How to Adopt a Pet

Petfinder is the temporary home of over 297,000 adoptable pets from over 11,000 adoption groups. I bet I have your attention now. Those numbers are just staggering to me. The first time I was on their website I just sat there for a moment staring at those numbers and reflecting on what that meant. And if you haven't been into a shelter in a while it brings up emotions of excitement about adopting and sadness at the same time thinking about the animals that aren't adopted and will be euthanized.

Wow! I sat down to write this article about all the pets that so terribly need your help and got all choked up, just thinking about them. You see this spring our beloved dog Neko passed away from old age. She was a little over twelve. Our other dog Desarae, just grieved for her terribly, because she didn't know of a life without her.

After weeks went by Desarae would sit by my side every afternoon and cry. She grieved for Neko and she was just darn lonely and had no one to play with. I decided to look on line to see if I could find some information about where we might be able to adopt a pet from.

Did we luck out. We found this wonderful organization called Petfinder. I could not believe my luck in finding this organization. We live in the middle of the desert about 30 miles away from the closest cities. There isn't even any newspaper delivery out here to be able to look for pets for sale or pets that were available. So, on line we found Petfinder.

This is one of the neatest websites. With the newest technology available, you can even see pictures of the pets they have up for adoption and when they are available for adoption. The pets are held for a certain number of days to give the real owners a chance to locate them before they are available for adoption. I had no clue that organizations were making such good use of the Internet with respect to pet adoptions. I am excited about that concept! Can you tell?

So, I bet your waiting to hear weather we found a dog through Petfinder. You bet! Folks we came away from the rescue center with one of the very best pets we have ever had. There is a charge to you for adopting these pets that need rescuing so badly. I was able to scrounge up the money. For us, it was the best $92.00 we ever spent. The charges can very by the different shelters. Our $92.00 covered spaying or neutering, distemper vaccination, rabies vaccination and even a microchip. All in all I think thats pretty reasonable. And it also included a free wellness check up. You can take your new pet to a clinic they recommend. They will give him or her a health checkup to make sure it will meet your needs. They will tell you of any suspected problems then and there. If this new pet does have problems and you don't feel that you can deal with the situation you can take it back to the shelter. Of course there is a time limit on returning the pet.

Petfinder is an organization that can supply you with a multitude of information about adopting pets. There's a guide to house training, You can locate shelters by distance and by state. There are dog and cat breed directories, along with cat and dog training videos. Then there's the local and classified area for pet classifieds, lost pets, found pets and you can post free classifieds about your pet.

It has a really comprehensive section called Search For A Pet. Here is where you can get down to detailed specifics of the type of pet you are looking for and where they are located. You fill in all the information for the fields shown. The animal type for example cat, dog, horse etc. The breed. You can click on all, and see every type of breed imaginable. You can specify the age, such as baby, young, adult and senior. Specify the size of small, medium, large or extra large. The gender and the location by city, state, Provence and even by the zip code.

If you think you have the requirements for adopting a pet, than I urge you to give it some serious thought. Do you have the yard requirements? Do you have some considerable time to take care of this new pet? Do you have the patience for training it? I once thought we adopted Jessy from the shelter supplied by Petfinder, but it turned out to be a two way street. Jessy adopted us as well!

If your curious Desarae is a two year old female mix of mainly Retriever. Jessy is a male now nine months old and is part Retriever, Shepherd and Hound dog. They play together morning, noon and night. And no, Desarae doesn't sit around and cry any more.

I did some Internet searches about pet adoption and pet rescue. Again the numbers are huge. Last month alone on one search engine there were 368,000 searches done for "pet dog". "Adopt a cat" had 9,000 searches and "dog rescue" had 246,000 searches in one month. So, you can see there is an awful lot of interest in trying to save all these wonderful pets. Lets help them out. I just put a link on my home page to petfinder.com. If we all pitch in and put up a link to their wonderful caring site, perhaps we can all play a role in pet rescue and pet adoption.