at the time, Maggie hadn't been born yet). We let them know that Hugo wasn't fixed yet, but we were planning on taking care of that when he reached 18 months of age. We received a response that because we hadn't had Hugo fixed we were not a candidate as it was irresponsible to have an "intact" dog over the age of 6 months (btw – Hugo was only 5 months old at the time). It really set Jen off. She wrote a long Email to them basically telling them that they didn't know what they were talking about. More and more research is confirming that on large breed dogs (Hugo is a Bernese Mountain Dog) that if you spay or nueter (SP?)them before their bones have time to fully develop them, it can cause all kinds of trouble in the future. Some of the adoption people are out of their freakin' minds.