dan360 wrote:Surely you got your dogs and cat from shelters and/or rescues and understand giving a little critter an opportunity
I do. I totally do. Norman and Lily both were adopted through the National Great Pyrenees Rescue. Hank (my Turkish Angora cat) was removed from the home of a very specific type of hoarder--she had a thing for purebred cats, as opposed to mixes. Norman was part of an actual cruelty case in Oklahoma, found with 81 other dogs chained to dead and dying horses and goats. All but four of those dogs (Norman among them) were euthanized. Lily was found at five weeks with her dam and littermates--alive and dead--in an irrigation ditch in West Texas. So all of my pets are "secondhand".
Fostering spayed female Great Pyrenees (GP) transported by NGPR out of the South (especially TX, OK, and AR) is what I do now. I turn down applications to adopt every single day. Everyone sees a cute fluffy GP puppy, or sees the beauty of an adult GP, and thinks, I can handle that, I'll "save" them. No, actually? NGPR took care of the saving part. I talked to a family that sounded perfect yesterday about adopting a dog arriving on a transport towards the end of this month. They sounded perfect...right up until I asked for a veterinary reference. Whoops. Their last dog (not a GP) had only been to see a regular veterinarian when a) she was hit by a car--meaning she was off the leash, out of the yard and not under voice control and b) she was put down. Into the round file with that one.
And yes, my judgment is clouded by my own personal experience with pit bulls and pit bull mixes. It's not the media doing the clouding, it's maybe the scars on my lower right leg that I earned by trying to step into a dog fight between Norman and an unaltered, male pit bull mix whom the owner was unable to control. There is nothing *quite* like
hearing your own tibia crush--adrenaline protects you from actually feeling it until you feel the squishiness in your shoe, and realise that it's blood, and then you start to lose consciousness. You manage to hang on long enough to call 911 and you barely manage to call a friend. Norman, snow white except for what are called "badgering" colourations on his face, had so much blood on him after that incident--mine, and the pit bull's--that he went to an emergency veterinary clinic to verify that he was not injured. Responders to the scene included King County Sheriff's deputies, Bellevue Police, and fire and EMS, plus KCAC. It was a nightmare that I do not wish to relive.
There was no good outcome for the pitbull mix that initiated the fight, and there was no good outcome for the dog's owner, who ended up being sued by Premera Blue Cross. Not me, my insurer.
I sincerely hope that this works out for this dog. I sincerely hope that a home with the financial and temporal resources to responsibly raise a high-energy, high-drive breed becomes available.