Are College Pets At All a Good Idea?

It isn't really clear why, but stray dogs and cats are very common around college campuses. Students may not show up at college with a pet from home. But once they do arrive, when they see all these cats and dogs going round, they like to adopt them. These animals become college pets - pets for the time that the students are in college. Often, those college students get so attached to those college pets that they take them home.

Often, college pets don't become house pets after those students graduate. The students just take them to the nearest shelter and let them go. Most often, it isn't even a sound idea to adopt a pet when you're at college. When you become friends with an animal, you become responsible for it.

Students have to try very hard to be able to afford college often. They get loans, the work on the side - they have to scrape everything together to go to college. They don't usually have any idea how much it's going to cost when they adopt a pet.

Let's say that a student adopts a dog, and it swallows something that it's not supposed to swallow. At the vet’s, it can easily cost $1000 to have the object removed. When you add up everything that you have to spend on dog food and add the vet bills and everything else, those costs can easily go up to $5000 a year. Where's a student supposed to go for that kind of money?

Not to mention, most colleges don't allow pets in the dorm. When students adopt college pets, they do the on-the-sly. The few schools that do allow college pets have strict rules on the subject. Because pets can induce allergies in people. They won't put  a dorm member with a pet in a room where the other dorm members might be allergic.

If you are any student who is considering taking a pet in at college, you  should think about a few things first. For instance, pets need care. As anyone who takes a pet in, you need to be able provide care. The busy student really may not be able to do this. If a pet is an absolute necessity, a cat is always better than a dog because they need less care. They can be left alone for long period of time every day.

Any student who thinks about adopting a pet at college should carefully total up everything that a year of care might cost. If it's a young puppy, it's going to need even more care and attention and money.

Thinking About Bringing Home a New Puppy

Spring is the season most animals we call household pets come together to mate. When all is said and done, we have millions more little household pets to find homes for. The parents could be household pets themselves, or they could be straightened out on the streets. Most of them end up in animal shelters everywhere. It can get really hard for the animal shelters to know what to do with all these animals. Things would get even harder if families everywhere weren't willing to adopt a pet on a regular basis. While it's a wonderful thing for them to do, they do need to prepare themselves. Bringing home a new puppy isn't a small matter.

Whatever kind of pet you are bringing home, you need to first read up and prepare for the kind of care your pet will need. It isn't just your pet’s needs that you need to think about. You also need to think about your needs and the needs of the family. Not every pet is suitable for every kind of family or lifestyle.

For instance, if you are single and if you have to go out to work 12 hours a day, bringing home a new puppy or dog would make little sense. Puppies and the dogs they grow up into, are very sociable animals. They need lots of time with you. And most certainly, there'll become mentally ill if you leave them alone like that. If there isn't someone who's going to be home most of the time, consider getting a cat – a far more independent animal.

And even if you're bringing home a new puppy, the kind of house you're in will have a lot to say about the kind of dog you get. If you live in an apartment without a yard, a small dog would be happiest in such spaces. Small dogs don't need much exercise and as much room to move about in. Larger dogs will be miserable in a small apartment without a yard or even a big apartment without a yard.

Once you get a pet, it's for a very, very long time. You have to be sure that you have the financial resources for it. If you get a pet and you discover a couple months down the line that the $2000 a year it costs in upkeep is more than you can spend, you'll be in big trouble.

What happens when people adopt pets without having thought things through? Well, those animals end up in the shelters. There are millions and millions of them that end up in shelters every year like this. Halfway through, they realize that something's not working out the way they thought. If you could adopt a pet like this. Those pants will be killed. So if you're bringing home a new puppy, you really must consider bringing home a pet that's already been abandoned.

Think Before You Buy a Dog. You Can't Think Later

Some people just don't get what it is like to have a dog as a best friend in their home. They get all hung up on how owning a dog is like taking care of a small child. You have take care of his toilet time, bathe him, brush his teeth, groom him, teach him things, take him out to play, take care of his medical needs and so on and so forth. Of course, they completely miss the point just the way a childless person misses the point when he says that taking care of a child is just too much trouble. But they do have a point in how when you buy a dog, you don't want to set yourself up for any more work than you have to do. Come to think of it, most parents do wish parenting wasn't just this demanding.

For some reason this whole "looks don't last forever, it's what's inside that counts" thing just won't leave us be. It isn't just women, cars or homes or anything else. It's dogs, too. You can't buy a dog because he's cute-looking. Because you know, he is going to outgrow it.

Deciding to not buy a dog for how totally cute he  looks as a puppy can be very difficult. Because hanging out in a public place with a totally cute 10-week old puppy is going to get you more women than you ever dreamed of. If you want to buy a dog, buy a dog because you really want the love and friendship of an animal companion. Not for this. Because before long, the cute puppy is going to grow into a big high-maintenance dog that sleeps all day and barks all night.

Somehow, we've been hearing about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks forever. Once we buy dog in puppy form, we could still hear that 10 times a day and we wouldn't really understand what it meant because that saying has just become scenery. With forgotten to pay attention to it. That's the truth.

You cannot skip training your dog. And if you are buying a grown dog or rescuing him from certain death at the shelter, while that's a wonderful thing, you do have to realize that it takes a lot to live with a dog that's not trained and that is this mistrustful of people. You have to spend about 10 times as much time and money on training him. It's just the way it is.

And finally, perhaps the number one mistake we make is to buy a dog first and then to think about how much time we have. It's a criminal thing to buy a dog and then to lock him up or tie him up all day without human company. Make sure you have the time.