Hello. We've finally going to get gates installed to secure our garden before a home check, hopefully in the next three weeks if the thaw continues.

What is the best way to look at adoption? Should we start to contact shelters now and then get home checked once we've seen a dog? Or is it best to get the gates in and then get home checked before we start looking? I don't want to waste any shelters time by doing it the wrong way.

Thank you for any advice.

There is no harm in looking at the moment. Sometimes the 'right' dog can take a while to appear. When we adopted our dog, it took about 3 weeks from an initial email to bringing him home with us, but all shelters work differently.

So, if you have specific requirements or are restricted travel wise and such-like, I would put the feelers out now.

Good luck

If you use one of the main shelters they will insist on a return visit to ensure the gates have been put up. So best put them up first. Just think height of gate, size of dog.
Try some small rescues also. Do you have a specific breed in mind?

Thank you, that's really helpful to know and thanks for the good luck. I'll report back with pictures soon I hope!

I'll keep that in mind although I am hoping to use smaller shelters if I can. No, we've no specific breed but probably a small to medium dog. The gates will be 4ft high.

Thanks for replying.

I recently went to a local rescue centre with my dad who was looking for a new dog. He completed a questionaire in which it asked about the security. If there was a dog he was interested in, he would get to meet the dog, if still interested they would then do a home visit and presumably check the answers he gave in his form. I would think if they were not happy with the security, they would not let him adopt until it was to their satisfaction.

It is probably better to have the work done first to save 2 visits.

Once the home visit was all okay, there was still more sessions with the dog before you actually got to bring him home.

This was about 4 or 5 weeks ago since he registered with them, and has never heard anything from them, even though we keep checking the website and seem to see plenty dogs coming in that suited what he was looking for, so dont go with the thought that you will go there at the weekend and have the dog home the following week!

Ah thanks, I am glad your dad got his dog. I've shown this thread to my OH and we're start to look around online and register but actually go to meet dogs once the gates have been done.

We've been waiting so long and were ready to start then came the snow!

If you are pretty certain that you'll get a dog from a specific rescue then it would pay to have a homecheck done so when the right dog comes along, things can be moved along quicker.

We had a homecheck done with a rescue, waited a few weeks... the right dog came up and because all the checks had already been done, we had her home just a week after meeting her.