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Originally Posted by *Nikki*
To this day I still have those four cats. One of them is very destructive and one urinates on the carpet. I still have kept them all though because by being a pet owner I cannot change their personality BUT I can take responsibilty for my own actions.
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Sticking hardheadedly with a situation that is making all participants miserable does not equal taking responsibility in my book.
Either way, I'd appreciate it if you didn't throw any more of that high horse attitude this way, since you have zero respect for how hard the decision I made was to come to, are not in a position to judge a situation where you are unaware of the circumstances to a degree where it matters, and have not bothered to reply to the question presented in the original post.
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Originally Posted by ShaniFaye
Til the day I say I will swear as great as these cats were, there were insane. They were unmanageable, and I'd had cats ALL my life. They destroyed everything in their path. We were renting the house we lived in at the time and being new parents we didnt have the funds to get them fixed or declawed. I'd never in my life had cats that destroyed so much property. Long story short, I couldnt find anyone that would take them so we had no alternative but the shelter.
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I can see that there was little else you could do.
With us, it wasn't that she was destructive to the apartment, puppies are supposed to tear into things. But she gave our oldest cat a limp and refused to stop pulling our older dog from her floppy ears. This ended up resulting in reoccuring bloody scabs on her ears, because the behaviour would not stop. She also would not respond to corrective guidance; I spoke with a dog behaviour specialist who, after meeting the dog several times, said she was at a loss and had not met such a puppy before. She said that with this type of behaviour problem she would have to surrender to recommending negative re-enforcement, which she normally always spoke against. Shock collar was one option, but my wife and I felt that this was an inhumane approach, especially since the puppy was definitely not aggressive. She simply needed to be in an environment where she could be among animals of her own size and "caliber", and preferably have access to a yard.
It just got to the point where our older dog, who is by nature submissive, would be afraid of this 9 months old puppy simply due to how rowdy the puppy was. Even if I pinned the dog down to the floor with my hands, she would still focus on nothing but the older dog, and the second I would let go she would run to her and grab one of her floppy ears in her mouth, with her teeth - and pull.
In the end, we had to keep her in her crate for the great majority of each day, letting her out to eat, to go outside and for walks, and play by herself for an hour or two in the evening after work.
Despite everything, I loved that dog. She was a puppy, she was not evil or mean, just not suited for the kind of environment she was brought into.