Dr. Lucas Kandefer talks about our choices when we are buying or adopting pets as gifts for the holidays. Some people think of it as a good gift or sweet gesture. Dr. Kanderfer says we can see, one, that we may be putting a burden on someone for something they can’t handle and two, making sure we have a pet that is the right pet for that individual, that they are making a good conscious choice for, as well that they have the time to help manage and take care of these pets. Dr. Kandefer says most of these pets that end up in the shelter again are there because of behavioral reasons. He says we do find a lot of these things we run into is not through any intentional fault of the owners, but it is easy to ignore some of these habits that were built into our pets and it is hard to ignore that dog that is barking and jumping on you and wants attention. It’s easy to ignore the dog that is just being there and calm and those are the ones we don’t reward that behavior, we reward the ones that are negative a lot of the times. Dr. Kandefer says having the time and the patience and making sure we do have the resources to take care of our pets properly is very important when we consider getting a new pet for the holidays or any time.
Dr. Kandefer says through COVID we have had a lot of people whose lives were upended and had different lifestyles and different changes and different schedules the whole time and don’t know necessarily when that is going to end, and we don’t know what time we are going to have. He says we have seen a lot of pets over the last year that people got at the start of the pandemic and then a hard struggle with behavior issues that people are struggling to manage when they are going back to work or a hybrid models or for whatever reason, the pets are struggling to adapt to that so we do want to make sure if we are going to get a pet for the holiday, that we think these things through and it’s always great have a pet and take care of them and we want to make sure everyone gets a pet a want and the gets get everything they need.
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