Country living offers more pet adoption choices

ROCK HILL, NY — Living in a city puts limits on the kinds of pets a person can have. Perhaps you could own a dog or a cat, a canary or a parakeet. Cats, especially, don’t need that much space—they don’t need to be walked the way dogs do. 

However, owning a goat or a horse isn’t an option for most city dwellers. That’s where living in the country can increase the options for a potential pet owner. 

In the country, the kind of animal a person can adopt depends on a number of factors, according to Lisa DiPippo, a volunteer who cares for the animals at the Sullivan County SPCA, a no-kill shelter. “It depends on how much acreage you have and your knowledge of the care of the type of animal that you want to get,” she said. “You don’t want a giant, energetic dog living in a small little studio apartment.” 

For a small property—perhaps an acre-and-a-half—DiPippo suggested a goat or chickens, besides a cat or a dog. “Goats are not super-huge animals and goats can go in or outside of the house. They could be a pet,” she said. 

She added that goats will eat any type of vegetable and love to rummage through gardens. “Goats tend to eat hay and pellets for their nutrition,” she said. “And every now and then, you can give them little snacks like fruit. It doesn’t take a lot to care for them. They’re pretty easy animals.”

Chickens, of course, are outdoor animals, requiring a coop and, perhaps, a small fenced-in area for them to stay on the property. Their nutrition consists mostly of chicken feed, which can be purchased at a feed and grain store, or leftovers like vegetable skins.

A potential pet owner can purchase an animal from a breeder. Most breeders raise and sell purebred dogs, but some offer cats and others are goat breeders. Anyone who is interested in a acquiring a goat, for example, can go onto livestock pages that are specifically for breeding auctions, or they can go to a farm that has a goat they might want to sell. 

However, adopting a shelter animal rather than buying an animal from a breeder gives a stray animal a home and a chance at life and opens space in a shelter for another unwanted animal.

Suzanne Gold, a member of the board of directors as well as the head of fundraising for the Sullivan County SPCA, remembered that someone brought ducks to the shelter some years ago. “We don’t have a pond,” she said. “We set up a kiddie pool and that’s what we kept them in until we could get them a home. We found them a farm to live on.” 

Rabbits, birds, and even a bearded dragon (which is a type of lizard) have also been brought to the shelter, and kept until homes could be found for them. Currently, only cats and dogs are accepted.  

There is a fee to adopt a shelter animal. As an example, the Sullivan County SPCA charges $575 for a puppy, $400 for an adult dog and $375 for a senior dog. The adoption fee for a kitten is $225, and less for an adult cat. 

The fees are used to take the animal to a vet to have the animal spayed and dewormed, to have a microchip implanted so that a lost animal can be reunited with its owner, and to conduct tests for Lyme disease and heartworm before the animal leaves the shelter in order to make sure they’re healthy. The fee also includes their vaccines for a year and all of their vet care and their care while they’re in the shelter.

Gold explained the adoption process, saying, “There’s an application that they fill out and when it’s completed, we will do a vet check and check with their references to see if the potential adoptees have had animals in the past and, if they did, that the animals were kept up-to-date on vaccines. Are they good pet owners? Did they ever surrender an animal?” Applications are available at sullivanspca.org and can be filled out online.

The adoption process concludes with an in-person meet-and-greet between the adoptees and the shelter’s adoption coordinator, who will find the perfect animal for them.

DiPippo suggests that people who live in the country, who are probably more outdoorsy, might want to adopt a dog. “You could off-leash train them and then you could go out on hikes or do whatever work you need to do and they would be right by your side.” That’s opposed to a cat that just wants to lie down and stay inside all day.

The Sullivan County SPCA is staffed entirely by volunteers and receives no funding, depending entirely on fundraising and donations. Staff members can be reached at 845/796-3120 to answer questions and to receive donations or you can go to the shelter’s Facebook and Instagram pages for more information.