by Maggie McCarthy
One year for my fiancé’s birthday, I surprised him with his favorite foods and his favorite beer. I went on a shopping spree for all of his favorite things and surprised him when he got home from work. Typically, we’d spend over an hour searching HBO and Netflix over a movie we could agree on. Me – Sci-fi or action, him, something typically including mobs and a lot of fight scenes. Agh, the struggle.
Since it was his birthday, he could pick any movie he wanted without any guff from me. Surprisingly, he picked Marley and Me. It’s one of those movies where 10 minutes in, you’re cursing yourself for watching this because you know how it’s going to end. Turns out, it’s literally impossible to watch the movie without crying. I remember Brian trying to hide the fact that he was crying by nervously laughing; he’s not fooling anyone.
The next day you’ll never believe where we ended up. Dog shelters! There MUST be statistics that reflect an increase in dog adoptions after that movie came out, right? RIGHT? We were living in Colorado at the time and we were “just looking”. I never had any intention to adopt a dog. I grew up with dogs but had been fairly allergic as a kid and Brian and I weren’t yet living together. This would be bringing our relationship to a whole other level. So like I said, we were just looking.
We didn’t know jack about where to go, so we decided to go to a ton of places. Naively, I was expecting this process to be adorable and sweet. It wasn’t. It was depressing, stressful, and disheartening. We were torn. Do we go to the shelters that have a lot of community support and nice facilities? Or do we go to the shelters that are extremely under-staffed, under-funded, and high-kill?
We started off going to a nice fluffy one. Everyone loved this organization, cages were often empty, and the facilities were clean and calm. Yes, there were several babies I would have liked to take home, but we were just looking so it was fine. We left feeling great because we were so strong (for not leaving with a puppy) and because we knew that every dog wouldn’t be there long, and would be well taken care of in the short-term.
