07/23/2026
This is a somewhat long read, but a very IMPORTANT one. Just this week, Herding Haven has received 6 requests for re-homing dogs(and the week isn't over yet). AND...this is pretty much the norm now EVERY. SINGLE. WEEK. Herding Haven has been doing rescue work for 14 years and we have never seen the number of re-home requests that we are seeing now. Our focus is and has always been, on dogs at high risk in shelters. As a general rule we don't take (and have never taken) owner surrenders. We are a small, all-volunteer, foster-based rescue. We don't have enough foster homes to save all the herding dogs in the shelters that will be euthanized without rescue. As indicated in the post, there are absolutely instances where rehoming a dog is warranted...but those instances are and should be the exception not the rule. When YOU adopted that dog YOU made a commitment. HONOR IT!!!! ...despite the inconvenience, despite the expense, despite the hardship, despite the time commitment, etc, etc, etc. That's what all of us in rescue do every single day!!!.
People need to step up and take responsibility for the lives that they committed to. Rescues are overwhelmed and rescuers are exhausted.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/196LWmtmbP/
(Angry rant warning - if you want to stay in a good mood look at the picture or Ruby and move on ❤️❤️)
I’m going to say something many of us in the dog industry think but are too polite to say.
We’ve had it with the rehoming posts.
We’re done.
The information is out there. People can choose better. They can research breeds, find responsible breeders or rescues, socialize their puppies, train their dogs, and ask for help before everything falls apart. Yet every day it’s the same excuses. The kids. The apartment. The job. The move. Life changed.
Life has always changed.
People have raised children and dogs together for generations. People have worked full-time jobs for generations. None of this is new.
So someone gets a cattle dog that starts biting the kids, or a Labrador that destroys the house after being left alone for ten hours a day, or a backyard-bred Malinois because they wanted a “cool” dog. Then, when the predictable happens, they dump the dog into a shelter system that’s already full, a rescue system that’s already overwhelmed, or a sanctuary system that too often collapses under the weight of more dogs than it could ever humanely care for.
Are people really this naive? Do they honestly believe their dog is somehow different? That their pit mix isn’t one of hundreds of pit mixes already sitting in kennels waiting for homes? That someone else is obligated to step in and fix the problem they created?
Here’s the hard truth: rehoming often relieves the owner’s guilt. It does not necessarily relieve the dog’s suffering.
Too many of these dogs spend the rest of their lives bouncing from shelter to rescue, rescue to foster, foster to another failed adoption, until they eventually die in a kennel, are behaviorally euthanized, or disappear into a system that has long since run out of resources.
That isn’t a happy ending.
It’s time we stop pretending that dumping a dog is a reasonable backup plan. It’s a failure of responsibility and a betrayal of an animal that deserved better long before the “rehoming” post was ever written.
