I have very grave concerns about this organisation.
I think that at the heart of it, they want to do their very best in helping rescue dogs from living on the streets or in kill shelters, but they’re rescuing more than they can find homes for, and are cutting so many important corners in order to place the dogs at any cost.
We adopted a dog from them, and were very honest about where we live and our living situation during the over-the-phone home check. I sent some photographs, and our application was cleared and we were told the dog was ours if we wanted her. She was a beautiful dog with the sweetest personality, but found aspects of our home environment (that were beyond our control to change) to be very challenging. I can’t be more detailed as we’re still scarred by the way we were treated by the organisation and i don’t want us to be identified.
Suffice to say we did all we could to lessen her anxiety, but it was becoming apparent that the environment was causing our dog to become more and more distressed, and her behaviour was deteriorating accordingly.
We contacted second chance at this point and were told we would have help from the behaviourist, but this took several days to happen, and it was then just pages and pages of information rather than a phone call and tailored support. They only have one behaviourist who was clearly overstretched, but it’s just another example of the organisation not being able to offer the kind of support it promises to its adopters.
Because we couldn’t change our environment, we realised that our dog was only going to continue to get more and more anxious, and that the best and kindest thing to do for the long term happiness of our girl would be to look for another family better suited to her needs.
Once we’d made this heartbreaking decision, we contacted Second Chance knowing that we would need to return the dog to them (having signed a contract to say we would should the need ever arise) and they were absolutely vile to us. Said some very unkind things that were wrong and unjustifiable.
So we had to take our beautiful girl back to the kennel in Wales. I still feel sick when I think about it. They wouldn’t update us on whether she had a new home, their attitude being that we didn’t care enough about her to make the effort to keep her (so far from the truth) so we had no right to know how she was. And I have recently heard that the founder has posted unkind things about people taking dogs back and not making an effort, treating the dogs like they were unwanted and returnable gifts. Which is so, so far from the truth.
But the thing is, if they were more careful and professional, if they placed the dogs with foster careers initially so that they were better informed about any potential issues, if they arranged for home visits before placing the dogs, and if they had professional support in place, then so much of this pain, confusion, sadness and heartbreak, for the dogs as well as the adopters, could be avoided.
Sorry for such a long post, but we still miss our beautiful girl, I still cry ever day, and feel sick at the memory of this entire story.
