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  • Geebo 9:00 am on November 22, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , animal shelter, , , ,   

    Don’t buy a sick pet for Christmas 

    Don't buy a sick pet for Christmas

    With the holiday shopping season upon us, many people are probably thinking about purchasing a pet for their family for Christmas. This decision should not be taken lightly. Pets should only be bought for immediate family members after a long discussion about pet ownership. Buying a pet for someone who might not want one could saddle someone with a decades-long burden they may not want. For example, you may not want to buy a rambunctious puppy for your elderly grandmother. That could result in disaster. Sadly, there’s an even more heartbreaking reason you may want to reconsider buying a pet for Christmas.

    We can’t stress this enough but never buy a pet online. Usually, there are two types of scams that involve buying pets online. The first one is where the scammer takes your money and the pet doesn’t really exist. The second is the even more heartbreaking one where backyard breeders or puppy mills sell you a terminally ill puppy. A quite disturbing report recently surfaced out of Southern California where a pair of people were selling puppies on various online marketplaces. Many of the puppies they ended up selling allegedly had already contracted the deadly parvovirus. This left many families devastated and in debt after having to pay for expensive emergency veterinarian services.

    As always, when it comes to buying a new pet, we always recommend going to your local shelter first. Not only will you be bringing your family a new member but you’ll also be giving an abandoned pet a new and loving home. If you have your heart set on a purebred dog there are shelters that do have them. However, if you’re going to the professional breeder route try sticking to licensed and local breeders. Anyone claiming to be a breeder and offering you a purebred pet at a too good to be true rate probably doesn’t have the pet’s best interest at heart.

     

  • Geebo 9:05 am on March 13, 2019 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: animal shelter, , , , Quad Cities   

    Pet flipping seen at shelters 

    Pet flipping seen at shelters and NY to crackdown on pet stores

    Previously, we’ve discussed many times why Geebo does not accept ads for pets. Not only does it discourage pet scams but mainly the policy in place is to discourage puppy mills from proliferating and causing further abuses against the animals they produce with little regard for the animals’ health and safety. As an alternative option, we almost always recommend adopting a pet from your local shelter and we still do. However, now at least one shelter and possibly more are encountering some of the same problems we do.

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teUq9PtVKJo%5D

    For example, there is an animal shelter in the Quad Cities area of Iowa and Illinois that’s been noticing a disturbing trend. They say that they’ve been finding some of the animals they thought they had found homes for turning up on Facebook and Craigslist as being either back up for adoption or up for sale. In some cases, the animals are being flipped like you would flip a house. In that case, the shelter is banning those people from adopting any more animals from the shelter.

    In other cases, people just don’t feel that the animal they adopted is a good fit and try to find a different home for it online. In turn that animal could be taken in by someone who doesn’t have the animal’s best interest at heart and could potentially be an abuser. The shelter states that they would rather see people who aren’t happy with their pet adoption to bring the animal back to the shelter as they are better equipped to find the animal a more suitable home.

     

  • Greg Collier 10:46 am on July 8, 2014 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , animal shelter, dog fighting, , , , , , spca   

    Free to a Good Home? A Bad Idea Online! 

    nopetsAny business owner needs to stay ahead of the trends, and unfortunately, that applies to trends in crime. I’ve said before in blog posts and TV interviews that we don’t carry personals because they can be used as a front for prostitution and human trafficking. We don’t carry pet sale ads, as they often trade in animals that have been bred through puppy mills—breeders who literally breed animals to death, leaving them undernourished and caged without proper exercise or loving contact. We simply won’t even take a chance at supporting criminal industries, so we don’t run the ads that market them.  
     
    Recent stories are showing that it’s not just online pet sales that can pose a threat to pets, but online pet adoptions, as well—often posted by well-meaning folks, under the heading, Free to a Good Home. Ads giving away dogs, cats, bunnies, and other animals to “good” homes may be posted by owners for a number of benign reasons, though they may lead to a life of pain and misery, and even death, for pets. 
     
    Remember the days of summers past when you’d ride down the street of your neighborhood in the back of your parent’s Pontiac or Buick, probably without a seat belt, and definitely without a car seat? You might pass a lemonade stand or a kid and his mom or dad on the corner with a cardboard box reading, “Kittens For Sale,” or, if you were really lucky, “Free Kittens.” No one thought anything of it. We survived, and for all we knew, so did our pets. But if not monitored, the reality of today’s digital marketplace can be a whole lot scarier for animals, just as it is for humans.
     
    The SPCA reports that animal abusers troll online classified sites looking for free animals, and they know just what to say to put unsuspecting pet owners at ease. Some abusers have even brought unrelated children to meet pets and pet owners in an effort to appear nonthreatening. Small animals offered “free to a good home” or to be “rehomed,” such as rabbits and cats, have been used as live snake food. Dogs have been found used as bait to train other dogs for dogfights. And crooks or kill buyers sell these free animals to research facilities or for slaughter.
     
    It’s not just household pets that face danger: While slaughtering horses for meat is illegal in the United States, it’s not in some other countries, such as neighboring Canada and Mexico. Kill buyers can often outbid adopters, and have taken advantage of the financial downturn to buy up horses on the cheap for transport and slaughter for meat. This poses a serious health risk to humans, as horses in the US are considered companion animals, and as such are often medically treated with drugs toxic to humans.
     
    A pet is a member of the family. Be sure you’re financially and emotionally prepared to keep companion animals—healthily—for the duration of their lifetime. Though if you must rehome for an unavoidable reason, it’s simply not safe to give away or sell animals to strangers via online ads without conducting strict home assessments and background checks. Most folks aren’t equipped for that, so volunteers at the SPCA suggest that anyone looking to rehome a pet work through their personal networks first—friends, neighbors, coworkers, church groups, their vet’s office etc.—maybe that’s why the neighborhood “Kittens For Sale” seemed to work fine back in the day? We all knew each other! 

    If your personal network doesn’t yield a reliable home, a reputable rescue group or shelter with good statistics in rehoming animals can help. Doing the right thing by your pet may take a little longer, may require just a bit more time and attention, but their health and safety is in your hands, and it’s worth it. We care about your family as we do our own, and that includes your pets. That’s why we don’t run Free to a Good Home ads at Geebo, and we hope you won’t anywhere else.

     

    • Theresa Dixon 4:08 pm on August 25, 2014 Permalink

      Very good advice. I try to tell everyone I know about this very thing. Spread the word.

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