We Want You To Love Us Not Hate Us Through The Application Process - Here's the Fine Print!
Hi and thank you for applying to adopt from DRSF!
In our never ending quest to make sure that adopters understand the process and to limit disappointment, we decided to try to clarify some of the most misunderstood parts of our adoption process.
Our application is NOT for a specific dog.
There are several reasons why we don't promise an applicant a dog before they are approved, here are a few:
We do not know from reading an application if the person will be approved.
We do not know if a particular applicant will be a good fit for a dog that they saw a picture of.
We can get up to 50 applications for highly adoptable young females and puppies over the course of 48 hours.
We get hundreds of applications a month and many people don't know what they are looking for until they have talked to our adoption coordinators and the foster family.
If you are only interested in one particular dog, we may not be the organization for you.
We added a place on the application where applicants have to initial next to acknowledging that they understand that they may not end up adopting the dog that they originally were interested in, We do not process applications until we have that spot initialed and we still have people getting angry at us.
We do not remove dogs from our website until we have a signed contract and the dog has gone home with their new family. We do that because occasionally, when the meeting happens, it isn't a good fit and the dog isn't adopted. We don't want the dog to miss out on the right match by removing them from the website.
If you are only looking for a young, perfectly bred, female pure bred (you and the rest of the world) expect to not adopt the one that you saw. The biggest mistake people make is that they don't complete the application process until they are fully approved. Finish the process and get placed on a waiting list so that once another dog that you are interested in is seen, you are all ready to go.
If you can be patient, we are confident that we can find you a perfect match for your family.
Am I Eligible??
To ensure that our Applications Team are working with families that are committed to adopting and welcoming a rescued doxie into their family DRSF's application processing fee is $25. We take the application fee not to raise funds, but as an additional measure to ensure that a family is ready to move forward.
The fee is non-refundable, and not applied to the adoption donation, so we provide the following eligibility requirements to be completely transparent in what we look for in forever families and also reserve the right to deny an application for any reason:
- Current and previous household pets must be spayed or neutered, with some exceptions for health reasons. To be considered for a medical exception for spay/neuter, vet documentation is required.
- Any companion animals must be current on vaccines, flea/tick, and heartworm medication.
- DRSF goes back 5 years in checking vetting records and utilizes the AVMA guidelines for preventative care to confirm annual checkups (2x annually for seniors), dentals, bloodwork, and treatment provided when necessary.
- DRSF is not equipped to ship dogs, so potential Forever Families should be in the South Florida area, or open to making a trip to South Florida to adopt!
- DRSF's goal is to find the best match between our dogs and adopters. Key elements include an effort to ensure dogs are placed in homes that are the best match based on energy level and needs to help protect our dogs from ending up in a situation of being homeless again in their lives. As such, we require that applicants age 75 and above have a co-applicant at the time of the adoption who is willing to also sign DRSF's co-signer contract agreeing to take in the adopted dog should the primary adopter become unable to care for the dog or be sure the dog is returned to DRSF.
Below are the ages of dogs that we will adopt to those 75 years of age and more. These policies are in place to ensure that the matches between adopters and dogs are the best we can do for the dogs. Please keep in mind that we put these policies in place because we have found they are in the best interest of the dogs we rescue.
The following are the ages of dogs that we will offer for adoption for seniors:
Adopters that are 75-79 years old- dogs that are 6 years or older.
Adopters that are 80 and over-dogs that are 8 years or older.
