DON'T GIVE UP THE PET!!!!!!!

Here is a heartbreaking story of frustration and danger for goodhearted innocents in the face of 'DOGged' bureaucratic perversity and stupidity:
http://www.dogbreedinfo.com/articles/savingbuddyspcadog.htm

Today, in wantonly deceptive euphemism, what was once called 'the pound' (as a place of empoundment - this in itself is a euphemism, as in fact it means jail/prison/killing station, with the pathetic but unhelpful nuance that those interned are innocent of crime by human standards, and are often both totally inoffensive and themselves the victims of crime [or what ought to be crime; yea, to some of us, crimes that should bring the death penalty upon the cruel perpetrators]), is now called a 'shelter'.  You get your licences there, and it's the first place to call if your animal - tagged, tatooed, chipped, or give 'em a discription & pray for the best - goes missing.  ...Or your weirdo neighbor's Burmese python, chimp, aquatic monster, or Baskerville hound is loose, or Something Looks Rabid, or something really BIG, like a horse/bear/deer/cow/cougar is wild in the streets, or there's a real emergency that a 'LOW kill shelter', the Fish & Wildlife Service, the zoo, or something better can't take care of in time (though the pound may just call, or have you call, the police, who tend to handle such things with very little patience and a strong tendency for  an ironclad Final Solution).

Woeful to have to accede to the fact that PETA 'shelters' may be the 'killingest' of them all, and that PETA higher-ups seem largely to be anti-pet: The phrase 'animal rights' has been largely perverted and co-opted by hidden-agenda, black-prop cranks who say domestic animals are all slaves - and of course, our favorite carnivores, along with us naughty non-vegans, eat other domestic animals, and maybe even kill rats and snakes and cucarachas who are, by the standards of those self-proclaimed liberators, 'purer' and more 'natural' even if they're Dangerous Invasive (dare we still say?!? =ahem=) Aliens, on account of being 'wild'. 

Next, articles like that linked above, unfortunately and historically, have hardly been unique.  Shows like Animal Cops, rightly memorializing the heroic efforts of the best of the SPCA and Humane Societies, give the impression that all such shelters may be so trusted.  Not so.  Whatever it is, check it out as carefully as you can.

And MOST OF ALL, study to be a good caretaker of an animal before you take charge of one, and don't give up on them!!!