We put an adopted dog to sleep after severe behavioral issues. The shelter is threatening legal action. : legaladvice

Authored by reddit.com and submitted by PlanningVigilante

Us: New Jersey The Shelter: New York

Backstory Skip if you're not interested.

My partner and I have been waiting to be able to have the time and money to care for a dog for 3 years. Over the summer we were ready, and adopted a young mutt. This dog slowly developed severe behavioral issues.

The dog would steal and destroy any object in the house and snap at us if we attempted to stop them. The dog would jump, bite the leash and lunge anytime we saw any moving object outside. The dog progressively got less safe to be around. I personally took this dog to the park to run 3 hours everyday day without any noticeable effect. We felt unsafe managing this dog and turned to professional help.

We got all the mental stimulation toys, went to classes by dog trainers for this type of behavior, and started working with a vet that specialized in behavior issues. We spent the next 2 months running through all of the medication and training tips that the vet provided and that we could find. We had a trainer come to our house. We found nothing that helped. The Vet said that the next steps would be trying medication that could take 6-12 months to dial in. We could not emotionally or financially afford that. We hated life and the dog hated life.

So we made the decision to euthanize the dog. This was crushing as we had researching, prepping, and waiting for our first family dog for years and felt like failures. The Vet Behaviorist and the administering Vet agreed with our decision and we did it. I told the shelter after the fact. They were upset as it said in our adoption contract, that if for any reason we were unable to take care of the dog, we were to return them. It does say that. I don't want to talk about why we did not return the dog.

Today we got a letter in the mail from what looks like a law firm. 80% of the letter is explaining to us how awful we are, with the last 20% asking for funds and demanding to know the contact information for the Vet to verify that we didn't just shoot the dog. They are asking for fees incurred from taking care of the dog. Food, boarding and training fees, and training gear. About $5k in total.

Firstly, I will be emailing the lawyer from the contact that I found online. Initial googling comes back that they look real.

My very not professional opinion that I have gleaned from lurking here is that they would be owed the value of the dog, not the funds that they put in to the dog. This dog was not a purebred show dog or a training police dog. It was a dog that knew several commands, but that's it.

Lastly, I would like to run this by a lawyer so that we can have them respond. But what kind? Contract lawyer probably?

Any suggestions, advice, or background info about contract law and animals in NY is appreciated. Thank you.

TankVet on February 1st, 2020 at 21:17 UTC »

That the veterinarian’s agreed to euthanize a young, healthy dog due to behavior issues is not a small thing. I’m a veterinarian and I don’t know anybody - even the shittiest, shabbiest shelter vets - who would do this without serious consideration and extensive trial of medication and behavior therapy and training.

I’ve had to do this. It wrecks you even when you know it’s the right thing to do. Even when you’re sure the dog is going to kill someone. Even when the dog has a history of hurting people.

It always sucks. Nobody does this lightly.

interloperdog19 on February 1st, 2020 at 17:56 UTC »

I have mixed feelings on this one, as someone who kind of loves neurotic, aggressive dogs to the point that I intentionally adopt dogs with these kind of severe behavior problems. I don't even know what to do with myself when I have an easy dog. Yes, I'm crazy, I know.

I absolutely would not return a dog with these kinds of issues to a shelter that uses shock collars on them. This kind of stuff is exactly why dominance theory and aversive-based methods are so dangerous--they do shut down aggressive behavior in the short term, but it will almost always eventually resurface, and often the behavior escalates because you've taught the dog that expressing their discomfort leads to pain, so they basically go from 0 to 100 without warning. For example, say you shock a dog for growling at you when you try to take a toy away. The dog might stop growling at you for now when you take away his normal toys, because you've taught the dog that growling will lead to a shock and his normal toys aren't valuable enough to him to be worth escalating over. But when your dog gets, say, a dead rabbit or something that's extremely high-value and you try to take it away, the dog might jump straight to biting because you've taught him not to growl but haven't addressed the underlying reasons for the behavior. And for the record, I have working dogs from pretty notoriously tough breeds so I'm actually not even completely against aversive methods; I think they do have a time and a place. But not with resource guarding or anxiety/fear-based behaviors.

But also... I wouldn't adopt from a shelter like that in the first place? If the LAOP is as experienced and has done as much research as they claim, it should have been easy to pick up on the warning signs from this shelter. I would honestly expect this kind of behavior from a dog that was was being shocked in a shelter. It's very normal for dogs to shut down and then get crazy in their new homes once they feel safe enough to express their discomfort.

If the LAOP is being totally honest about a veterinary behaviorist agreeing with their decision to euthanize, that's pretty significant to me. But I kind of wonder if that's true. Two months is not a very long time to be working on this issue; even simple SSRIs and stuff can take up to a month to work, and it sounds like they were switching up medications multiple times during that time. Also, some of these medications can actually increase anxious behavior when used in close succession without letting the dog fully taper off, so if they're jumping around between multiple different medications in a two-month period, that could be playing a role.

I know they say that they're experienced and this behavior is more extreme than it sounds, but honestly, I've heard a lot of people say that about behavior that actually wasn't that extreme. They just only have ever really worked with doofy, friendly family dogs so anything that is outside of that seems crazy intense and scary, whereas someone like me looks at it and goes, "Oh, that's not great, but we can work with it."

So I guess my response is ???? LAOP's saying a lot of the right things so I want to believe them, but there are some red flags here.

Thank you for reading my impromptu dissertation.

edit: And for the record, I do think there are some dogs that do need to be euthanized for behavioral issues and don't inherently judge the LAOP for that. In a situation where that is the best option, I also think it is kinder and more responsible to do it yourself rather than having the shelter do it or potentially passing the problem on to another adopter. The only reason I'm not fully supporting the LAOP is because of some of those weird little details; if this dog truly couldn't be rehabbed, then I think that they did the right thing in a moral sense.

WyoGuy2 on February 1st, 2020 at 17:08 UTC »

EDIT for visibility: LAOP has responded here. It’s buried in a response to this comment.

ORIGINAL: I’m still not clear why LAOP didn’t just return the dog to the shelter. They obviously wanted it back, and unless the dog was in chronic pain or something there’s a chance it would have ended up better off with an owner who could care for it.

However, evidently the vet agreed with LAOP’s decision to put down a young dog over behavioral issues? That doesn’t seem right unless it was being violent against humans.