Prescreening of the Dog's Health and Personality

Host: How does the shelter pre-screen a dog for health and personality?
Michelle Otis: Well, all shelters will give the animals a brief exam upon intake just to give them their first vaccines and also make sure that there’s nothing serious going on with the animal that can easily be seen. But keep in mind that these animals again are coming from an unknown background, unknown history. There could be something underlying that most shelters have no way of knowing about without a full veterinary facility.
So our shelter is not a veterinarian and that is why most shelters will give you a free veterinarian visit or they will ask that you take your animal to the vet within a certain period of time. So medically, you can expect the basics from the shelter, but also expect that you are going to have to establish your relationship with your vet and that you should do it within two weeks of the adoption.
Temperamentally, different shelters again, have different resources so they—most shelters will do some kind of a behavior evaluation and there are various types of behavior evaluations out there. It just depends on the organization and which one they choose to use. There are also our different adoption programs that focused on matching and making a personality assessment and those programs in addition to a basic safety and aggression type of evaluation will also set the dog up in certain scenarios and see how the dog reacts to that such as leaving a dog alone in the room and seeing if the dog is a counter-surfer, is the trash digger and little things like that can be part of the assessment process at some shelters and that can give them more information about what kind of dog you’re going to get when you get home.



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