How to get rid of your unwanted pets
The only pet you should have in your home is your pet, and you’re more likely to have unwanted pets if you don’t have a home for them, a new study suggests.
And while the study is based on the pet owners’ responses to the question, “What should I do if I find a pet I don’t like?” the findings suggest you should start the process of getting rid of unwanted pets before you decide to take on a pet as your own.
The study of more than 7,000 pets, from dogs to cats, dogs to horses, cats to guinea pigs, found that only one in three pet owners actually took the time to consider whether they should get rid or keep a pet.
That’s a significant difference, said lead researcher Amy Miller, a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at New York University.
“I don’t know of a study that looked at this topic before that has looked at how many pet owners really thought about the possibility of getting out,” she told ABC News.
The findings come from a large, nationally representative survey of 1,200 pet owners conducted by the pet-obsessed blog PetSmart in late February and early March.
Miller and her team asked pet owners how many of them said they had adopted a pet, which includes the pet’s breed, if the pet was a pet they own, or if they owned a pet that wasn’t their pet.
In the two-thirds of pet owners who answered that they owned pets, nearly half (46%) said they would consider adopting the pet if it was “not a pet you can get rid off quickly,” such as a pet in the mail or unwanted.
But just 24% of the pet owner population said they thought about keeping a pet once they had a pet and they had the choice to do so.
“I don.t know that I would recommend doing this, but you might want to think about it,” Miller said.
“It’s really important to keep pets together and the sooner you do that, the sooner they can go away.”
The researchers asked pet-owners whether they had ever let a pet go.
The majority of pet-owner respondents said they’d let their pets go, but a smaller percentage said they didn’t think about how to do that.
“If you’re a pet owner and you have pets that are going to live with you, then you’re going to be a little more responsible than other pet owners are, because you’re the one who’s going to pay for the cost of having to let your pet go,” Miller explained.
The pet owners also had the option to say whether they’d keep the pet for their own pet or sell it.
Only a third of pet owner respondents said, “I’d like to keep the animal,” a question that has been on the minds of animal advocates for years.
Miller said that’s a major change from the pet ownership survey that asked the same question and found a similar number of pet ownership owners saying they’d be OK with their pet going.
“It’s very clear that pet ownership is a lifelong decision,” Miller told ABCNews.com.
“This is a question of when you can afford to get out and when you shouldn’t, and we’re talking about a pet for life.
We can’t just do that right now, we need to have more information.”
Miller said the findings should encourage pet owners to think critically about how their pets are kept and how they should treat their pets when they decide to leave them.
“People are not necessarily looking for the perfect pet, but it’s very common to be concerned about how they’re being used by their animal,” she said.
“That can lead to a lot of problems in the home.
People who have dogs don’t necessarily understand how to handle them, they can get too excited about them.”
In addition to Miller, other authors of the study included researchers from Yale University, Penn State, the University of Michigan, and University of Florida.
The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.
The only pet you should have in your home is your pet, and you’re more likely to have unwanted pets…
