Giving up on a beloved pet is never easy, but sometimes we are faced with an impossible situation and we have to find a new home for the dog or cat.

But since you love the little one, you want to do the best, right? You don’t want to just dump it in a field or leave it in the yard in the hopes that the neighbors will take it in. This happens, but only rarely. More commonly, if left to roam, they are picked up by animal control and then euthanized. Few animal control agencies have the time and resources (or the desire) to make any effort to find them new homes.

Any rescue shelter can tell stories of pets found in yards, half-starved, if not dead yet, and horribly injured cats brought in by good-hearted people who found them. But the reality with these cases is that most die or have to be euthanized because they are too far away to recover. Lacking the skills to survive on the streets or in the fields, they simply won’t make it on their own.

However, it’s hard to say which is worse: drop them or advertise them as “free for a good home.”

Huge numbers of innocent animals … surplus kittens and puppies, usually … are given away at parking lots and yard sales to what appear to be “good people.” But what most pet owners don’t know is that a large number of these people are part of an underworld of animal collectors, called Class B merchants, who collect and then sell animals to research labs. Colloquially, they are known as “montadores” because they obtain a “bunch” of animals to sell to the traffickers in a quantity large enough to generate a good income.

These merchants have their own version of auctions and flea markets, where the bundlers arrive with trailers and trucks full of cages full of surprised and miserable pets who have no idea what just happened or is about to happen.

Meanwhile, while collectors await buyer events, conditions in their “kennels” are so dire that many don’t even make it to the flea market. Beyond that, many don’t make it to the labs either. But for those who do, life doesn’t get better.

If you advertise your pet in the newspaper or on the radio, do your own adoption work: ask for and check references, visit the new home to see if you want your cat or dog to live there, and tell the new owners that you will. will visit later to make sure things are going well. Don’t just make a phone call … it’s too easy to lie about everything. Really nice people won’t mind the follow-up. In fact, most are delighted to be in touch with you. If you are reluctant to this, it is definitely a red flag.

If you must move and cannot take your pet with you, and you have no immediate prospects for a new owner, call a shelter and make arrangements to receive your pet. And if no one can, then do everyone a favor by euthanizing an unwanted pet before it has to suffer.

Remember that having a pet involves a degree of responsibility, and anyone who cannot handle that should not have a pet. Also, if you don’t move out of the blue, don’t expect a shelter to accept your pet that way either.