HOMING PROCESS: Essential Reading Prior to Your Application
Our Homing Team:
If you are considering adopting one of our dogs, our Homing Questionnaire is the first point of enquiry. It is always the first step in our rehoming process. We do not have telephone resources.
Our volunteer team is small. We do not have the manpower available to discuss our dogs in sufficient depth to answer your questions before we receive an application from you. A Fosterer may know their dog in their limited circumstances, as the dog’s behaviour emerges, but won’t have the depth of experience to translate through to more varied situations based on the reading of the breed and a specific dog’s integral skills.
Our Homing Team may direct you to another dog who is more suitable for your lifestyle, so discussions have to be through the homing team – hence the application. Families need to meet our criteria first: i.e. being serious about adopting a dog within seven days, as well as being prepped and ready. Our Homing Questionnaire is comprehensive and we will need answers to all the questions for us to successfully match a suitable dog to your family. Otherwise, applicants end up wasting their time and ours too. We will be blunt and direct, and you may think we are washing away your dreams, but homing a dog needs to be founded in realism. The aim of our guidance and process is to achieve a positive outcome for our dog and its adoptive family.
Our Forum is our Rescue Centre. Browse. Each dog’s title bar on the Forum states their name, breed, age and location. Please do not post questions and claims on the Forum. We will probably be talking with families about various dogs, and it can upset those families to think that we have reserved a dog for another person. We can only answer Homing Questionnaires. We strive to understand the complexity of your circumstances and home situation as provided by you in your Homing Questionnaire. We aim to be thorough and professional during the course of our our homing procedure.
Rehoming Preparation Factors Include:
Do not apply if you are planning a holiday, your fencing is broken, you are in the process of building work or house move.
Please note we have an expectation that you can commit to a quiet settling of up to six weeks after you have adopted
Activities and Plans:
Garden boundaries must be checked, repaired and ideally photographed/videoed. Are your garden boundaries appropriate for the type of dog you are applying for? First time dog owners should investigate local positive training classes or one to one training sessions.
Neutering Policy:
Complete our Homing Questionnaire:
Interview and Home Check:
After our discussion, we will then arrange a home check and/or possibly a vet reference. We do this quickly, and arrange for you to meet selected appropriate dog(s) with the view to homing. This is not a long drawn-out procedure. From first enquiry, you may find yourself with a waggy tail in your home within 3-5 days. It is clearly in the interest of our dogs, and the many dogs looking for rescue places, to achieve this process as speedily as possible. And this is why we ask you… Are you ready?
Respect:
We look for families who want our dogs as included family members, and not closed off in the kitchen at night and when left, and only allowed on the sofa on invite. Our attitude and approach is to work with our dog in the frame of loving kindness, and respect their breed traits. For example, a Shepherd will very often have ‘guarding traits’; ‘Working Terrier’ types can kill small furries or cats; Bull breeds are emotional and need to engage, and when young will jump up to greet you – they can be mouthy. Some of our dogs need to be only pets, and some need to live with at least one other dog.
We ask you to respect our time and experience: we are experts in our field. We treat your application as a job interview/dog interview! If you fail to impress us, we may not want to take the process further, as we need to trust that we are placing our dogs in capable hands. We are looking for flexibility, tolerance, and a responsible attitude while you support a homeless dog to build its skills and to settle in your home.
Our adoption process is just that. It is not a purchase/retail process. It is a vetting process to try to ensure our dog will be well cared for, kept safe and hopefully live out the rest of its days in your loving care.
If we receive abuse, we have then lost an enduring trusting relationship with our dogs’ potential owners – so please do not go further. An abusive email or phone conversation signals a completion of the relationship. We most often receive abuse when a family are focused only on the looks of a particular dog and do not want to listen to us when we relay to them the needs/homing requirements of that dog.
Our potential families must demonstrate empathy for our kennelled dogs, who don’t deserve an hour longer in kennels – an extremely stressful environment. That is why we put ourselves out there to get our dogs into their rightful homes. The pace we work at may not suit you, but it suits our dogs. If you want to approach dog ownership casually and take your time, please go to a large Rescue Centre. But be aware that until you are home checked, no dog is reserved, so you may be daydreaming about a dog who is already off into their home before your visit.
Off Lead Advice:
Current Dog Law:
A few facts:
Rescue Remedies is a responsible rescue. We help council pound ‘death row dogs’ that have been handed in as supposed strays, or who were genuinely stray from being lost off lead or escaping from insecure gardens. Council pound dogs get seven days to be reclaimed, and often cost at least £100 to reclaim. Even when owners claim they sold their dogs on, or deny ever owning them, from April 6 2016, owners will face hefty fines for failing to change ownership details on their dog’s microchip.
Owner Considerations:
IF OR WHEN a member of public gets inadvertently or accidentally bitten, for example, by an over excited dog patted by a stranger, or during the separation of 2 dogs, I will stand by the dog when a police officer visits, and I receive a Control Order or possibly a ‘Destruction Order’, which could result in my dog being put to sleep. Or I will accept my dog may be seized and fight for it through the courts to prove its character, and save my much treasured pet’s life.
OUTCOME:
AFTERMATH:
Some Rescue Remedies rehomings, where we trusted first time owners to take their dog and themselves on a training course, have not done so, but call in a behaviourist within weeks of homing, placing the blame on the dog. Some fail to grasp basic breed traits which give them chase drive and exuberance, or forget the impoverished background the dog had. Some families who insisted they will keep their new dog on a lead, call us to say the dog has been missing for four hours and they are worried sick, or that it is fighting for its life after being run over, or that it got into a fight with an antisocial dog.
Some families ask us to take our dog back after rehoming, as it isn’t that ‘100% all singing, all dancing, perfect mannered’ dog they’d hoped it would be. Many of our responsible rehomers do stand by our dogs and ensure they are on lead, are supported with dog encounters, and are safe in public. These dogs go on to enjoy fulfilled and cherished lives.
If you are interested in re-homing one of our dogs, please complete our homing questionnaire, so we can ensure our dogs are matched, and will suit your circumstances/lifestyle.
Any interest for our dogs must be expressed through the homing questionnaire. It is meant to be a sobering and revealing experience, to ensure you are ready and open for us to match beyond the dog’s looks, but based on your ability to meet our dogs’ needs.
We hope you appreciate that you are not dealing with a shop that is just making money out of dogs. We are a charity. We put our own money into our dogs to save them being put to sleep in the pounds. We then provide them with all the necessary vet care and kennelling until they find their families. Anyone seriously involved with us and preparing to meet a dog needs to show commitment and respect for our volunteers’ time. No one is paid, so there is no cause for harassment. We only have the dogs we have at any given time. Please keep in mind that another ‘so called rescue’ may allow you to rehome their dog based only upon looks and not on its integral skills, but you could become heartbroken as a consequence when that dog’s integral make-up doesn’t suit your expectations. So please respect our assessment of our dogs’ needs and your circumstances.