THINK BEFORE ADOPTING THAT CUTE PUPPY OR THAT ADORABLE KITTEN

Owning a pet is a huge responsibility and some people don't know that. Our society needs a wake up call right NOW.

Your pet depends on you for everything. If you adopt a pet you have to provide him with food, water, proper care and shower him with love as you will do to a family member.

Yes, unless you see your pet as a member of your family, you are doing injustice to a sentient being that deserves much better than being chained up outside your house day in and day out, under rain or shine.

So, you see a cute little German Shepherd puppy you buy him and bring him home. He grows up and with an excuse that you did not expect him to grow this big, you either abandon him or leave him in an animal shelter. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a German Shepherd puppy would multiply in size as time passes so what kind of a lame excuse is that? 

Another common excuse is, "We are moving and we can't take our dog/cat." Sure, you can make space for all your inanimate belongings, from the the massive mahogany cupboard and the tiny tinsels but not for a living, loving, knowing being whose whole world revolves only around you. 

If you don't have enough space in your heart, don't adopt any pet because the smallness lies in your heart, not in your home.

Before adopting a pet, hold yourself back and take a moment to do a check and balance on your affordability of taking care of your pet's every need throughout his lifetime. And, lifetime is not six months -- it's more than a decade. At the slightest tinge of uncertainty if you are capable of doing the above, DON'T ADOPT. You will spare a life.

Some of you may think I'm dramatizing. You might justify that if you can no longer handle or care for your dog or cat, you can always give them up to pet shelters or humane organization and they will be adopted in no time.

Well, sorry to burst your idealistic, self consoling and mostly ignorant to the hilt bubble but 90% of the animals in the shelters don't get out alive.

The persons who surrender their pets to shelters and then have the nerve to tell the volunteers there that they don't want to stress about finding a place for him and he's a good dog, he is gonna tug the strings of someone's heart and get adopted (never mind you being heartless) should be made work at the back of an animal shelter for one day.

The odds of your pet getting adopted is anything but fat chance. If your pet does not get adopted in 72 hours after surrendering, he dies; if he sniffles, he dies; if he displays aggression due to kennel protectiveness which the sweetest of dogs develop due to prolonged confinement, he dies 

You want to talk about stress? I will tell you what stress your pet will undergo in shelters. He will be confined in a small cage where he can barely turn around with others who share the same fate as him. He will cry and bark out of depression for his family that abandoned him. He has to relieve himself where he eats and sleeps. If he is lucky, he will be taken for a walk -- if not, all the attention your pet gets is a bowl of food slid under the kennel's door and the waste sprayed out from his cage with a high powered hose.

Surrendering your big, black, or dogs of rottie, mastiff, pit bull etc 'bully' breed into pet shelters is a death sentence for them. They won't get adopted no matter how sweet and mellow and well behaved they are due to their archetype attribute of aggression. THEY ARE GOING TO DIE.

If your pet falls sick, it immediately gets destroyed for the possibility of infection spreading

But most animals in pet shelters are perfectly healthy and spirited when they are put down and the procedure is heart wrenching:

First, your pet will be taken out of his kennel and leashed. They always, always look like they think they are going for a walk, with a good dog grin on their face, looking very happy, wagging their tails and looking up at their walker thankfully.

Each and every one of the dog freaks out and freezes when they get to The Room's door.. Perhaps they can sense the presence of the souls of those who have gone before them or it smells like death, given dogs' smell and perceiving sense being far greater than those of humans.

They will give their paw sadly and as the worker empties the syringe filled with a lethal cocktail of chemicals into them, confusion and a sense of being lost are evident in their eyes. They die quietly and you can see their life slipping away from them.

After all of it ends, your pet's lifeless body will be stacked in a large freezer like firewood along with all the animals that were killed, waiting to be picked up like trash.

You will never know what happens next and I bet you don't give a damn. It is just an animal and you can always buy another one and then dump it again in a pet shelter when you don't want it any longer, right?

Do research and do your homework and know exactly what you would be dealing with before getting a pet.

Abandoning your pets will result in strays and overbreeding and the animals suffer the same fate too. Euthanasia. 

It is a vicious cycle but it can be stopped.

Be a responsible pet owner. Animals are not meant to be disposable so if you don't have the resources or the ability to love your pet as a part of your family, PLEASE DON'T ADOPT. The animals will thank you for not meddling with their lives for your ephemeral pleasure.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that a country's physical and moral development can be gauged by the way they treat the animals there.

I rest my case.

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