TLDR: We have a disabled puppy that needs a low key lifestyle, which isn't ours, but I love him and am trying to figure out a way around re-homing. Could dogsharing work? I would love to hear others' experiences.
Hey all,
Does anyone currently have a dog sharing set-up in the UK, or beyond? Did you go through an organisation? Did you arrange it informally? What works well about it? What doesn't or are there things to be careful of? Was it a workable solution to re-homing? How hard is it to find this and set it up? I've looked at a few websites but some seem a bit shady, and many aren't well populated with 'looking for a dog' profiles. We've considered Borrowmydoggy - I was an active borrower before we got our dog, but I worry about the inexperience of general borrowers who want to play with a puppy, but aren't thinking long-term.
As a bit of background, my partner and I are trying to figure out if such a set-up would work for us and our border collie pup (10 months). He's a wonderful, sweet boy, but due to some health circumstances**, he can't really hack our lifestyle. Ironically we got a collie because our norm is 10k walks or runs a few times a week, as well as hiking and overnight camping adventures on the weekend, but our poor boy can't do that for now, and it's very possible he may never be able to keep with that into the future.
We're expats so don't have that family network that would allow casual dropping off the dog at our parents' or siblings' etc and many of our friends are out and about as well. At the moment, we've paid about as much in pet sitter fees during craterest and during his post-crate rest period (one 24-36hr stint/a week) as we did on our mortgage, and it's given us only a semblance of what our lives looked like before ie, getting out of the house together for proper exercise and fun. His isolation training got shot to shit from traumatic hospital experiences and crate rest and we're only just starting to make a bit of progress, but he's a champ at the at home chill from all the settle training we did during and before crate-rest. We are having hard conversations about our quality of life, ability to keep up this cost, love for him - and the balance between all three.
Our thought was that if we shared our pup with another family/couple/person that had more of a low key lifestyle we'd be able to keep this super sweet boy in our lives, but also give him the stability and love he needs when we go off and get what we need to be happy, healthy people. It's been a rough time these past months and while falling in love with his sweet soul, I've also been mourning what we've had to give up and what our future might likely look like.
Thanks for any insight! I'd love to hear about logistics.
(**He had OCD in both his shoulders diagnosed in late Nov and was put on rest, then bilateral surgery in mid Jan, then 2 months craterest, and now ongoing physiotherapy that only allows two 30min lead walks a day. We won't really know his longer-term prognosis for another month or so, but the physio isn't wildly optimistic at the moment, and had told us the from the start that things like agility or ball fetch games are off the table forever. Poor boy. )
my sweet boy trying to get out of morning physio by being cute
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from Pets https://www.reddit.com/r/Pets/comments/mwv3w8/dog_sharing_pros_cons_a_way_around_rehoming/
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