Why Are There So Many Dogs in Rescue? | Understanding the Crisis with FMK9
Having started my career with dogs working in rescue, I have seen countless dogs signed over into rescues for all manner of different reasons ranging from the sad death of an owner to the owners being unable to manage their dogs behaviour.
In this blog post we are only going to discuss the dogs being signed over for behavioural reasons and in my opinion, the main reasons for this.
Owners not doing research into the breed: This is becoming an increasingly common reason for dogs being signed over to rescue centre's. There has been a huge increase in people going to breeders and buying dogs that have been bred for a very specific purpose and the owners have done very little or often absolutely zero research on how to fulfil these dogs or how to meet any of their needs. In my experience these dogs tend to be; Belgian malinois, border collies, dachshunds, cane corsos, Dutch herders and patterdale terriers to name a few. Now don’t get me wrong these are absolutely fantastic dogs for the right people but they are all dogs with insanely high drives and designed to work very specific jobs but unfortunately they are often bought by people who have seen deeply impressive videos on social media without understanding the skill and dedication of the handlers and unfortunately these dogs don’t get the fulfilment or an outlet for their breed specific behaviours so more often than not they find an outlet themselves which can take the form of reactivity, resource guarding,barking, shadow chasing, destructive behaviour, chasing livestock and much more.
If every aspiring dog owner did the research on the breeds they want to check they can actually provide the dog with the life it deserves and every breeder checked to see if their customers had done this then we could drastically reduce the number of dogs being signed over to rescues.
Backyard Breeders: I have worked first hand rehabilitating, retraining and rehoming countless dogs. Unfortunately far too often I was working with some extremely difficult dogs that quite frankly should never have been born. Now before you shout at me, let me explain. These dogs had been bred by the lowest scum on earth to be status dogs, to be fighting dogs and to do badger baiting. To achieve effective dogs to force to do these horrific activities they bred dogs with enormous drives with dogs with enormous physical strength and endurance. An example of this was a dog I worked with who was a Belgian Malinois X Pitbull X bull herder X American pitbull. Now if you payed attention to the paragraph above, you will know why that is a serious specialist dog and it’s one thing retraining that dog but it’s a whole other thing to find a suitable home for him (good news, we did !….. but it took 3 years). As you can imagine these breeders have no principles or morals and will sell these powerhouses of dogs to anyone that dangles a wad of cash in front of their greedy noses so unfortunately without stricter laws and sentences these scumbags will continue churning out these dogs and they will continue ending up in rescue centres, and that’s if they’re lucky.
Owners not consulting a good trainer: Small behavioural problems are often allowed to grow and spiral out of control without intervention and it’s the dogs with the serious behavioural problems that get signed over to rescues. There are many reasons for this, the first being that owners are often unwilling to spend money on a dog trainer and see rescue centres as get out of jail free cards. The second being that many dog trainers quite frankly charge too much money and often don’t actually solve the problem or use either ineffective methods or methods that exacerbate the problem. This is why I don’t buy into either side of the force free vs balanced argument as we frequently see the results of bad training on both sides of the equation. This is why at FMK9 we keep our prices down and offer a full refund if we don’t believe the training is working or we continue working free of charge until the matter is resolved.
For more information on what to look for in a good dog trainer, see our next blog.
Thankyou for reading and if you are still with us and want a good dog rescue centres to support- visit our friends at sydrescue.org.uk