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Print this pageMona and Me
One couple’s tale of dog adoption. 
When my boyfriend, Steve, and I first made the decision to adopt a dog, we never imagined we would find her online. But after months of searching local shelters for a dog that met our criteria — a little older than a puppy and small enough to be happy in our apartment — we decided to expand our search beyond Rhode Island. Trolling petfinder.com, we came across Mona, a black schnauzer-cairn terrier mix about ten months old, who was listed by Double Dog Rescue in Harwinton, Connecticut. We contacted them for more information and were told that Mona was actually in a foster home in Tennessee, recently rescued, along with her six brothers and sisters, from a high-kill shelter. My initial reaction was to keep looking. We didn’t like the idea of not meeting her first, especially coming from such harrowing conditions; it just seemed like too big a risk. But the more research we did, the more we felt like adopting Mona could be our little way of helping out with a much bigger issue. In the rural south, spaying and neutering dogs and cats is a rarity, making overpopulation a major problem and high-kill shelters —where animals are put down within a few days of being dropped off — the norm. Most rescue agencies in the Northeast work with affiliates in the south to try to adopt out as many animals as they can before they are put down. So we filled out our application and waited. A few weeks later we got an email telling us that we got Mona, and two days later she was on an air-conditioned trailer with an animal transport service that makes weekly trips up the coast to drop off newly adopted pets. The day we were to pick her up — at a park and ride in Plainfield, Connecticut — we were both anxious. Would she be timid and hard to socialize? Or a little terror that was impossible to control? Mona walked off the trailer a well-adjusted, happy dog that is, a year later, fully settled in her new home. It’s not easy to think about what Mona’s fate might have been had we not decided to take a chance. But we can gladly say now that it was a chance worth taking. —Courtney Anderson
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