adoption Archives - We live in a flat

Tag: adoption

Adoptable dogs in Singapore Ikea store

On May 21, 2014

Home for Hope campaign helps dog shelters reach out to homeowners at Ikea

Locally in Singapore, Ikea is currently running a campaign with the shelters – Save Our Street Dogs (SOSD) and Animal Lovers League (ALL) – to help find adoptable dogs a home. Life-like standees of the dogs are placed in the Ikea store in the furniture display areas to show how “…sometimes, it takes more than a good piece of furniture to complete the home.”

standee of an adoptable dog in ikea store

The website Home for Hope shows the dogs that are looking for good homes.

Home for hope website screenshot

Of the 36 dogs listed, two have been labelled as adopted since the campaign launched this month (at time of writing this article).

Unfortunately, the website does not show which dogs are HDB-approved. But the great thing about the website is that you can see how some of these dogs behave by looking at the videos of the photo shoot. Here’s two dogs, not yet adopted at time of writing, with especially waggy tails.

Home for hope website screenshots

Consolidated data from 9 welfare groups on adoptadog.com makes adoption easier for potential adopters

In the same month, I discovered the website adoptadog.sg on Facebook. It doesn’t look as slick as Home for Hope nor does it have videos. But the functionality! Get this, you can search by age range, gender and whether it is HDB-approved or not on their database. Because who wants to adopt a dog that you may possibly be forced to re-home because you live in an HDB flat?

And I say this is awesome because when I was looking to adopt Donna, I only had so much time to visit 3 or 4 websites to look at what dogs are available. And to be honest I didn’t even know there were so many dog welfare groups in Singapore!

This site does it for you! It has the data from not one, not two but nine* different dog welfare groups in its database. The welfare groups are listed on the homepage. That makes finding an adoptable dog so much more efficient and effective because you now have a larger pool to shortlist from!

*The actual list comprise 10 groups but no dog shows up under the 3legsgood listing.

Adoptadog.com appears to be developed by an individual. The site is meant to be self-regulating so hopefully the dog shelters and the developer will continue to support and update the information there.

What does a real home with a dog look like?

Now since Ikea is showing customers at their store how these dogs could potentially fit into the small living spaces that Ikea typically caters for, I thought Donna will show you real life! How she fits into living in our flat ;)

See if you can recognise which ones are the Ikea furniture.

Panting after a game of fetch with her toy hippo.
Abuses her toys, so I have to spend time with the needle.

I thought you said no sitting on the furniture, human.

Always likes to eat and chew on her beds and stain it, which is why I always look for busy patterns in the fabrics to hide the stains.

Has lots of beds scattered about the flat and still likes to nap in the middle of the floor sometimes. Mind your steps!

A pet is a great companion and addition to the household, but he/she is not a piece of furniture. A dog needs to be fed, exercised, played with, bathed, and groomed, be checked regularly by the vet and safe-guarded from specific canine ailments that can strike easily.

So adopt, with consideration, not with impulse. ;)

Note: Donna is a dog we adopted at age 3+ from Gentle Paws and Friends. We are not sponsored or paid by Ikea to write this post. We are also not affiliated with adoptadog.com but found it potentially helpful for anyone looking to adopt even after the Ikea Home for Hope campaign is over (as long as they continue to maintain it).

References
– homeforhope.sg
– Furniture mall partners animal shelters to find homes for abandoned dogs
– Ikea helping dogs find a home
– Ikea promotes dog adoption by advertising homeless dogs in its showrooms

Gotcha Day at Macritchie Reservoir

By weliveinaflat

On January 14, 2014

In Explore

dog at macritchie reservoir We adopted Donna on 12th January last year. That makes it our 1st year anniversary with a dog two days ago. We didn’t rename her but she did have to adjust to a new home, a bigger space to roam in and more things to chew on that were not supposed to be discovered in the first place. Now that a year has passed,

Christmas week, a year ago and today

By weliveinaflat

On December 24, 2013

In Behaviour

sleeping dog for Christmas post Happy Christmas Eve and have a merry week everyone.
I have a short fictional piece for you because I don’t pretend to know what my dog is thinking. :P It is inspired by observations of Donna last year when she was still in the shelter and this year, Donna is sleeping as I typed this. Planning to get Donna a nice fat juicy steak for Christmas Day tomorrow, since we have to be off to our relatives later today without her.

Re-homed dog abandons bear

By weliveinaflat

On November 17, 2013

In Photography

No love lost between this two!

Newsflash: A re-homed local mongrel dog has been caught on camera abandoning her pre-loved toy bear. Donna the local mongrel refused to share her bed with the teddy bear, so much so that she was willing to give up the bed to the bear. When asked why she thought the bear too repulsive to be near, Donna replied that she couldn’t sleep with the bear there and the human clicking away on her phone camera on the other end. The human cannot be reached for comment.

Do you believe in karma?

By weliveinaflat

On March 25, 2013

In Dog & You

When I was a young school going kid still, I was like the typically child with a fascination for small animals. I would pet all the street cats, only to turn my hand up to see it all covered in dirt. I would buy small cans of cat food with my pocket money and feed it the to stray cat that gave birth to kittens under one of the teacher’s table in the classroom.

And there was once, only once, we found a small kitten, my friend and I.

The kitten seem to be sick. So my resourceful friend found out where we could take it to the vet. We went there and then we took it to the SPCA. But by the time we got there, I had gotten it into my not-so-brilliant head that I would adopt the kitten. And so the SPCA staff said I should not bring the kitten in and sent me home.

But I was a young child with no real knowledge of how to go about taking care of a poor young kitten. The kitten did a wonderful job of being cute, taking small steps across our great desert of a floor and mewing piteously. But it didn’t know that it shouldn’t pee or poop on the floor and plonking it on the newspaper, like the book I had borrowed from the library had advised, didn’t work. I was a small child, I had no patience and no real understanding or empathy for the kitten.

At last, after a full day of putting up with everything, my mother lost it when the kitten made a mess on the floor yet again. She took the kitten and returned it probably to some void deck similar to where I had found it originally and that was that. I never saw it again. I was a young child, any resentment was quickly forgotten, although the memory remained.

But why am I talking about a poor abandoned kitten?

We are not Donna’s first family. She was adopted by a schoolgirl when she was a puppy. It seems like a very similar story, it seemed like the schoolgirl never really got her parents’ consent in the first place. And probably like my mother, they tried to put up with it. Eventually, Donna was returned to the shelter. Donna was lucky, she had folks at the shelter who took her in and cared for her unlike that tiny kitten from so many years ago.

We bumped into our neighbour today when we returned from Donna’s pee break. I joked that I was Donna’s servant having to take her down to do her toileting. My neighbour’s answer was that Donna must have done a lot of good deeds in her previous life to find a good home now.

Or maybe, its just my karma and what goes around comes around.

One thing for sure, the decision for making an adoption should not be left in the hands of a schoolchild. Their un-informed parents are most likely not ready for it.

Oh, and my neighbour’s primary school-going son was quick to add, if he had done a lot of good deeds in his previous life, he’d rather be a human than a dog in the next life. Tell that to Donna.

Why we adopted a homeless local mongrel

By weliveinaflat

On March 16, 2013

In Dog & You

Truthfully, we didn’t really start out with a local mongrel in mind.

We went to the SPCA and being law abiding citizens wanted to look at HDB-approved dogs. The only HDB-approved dogs they had there were two mini schnauzers that looked bedraggled and none too appealing. I had read that they were stubborn and difficult to train and honestly speaking, I didn’t really want a dog with a beard :P

We went to a big pet shop in a neighbouring town. The small puppies there were cute but we were not sure if two people with zero dog experience can successfully bring up a puppy.

We finally decided we should adopt an adult dog that should ideally be toilet-trained, medium energy and around 2 to 3 years of age so that we have many years with the dog. Should we have a child, we certainly did not want a dog that will die of old age that soon and traumatise the poor child at age 7, for example. Yes, you may accuse us of over-thinking things.

With that in mind, I googled local shelters and wrote to them. The organisations replied speedily. I was asked to provide ASD with a shortlist of dogs on their website as some were fostered out and need to be fetched back if we would like to view them. Gentle Paws appeared not to have this problem and simply directed us to where they were located so we could view the dogs. Since we had no opinion on any dog on the websites, it was simply easier to visit Gentle Paws first and hopefully have somebody who could help us through the process of finding the right dog.

Gentle Paws turned out to be a busy hive that mothers mostly strays and mongrels. I am not the most confident of people so it was easy to feel overwhelmed and out of place when you are a visitor and everyone else seemed to know what they are about here. As shared in How Donna came to us, we couldn’t really differentiate the dogs and had no strong opinion on any of them. We almost left without a conclusion, which meant we probably would have followed up with ASD and perhaps ended up with a different dog if that was the case. For all you know we may have ended up with a known HDB-approved breed or ended up as one of those pilot guinea pigs in Project Adore. Or we could have gone on to The Rehomers or The Animal Lovers League and on and on until we found a dog or gave up.

But Florence intervened and introduced Donna to us. When she was not over-excited, Donna was really docile and tractable. And of course, Florence was very good at selling how smart and trainable Donna is, etc, etc. Between ourselves, we figured she was probably a good intro to Dog 101 for total noobs like us. And so the rest is history.

And there you have it. We didn’t set out to adopt a mongrel, but HDB-approved breeds in our target age range meeting our criteria seemed almost nil in the shelters we visited at that point in time. The availability or lack of guidance in the selection of dogs for total dog newbies like us also led to us favouring one organisation over another. And if that organisation had 100% medium and large breeds that are not HDB-approved, that is just the luck of the draw for us.

Of course, we could have persisted in waiting or continued with ASD or other organisations. But here is a perfectly good dog awaiting to be adopted, behaves even better than that beagle that always barks at us from the 6th floor balcony or the dachshund at the park that escaped from its owner to chase a cat. Why should we wait when we are all ready to get on with our lives.

So many dog breeds, so many sad stories

By weliveinaflat

On March 14, 2013

In Dog & You

When we were contemplating dog ownership, I did some research on the Internet and learnt new terms such as “puppy mill”, “backyard breeders”, “animal rescue” etc, which eventually set us on the route of dog adoption, rather than buying a puppy of a known breed from a pet shop.

One of the dogs on the Internet which made a lasting impression on me was Rosie. When I showed Mr P Rosie’s picture, he wasn’t sure what it was I was showing him.

Rosie is a poor little chihuahua born from a backyard breeder with severe congenital deformities of the face, jaw, spine and legs. Despite her deformities, she managed to survive by crawling across urine soaked floors of the backyard breeder’s home through years of feces to eat what bits of food the other dogs being hoarded left behind. More about Rosie’s story here.

Rosie’s story is a very visual reminder why not to buy from any ol’ breeder but to ask questions, do our research and make sure we do buy a dog from a reputable breeder.

But reputable is not enough.

Originally broadcasted in 2008, the video below – Pedigree Dogs Exposed – dug into how breeding practices of some reputable breeders in the UK is destroying pedigree dog breeds through inbreeding and of dogs not scanned for pre-existing conditions. The investigative documentary focused particularly on winning showdogs, their health and their detrimental impact on the breed’s health when used as studs to breed puppies close to the breed standard in form. You may not want to watch this, if you cannot stomach images of dogs in pain or discomfort.

Pedigree Dogs Exposed – Three Years On
– Part 1, Part 2a, Part 2b, unable to locate part3 but you can read the summary of the remaining content on wikipedia

So yes, reputable is not enough. If we were seeking a pure bred dog, we should love your future pet and protect its health right now by making the effort to identify a socially responsible breeder that makes good health and diversity a criteria in his operations.

In the end, we decided that rather than buy, we should adopt. We know our limitations and were not looking to be all good Samaritan and adopt the first troubled shelter pup with all sorts of health conditions. But one more shelter dog adopted I guess would open up one more space for another rescue in the shelter, as long as there was an adoptable dog that fitted our criteria, there’s no reason to buy one. I’d rather save up that money to spend on better food and other stuff like heartworm preventatives and medical care for my adopted dog, especially if we had ended up adopting a breed that can be expected to have congenital conditions as it age.

Other references
– Are we breeding our dogs to extinction
– It’s not all lost with bad breeding