Why do people think that they have to have an expensive pure breed dog when there are so many unwanted great dogs who need homes?
I don’t know where you are located in the world, but here is the breakdown in the US.
- There are 80 million owned dogs in the US (pets and working animals)
- 8 million people a year are looking to buy/get a dog or puppy
- The total shelter and rescue intake of the US is about 3.2 million dogs a year
- of these, 6–700,000 are strays successfully returned to their original owners
- of these, even the most stringent no-kill advocate would estimate that another 10% (at least) are not adoptable - that is, at least 260,000 of these dogs are too ill or too aggressive to be adopted and any sensible person would euthanize them for their own good as well as the safety of others.
- the actual number euthanized is around 650,000
So we have a situation where 1 in 4 dogs in the US is already adopted from a shelter or rescue… and there are only another ~400,000 (very high estimate) dogs that could possibly be adoptable and another 6 million homes looking to get a dog.
Of those 6 million homes, why do they not all adopt? Most people would like to, actually.
But the dogs in shelters are rarely purebreds with predictable combinations of traits (Katie Bjorkman's answer to Why do people pay thousands for purebred dogs when there’s purebred dogs you can adopt?) most are actually only a handful of breeds, similar in age, and with similar traits (Katie Bjorkman's answer to What dog breeds and ages do you typically find in an animal shelter? What won’t you find?).
If you are a home that needs, for example, something that is any of the following:
- Smaller than 40 lbs
- Hypoallergenic coat type
- Good with cats
- Safe with small kids
- No excessive barking/whining/howling/separation anxiety
- A less-strong or smaller person can physically be safe walking on a leash
- Doesn’t need more than an hour of exercise/training each day to be happy and healthy
- Can be confined with a 4–5′ fence flush with the ground but not buried rather than jumping or digging out
- Not a breed/mix that is banned for renters, military bases, or HOAs
Then you are going to have a hard time finding it in rescue. I think you should still give it a look - I have found many great dogs in rescue, though it sometimes took me literally a year or more to do it - but don’t pretend that:
- There are enough (or a huge surplus) of shelter and rescue dogs versus demand
- Dogs are fungible so that senior citizen who would be perfect with a Havanese should get that untrained Boxer-Pit-Lab mix with separation anxiety from the shelter instead of a suitable dog from a reputable breeder