Let me say as a preface that I fully support people who have to rehome a dog due to extreme circumstances: the loss of income that makes it impossible to care for the dog, loss of a home, etc. I would never judge someone in those circumstances!
But what about rehoming one of your dogs if they are not getting along? Well, yes, sometimes it’s far kinder to find a dog a new home than to make them live with another dog they despise—or who despises them. It’s dangerous and stressful to live with dogs who want to kill each other, and even if you manage to keep them separated from each other at all times, the fear of accidental interactions wears on everyone in the household.
The trick, though, is finding a new home for one of your dogs. Few people want to take on the burden of owning a dog-aggressive dog—but perhaps your dogs are only aggressive to each other, and never to any other dogs? It seems unlikely, but if this is the case, and you can find a home for either of your combatants, it seems like the right thing to do for all concerned.
However, the situation that is simply unthinkable to me is when someone simply surrenders one of their dogs to a shelter—particularly if they chose to relinquish the dog they’ve owned for a longer period of time.
I was at my local shelter recently and was taken by a large, grey-faced, shaggy older female dog. She sat, stoic, in front of her kennel door, only giving a slight wag of the tail in acknowledgement as I stopped to read her cage card. What was she doing at the shelter? “Fights with younger dog in home,” read the surrender notes. Did the owners understand that she was likely going to be euthanized at the shelter, because there are just not enough people who will choose to bring home a dog-aggressive older dog? According to the shelter’s front counter staff, yes, the owners understood. But they wanted to give her a “chance” of getting adopted instead of having her euthanized by their veterinarian.
All of this just makes me see red.
