If You Care About Pets: Don't Buy or Breed! Please Adopt!

Finally, there's a campaign about caring for pets and of love of animals I can genuinely relate to and feel comfortable supporting. I was watching Entertainment News (Channel 80 on Singapore's StarHub cable service) when there was a blurb on Kellan Lutz with the "love of his life" which just happens to be another of Man's Best Friend with him posing for a campaign poster that promotes the message to Adopt rather than Buy pets.

I have been watching Dogtown on National Geographic Wild and this is a truly excellent documentary about a pet shelter in Arizona that takes in animals that are usually more difficult to find homes because of some fault or disability, and they are nursed and trained back to their dignity of becoming more suited for social interaction and adoption.

Their stories are genuinely heroic. Because I live in a government flat, it's hardly the best place to have a four-legged pet, and because of my previous work and lifetsyle commitments (up early and out, home late and asleep), having a pet was simply out of the question.

But I have always wanted to get a dog. I have house-sat cats and they aren't difficult. I have had fish and shrimp, and my house plants are doing well. I feel like I really should progress to a real commitment and relationship... no, definitely not with another silly human!

There are just a few options I have to seriously consider before I decide I can take on a pup or an abandoned dog I can care for. It will have to be trained and social, for sure. No way I can handle a personality that is more challenging than my own!

But for now, I think I will commit to knowing more about these animals and their needs at the shelters before I decide if there's one for me to take home. Will the dog get on the bed? What dog doesn't?

So, please, if you say you genuinely care for animals and love them. There are really so many dying in shelters and being abandoned. No Trade; don't breed or buy them! Adopt them. Nothing is better than caring for the abandoned dogs than adding to a trade that is causing so many of these pets to eventually be euthanised. This is one cause I believe that's worth supporting.