dog adoption Archives - We live in a flat

Sonel’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Family
#1 Her family of used toys, donated from a friend
#2 A t-shirt commemorating her sister, who had passed on

This photo was taken probably somewhere in March. The T-shirt shows Donna’s birth sister, who has passed on. You can read more about her sister here.

While Donna is a local mongrel, she was never a stray like some of the other local mongrels in the shelter. You see, Donna was conceived and born at the shelter. She and the rest of the litter were the unplanned children for a couple of dogs slated to be neutered but have not yet had the procedure done.

It was thus why I had mixed feelings when I read a post about terminating pet pregnancy recently. On the one hand, terminating a litter of puppies will help by not adding additional strain to an already overcrowded shelter support system. But on the other hand, I also can’t help but be glad that the shelter kept the puppies of the already pregnant mother dog or there would not be a Donna. :P

I did write before that when we explored adopting a dog, we visited and wrote to various shelters and the SPCA. None of the dogs left a strong impression on us. And we might just as easily have gone the other way, just continued with our busy lives and not adopted a dog at all.

But we got lucky, we met Donna. And we are still lucky today that we don’t have the problems that some of the other adopters of the same shelter seem to experience – aggression against other dogs, snapping at children, destroying the furniture – things that got some of the dogs returned.

We are lucky.

Life is never black and white. Humans make choices that they either believe make themselves better people or are choices that they just have to live with. The choice is really down to the individual or collective of people. A pregnant dog would not have a choice if the humans decide to take away her unborn puppies. As the guardian, a human that lets the puppies live and is committed to their well-being for their entire lives cannot be faulted. Neither is the responsible abortion of puppies wrong if no one would commit to them.

All I can say is Donna, who was adopted then returned, went on home stay than returned again, got lucky and so did we. And this blog exists documenting the minutiae of everyday, the good and the awful, so that hopefully people who are thinking of getting a dog for their family and happen to visit our blog will seriously consider before taking the plunge. And if they do intend to get a dog, I hope they would consider adopting one.

Quite sometime back, I saw this documentary on TV – I love you, mummy. It basically documents an American family’s adoption of a child from China.

Now this was not a puppy or a shelter dog but an 8-year-old human child. Although she was abandoned as a baby, she had grown to view the Chinese foster family she lived with as her own. The foster mother was her mother and not the new adopted American mother. The foster siblings her real siblings and not her new siblings from her adopted family. Was it hard for the Chinese foster family to give up the child? I do not know the machinery of China’s fostering programs. But the Chinese foster family was on board for a reason I find hard to argue with. They explained that the international adoption was her best chance in life. She was born with clubfoot and dropped wrists and they feared she would have a hard time as an adult if she had stayed in China.

The documentary was emotionally hard to watch.

Puppies adopted and then returned to the shelter again when they are in their “terrible twos” may cry, may retreat into a corner as they struggle with their new circumstances. The child may be adopted by new parents but at the same time, wouldn’t she feel a conflicting sense of abandonment? What complex emotions does an 8-year-old child feel?

She struggled and she cried. She was the alien in a new country living among people who look not at all like her and who don’t speak her language. She can keep crying about how terrible she feels but no one can comfort her back in the language she understands.

It must have been difficult for the adoptive parents as well, taking a strange child (no matter how much they wanted her) who did not want them, who wanted to go home and who can’t communicate to them when she is hurting physically.

But as it is with life, people adjust when they are forced to it, no matter how difficult the circumstances. They make do. They adapt. And so the adopted child learnt to get along with the other children in the family and also a different set of expectations from her new parents. She learnt English. She gradually forgot her mother tongue.

The manifestations of love by man is manifold. Giving up a child with the hope that the child may have a chance at a better life even knowing that it would be very difficult for the child. Taking in a reluctant child that protests against being taken in and refuses to acknowledge you as family. Learning to be comfortable with and care for a strange new family that you have been forced into and had to depend on in order to survive.

The responsibility one takes on and the endurance and commitment the family, including the child, needed to put in to making the adoption work is perhaps hard to conceive unless one finds oneself in their shoes. Love alone is not enough. Now somebody tell this irrepressible dog please! :P