Dog? No Dog?

Every year Gerard and I enjoy going to "Meet Your Best Friend" at Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. Many different shelters bring their adoptable dogs and cats all at one time in one place. We enjoy seeing them all and it's always tempting to bring a dog home with us, but no one is home all day so we plan to wait until one of us retires. We still enjoy visiting them all and rejoice when we see some get adopted.

This year when we went, we saw 5-6 medium sized dogs that we both liked and once again, were so tempted to bring one home with us, but ahh, we didn't bring any money along which is a good thing. It kept us from making a impulsive purchase. However, one of the volunteers did suggest that perhaps getting an older dog would work for us since it wouldn't be as active and need as much attention as a younger one. Plus, not many people adopt the older dogs, they usually wind up dying in the shelters. She suggested we get a big crate that it could go in during the day while we aren't at home. Hmm. something to consder. It would be nice to let an older dog live out the end of its life in a loving home . . . like ours.

The questions we must think about are:

1) will it get along okay with the cats?

2) do we really want to put ourselves through the hurt when it dies?

3) do we want the additional expense and responsibility of owning a dog at this time?

We'll have to think about it some more.

What do you think? Should we get a dog now? Please vote on the survey to the right.