Sat 18th Feb: Promoting adoption, not politics

Goodbye sweet Pippy!

Recently surrendered "papillon" puppy Pippy was adopted today, which wasn't a surprise as he's a lovely little dog whatever his breed is or isn't.   In fact we can be pretty sure of homing any young and smaller-sized dog without much problem, as long as there are no behaviour issues, and I try to line homes up in advance as much as possible.  That backfires sometimes, often in fact, when the anticipated arrival never happens, as is the case with three Yorkshire terriers we were expecting on Sunday.

I was told they were being given up because the wife was pregnant, but over the following twenty four hours the woman kept changing her mind.  It went from three dogs to none at all, then it was two, and as it stands right now we're back to no dogs coming at all.  It was so certain at one point that I posted the photos on Facebook, only having to taken them down again very quickly.   I hope for the dogs' sake that they are given up and we can find them better homes, but I have no idea what will happen.

One thing that I have learned from doing this work and trying to promote both HKDR and the concept of adoption, is that you can never please everyone.  In fact I have been on the receiving end of some very unpleasant and often personal attacks, fortunately in writing rather than physical although it's been close once or twice.  I know it's not only me and social media has spawned a society of armchair critics, many of whom hide behind pseudonyms while they spout opinions on people they have never met or situations they know nothing about, so I accept that it comes with the territory.  The more you try to raise awareness the greater the chance that there will be people only too happy to have a pop at you.

We had an unannounced visit to both of our Homing Centres yesterday when Chief Executive CY Leung came to look at our dogs with a view to adoption.  I really thought nothing of it when I posted a photo of him and his wife at Tai Po alongside our staff members May and Eva, but it unleashed a torrent of comments, both supportive and the opposite.   It was as if both parties had staged this as a public relations exercise when in fact it was nothing of the kind, but as with every well known visitor, including Chief Executive candidate John Tsang the other weekend, I was happy to share to help promote our cause.  That's dog adoption by the way, not any political stance, but you would think I'd invoked the devil himself judging by some of the things said.  Online bullying is never pleasant and Facebook threats are meaningless, so in response to demands that I remove the post and photos the answer is no, there is no reason for me to do so.

Saturday is of course the day before our Puppy Adoption afternoon at Whiskers N Paws, and another unknown in terms of who will be lucky and how many will find homes.  We have a new litter of babies arriving from AFCD next week, continuing the never-ending cycle, so I really hope we say goodbye to lots on Sunday so we can get lovely updates like this one about Tino and Rosa.

We have renamed them Dobby (was Tino) and Honey (was Rosa).