A long time ago when I was younger and more naive I got a rescue dog from abroad and I would warn people against it.
It cost £700 to fly him over but I then ended up paying an extra fee at the airport. He was 5 months old, had his pet passport, microchip and first set of jabs, but the vet said they used a different brand to what is typically used in UK so we had to start from the beginning again with immunisations. He hadn’t been with the rescue for long which is why he’d only had one set.
He was very easy to housetrain and was the most loving, affectionate dog to me and my DP at the time but outside of our home he was so stressful. He had fear based aggression, so would snarl and hide any time a person or dog came near him. We couldn’t have people in our home either. He had clearly suffered some sort of trauma as he was terrified of children. I contacted the charity a few weeks in and it turned out they thought he’d been attacked with stones by a group of children. They’d never told us this. They also gave some bad advice around just accepting he’d never get on with other dogs/people.
We worked so hard with him, it was so stressful and difficult and took over our life. Eventually we got him to a place where we could take him for a walk with other dogs and could slowly introduce him to new people. We couldn’t never stop being vigilant though.
Luckily we had got him young so we could have more of an impact but it also meant the charity hadn’t felt they had to do proper behavioural testing because he was a puppy. If we hadn’t been able to manage him or our home situation had been different there was no way to send him back. He would’ve ended up in an already full rescue here. There was no real support from the charity which was run by people with good hearts who had dogs of their own but didn’t really have proper training/education so were giving advice that I now know to be incorrect.
The charity is still running and I do think they are genuinely trying to do a good thing, but the execution is poor. They want their dogs to go to other European countries where dogs are cherished rather than seen as expendable but it doesn’t really work when there’s no ongoing support.
We had also been turned down by UK rescues due to both working (although on different patterns so dog would’ve been left for 3 hours max and not every day) and the fact that we lived in a maisonette with a garden, as the stairs were apparently too difficult for a dog to manage.