Arthur is still here with us, despite attempts to find another cat-free foster home, and I have been posting his photo and description on every lost dog and social networking site I can find. Last night, I was browsing through older entries on lostdog.ie and I found a photo that looked just like him! Initially excited, thinking I had found a family who were missing him, I read the accompanying text and quickly realized that while it was indeed Arthur, it was also posted by the couple who had supposedly found him as a stray and contacted HUG to take him in as a rescue. You can read the full entry here, but basically, they adopted Arthur (formally known as Avon) at 8 weeks old from an ISPCA shelter, they didn’t expect him to grow so large, couldn’t handle his behaviour issues and were therefore looking to re-home him. So much for the story they sold us in order to take him off their hands, of the stray that they coaxed into their home, and fed for a couple of weeks out of the goodness of their hearts!
Since then, I have discovered that they had also contacted Orchard Greyhound Sanctuary, who were going to try and help them work through his behaviour issues, but they never followed through and in the meantime contacted HUG with their story about finding a stray dog and asking us to take him in. If they did originally adopt him from the SPCA, I would like to find out which one and what their policies are regarding the surrender of previously adopted dogs. It is frustrating in dog rescue when puppies are the easiest to find homes for with their cute faces and big eyes, but some potential adopters have not always considered what type of dog they will grow into and are unprepared to give them adequate training, so they end up back in another rescue, now as an adult dog, full of issues and anxieties and therefore much harder to re-home. I’m not quite sure what we are going to do with Arthur now, I would still like to try and find him a good home, I just wish it wasn’t under the false pretense that brought him to us in the first place!
Nervous boy, curled up by my feet at my desk
I hope there is something you can do. They KNEW his history; medical, behavioural – and chose to lie and not share it in order to offload a complicated animal quickly. That breaks my heart – it isn’t as if you can’t surrender an animal, without lies, in order to give it a better chance. Yes, the shelter might have given them grief for doing so, but not as much as they deserve for pulling this on you, and HUG.
Sigh… To forward this poor guy on, without relaying his issues and behavior — amid such lies — is simply inexcusable. How can they not think that this is going to harm him? Answer: They don’t CARE. Selfish, wrong, and ignorant. He’ll be wrought with abandonment issues, on top of it all (one of my rescues suffered a similar fate, and I’m still working through it 10 years later). Thank goodness he has you right now, but like you said, a more permanent solution is obviously needed. Poor guy.
[...] has been a long two months fostering Arthur, who continues to challenge my nerves, patience and upper body strength on a daily basis, but it [...]