Adoption Doubts?

This is something we have hoped to avoid writing about, but the time has come to address an issue that is happening more and more often. If you are having significant doubts about adopting a greyhound, then PLEASE let us know in advance. Even if it is the morning of your adoption. We would much rather cancel your adoption and reschedule it for another day. Although it may not give us time to schedule an in-home with another potential adopter, it will at least save the time of our volunteers.

To be clear, when your in-home visit is scheduled, and our volunteers come to your house, we are fully expecting you to adopt a dog that day.  Every one in the family needs to be on board with the adoption. It is not a personal meet & greet to see which dogs you like or who you clique with. You are making your choice based on the dog’s personality. Not one based on their color, their age, who they remind you of, or how tall/short of big/small they are. While there is no fool-proof process in selecting the hounds which we feel are a best fit for your home, we take pride in our success rate and how our process works. 

Every one of our volunteers puts in the work required because we love this breed. Nobody – not one – of our volunteers are paid for the work we do. We have families. We have jobs. We have friends. We pay for our own gas to drive to your home. People are often surprised to discover one of our volunteers had to drive anywhere from 1-3 hours to get to their home with their foster dog. That is potentially 2+ hours of driving one way, another 2-3 hours for the in-home, and then another 2+ hour drive home. Our volunteers can easily dedicate an entire weekend day for a single dog to be adopted. When you decide not to adopt you have taken away time that is precious to our volunteers. That is time away from our families and friends that we cannot get back.

From time to time we get suggestions, often not so friendly, on how we should better run our group in order to speed up the adoption process. We are sympathetic and understand the frustration that can come having to wait for your in-home to get scheduled. This year has brought in an unprecedented number of applications creating a never-ending backlog. Although we have a large number of volunteers within our group, only a few select individuals are qualified to handle the actual adoption visit. That is why it is so detrimental when a dog does not get selected at an in-home. Not only have we lost that day to do another adoption (or potentially 2 other adoptions depending on the situation), but now we have to reschedule your visit which puts new applications even further out.

To combat this issue, and effective immediately, we will begin adding a $50 fee to the adoption cost for a rescheduled visit. In addition to the fee, your application will go to the back of the queue for rescheduling. This ONLY applies to individuals that choose not to adopt for frivolous reasons. There are legitimate instances when a dog should not be adopted, such as an issue with cats in the home, how the greyhounds react to another dog, and so forth. In those extremely rare cases the fee will not be applied. Our group has never, and will never, try to force a dog on someone or into a home that is not a proper fit. That is not what this is about, but we feel something must be done to address this problem as it is happening more frequently.

Make no mistake – we want you to adopt from our group and become part of the Allies family. Our volunteers are doing the best they can and they want your adoption to be a success. All we can do is to ask for your continued patience and our promise that the wait will be worth it.