Need to give up your Malamute?

If you call us to give up your dog, please do not tell us that you "wish" or "really want" to keep him or her BUT.........because we will try to assist you in fixing your problem. Most behavior problems can be overcome with a little time, patience and training. Do call us if you want training/behavior help, we have excellent assistance available. If your mind is made up, and the dog MUST go, be upfront with us. Let us know that you took on a commitment that you could not fulfill, and that you need to place your dog in rescue. Be upfront with us about your dogs health and behavior. This is in the best interest of your dog, and will help him/her get a new home in a more timely way.

Always contact the breeder of your dog first. Many breeders sell their dog with a contract that requires you to notify them first if you cannot keep the dog.

We charge a $50 owner turn in fee to accept a dog into rescue. This pays for a visit to our vet for a health baseline. Please understand that due to the volume of dogs we help, there is often a  6-16 week (or longer) waiting period for owner turn-ins. Contact us as soon as possible if you have to give up your malamute, and we will put you on the waiting list. We MUST have written proof of current vaccinations, spay or neuter, microchip,  and a current (negative) heartworm test. It is your responsibility to keep in touch with us WEEKLY, via email or phone,  while waiting for a space to become available, and to give us all requested information on your dog. Failure to provide weekly communication will result in your dog losing his or her place on the waiting list.

*EMERGENCY* Turn -ins:

If you must turn in your malamute within a week, and cannot wait the normal 6-16 week waiting period, we will do our best to accommodate you. Sometimes boarding is available at a cost of $10/day at an area boarding kennel, and you may board your malamute while we are waiting for an available space in rescue. Please contact us right away if you must turn your dog in immediately, and we will give you an estimate of the current waiting time, and whether or not boarding is available. (Please note: Boarding is usually NOT available during holidays) You can also board your dog at a vet or boarding facility near you while you are waiting for space. 

If you need to turn in your dog and be put on the waiting list, or if it is an emergency turn in situation, please send us an email at keysci@worldnet.att.net and include all pertinent information. Your dogs name and age, reason for surrender, where you got your dog, current vet status, vet name and address, and your name, address, phone number, and best time to reach you.

ANOTHER OPTION:
You can list your malamute on our "dogs still with owners, seeking new homes" page for a  $25 donation. This is the option we recommend to most people looking to rehome their dogs, as we can get them on the site quickly with no waiting time.   Dogs must be spayed or neutered, current on vaccinations, microchipped, and heartworm negative, and we must have written proof. We will connect any interested parties with you, we assume no liability for the adoption. Please understand that this option can take a very long time - depending on the dog. Young, healthy, well trained dogs are usually adopted fairly quickly. Older, less healthy dogs, poorly trained dogs, or dogs with issues can take much longer.  We have had some of our rescues for a year or more. Again, weekly communication is required, or your dog will be removed from our site. 

If you plan to rehome your dog yourself, make sure that your dog is up to date on vaccinations, hw negative and on preventative, microchipped, and spayed or neutered. Interview possible homes very carefully, as sad as it is, there are people that want these dogs for less than desirable reasons, such as dog fighting, or laboratory research. BE CAREFUL. Also understand that "no kill" shelters will have a long waiting list, as we do, there are only so many spaces available. Most shelters are "kill" shelters. They do the very best they can, but with so many unwanted animals, usually they can only keep dogs a few days, or a few weeks at most. The law requires that strays be held three days, but there are no such requirements for owner surrenders. The dogs are not lost, and no owner is looking for them - the owner has given them up.  They are often the first to be destroyed, often the same day they are given up. Unfortunately, often large dogs, or dogs over a few months old, are the first to be put down, as they are the hardest to place. 12 million dogs are put down in shelters every year in the United States. Don't think it won't happen to yours.   

See Spot Die

by John Dorschner


There are a hundred million dogs and cats in America. We cuddle them, talk to
them, make them part of the family. Every year we buy them $5 billion worth
of food, not to mention collars, bowls, flea spray, vaccinations and little
pink sweaters...

We love our pets. Except, of course, when we have to move, or get tired of
walking them, or sick of paying the vet bills. Then we abandon them. By the
millions. We tell ourselves they’ll find a new home, but the truth is, when we
drop them off at the animal shelter, we drop them off to die.
So many unwanted pets, so few homes for them. They get handed over to the dog
pound, abandoned in parking lots, let loose in parks, or simply allowed to
drift away from home and never searched for: mangy mutts, elegant purebreds, pit
bull pups, fluffy kittens, dogs that look like Rin-Tin-Tin, and Lassie, and
Toto.
People take their cats to the shelter and say they want to get rid of them
because the pets don’t match the colors of their new decorating scheme. They
want a new cat, one that’s color-coordinated. Some people go on vacation and drop
off a pet; they don’t want to spend the money on boarding; they say they’ll
pick up a new pet when they get back.
The result: four out of five pets are left unclaimed. Those unclaimed are
given a lethal injection of sodium pentobarbital. Then they are thrown into a
large plastic hamper, wheeled outside and tossed like bags of garbage into an
incinerator. Nationwide, between 12 million and 20 million unwanted pets are
killed each year. The numbers are inexact, because this is one subject few want to
research. Man’s best friend has become man’s biggest victim.


When people get tired of their pets, most don’t want to deposit them at the
animal shelter; they know what’s likely to happen to them. And so they engage
in a quiet little fantasy, imagining they’re a Robert Redford, climbing to a
mountaintop to release an eagle. They’re not abandoning Fido — they’re setting
him free. Often they choose parks or affluent neighborhoods. Perhaps some
wealthy family will pick him up. Or maybe old Fido will revert to the wild, learn
to fend for himself, catching squirrels and whatnot.
But pets are not wild eagles. Animal control officers know that a roaming dog
is much more likely to be squashed by a speeding car than to learn to live in
the wild. The Service has trucks that do nothing except travel the country,
picking up tens of thousands of dead dogs and cats each year. The animals that
survive forage through garbage cans and alleys, desperately trying to avoid
starvation.
In the Dade, Florida, animal shelter, for example, where 25,000 dogs are
killed each year, the situation is typical: the shelter is dreadfully overcrowded,
four or five dogs locked in a run intended for one. It is primitive —
concrete and wire mesh, with screening on the outside walls to allow in whatever
breeze exists. Each day, the barking of 300-plus dogs reverberates like the
pounding din of jackhammers. The stench of urine permeates everything, despite the
dedicated efforts of the shelter workers.
It is here that most of the dogs and cats of Dade County spend their last
five days. And so the dogs wait. And wait. The hound from the day-care center
spent most of the time lying on the floor, its snout in a puddle of urine and
water from her three cellmates. A few feet away, Chica, the beautiful vizsla with
fleas, was squeezed into a run with three mutts. She sat by the door, looking
expectantly at each visitor who wandered by. The grumpy chow from Kendall was
in a run with a massive red Doberman that had killed a poodle. The smaller
chow stayed silent at the back of the run, huddled against the wire mesh.
The little bearded Tramp sat at the back of a run, with three larger mutts,
his shoulders bent forward, intimidated by this turn of events. Max, the boxer,
was given his own cage. Boxers are prized dogs, and it was assumed someone
would adopt him. Not so the pit bull pup from the park: As with all pit bulls
that enter the shelter, his card was stamped NOT ADOPTABLE. It was a death
sentence.



The Shelter is always overcrowded, and each morning a sheet is prepared, a
simple white piece of paper. On it is a list of tag numbers — the tags the
officers put on the animals — and the notation, ER. ER stands for Euthansia Run,
the run where the dogs are placed a few hours before they are executed.
The execution chamber is at the end of the corridor, close to the
incinerator. It’s the size of a small bedroom. A wall-unit air conditioner rumbles and
rattles, its noise blending in with the constant yapping of dogs. The bare
fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling cast a raw, stark light. The floor is concrete,
sloping toward a central drain, to collect the urine and water.
Jessica slipped a white lab coat over her red T-shirt and joined Lily, a
feisty woman with glasses and short curly hair. Lily’s the vet-tech; she’s been
there 14 years. Her job is to handle the needles, Jessica’s to hold the dogs.
Jessica began bringing in the dogs, attaching their leashes to the screens of
the cages. The dogs yapped loudly, expectantly. For the first time in days,
something was happening and they were excited.
As the dogs arrived, Lily prepared the tray. It consisted of a half-dozen
plastic bottles, each six inches high, filled with a turquoise liquid. On the
side was the word POISON, printed in red, flanked by two red skulls and
crossbones. Inside was sodium pentobarbital.
For euthanasia of animals.
For veterinary use only.
The brand name:
Fatal-Plus.
Lily filled a series of needles with six cc. of Fatal-Plus and placed them on
the tray. Then she slipped on a pair of thin plastic gloves, the kind
surgeons and dentists use.
When they were ready, Jessica shut the metal doors, so outsiders couldn’t see
in. She spread a section of a newspaper on the two-by-four-foot, stainless
steel table. A red pad had been placed under the table so that the table was
precisely the same height as the gray plastic hamper next to it.
Jessica grabbed the first mutt — a knee-high gray-black guy — and lifted him
to the table. She leaned forward, her chest on the back of the mutt, forcing
him down on the table, front paws straight out, her arm wrapped gently around
the dog’s head.
Lily took a ragged yellow sponge out of a plastic bucket and sponged off the
right paw, flattening the hair so she could find a vein.
“Okay,” said Lily, stepping forward with the needle. She searched for a
vein, then plunged in the needle.
The mutt tensed at the prick of the needle, scanned the room frantically for
a few seconds. Then his head slumped onto the table. Within 10 seconds, he was
dead.
Jessica slid the dog back into the plastic hamper. It landed with a heavy
thwupppp.
And so it went. Get up on the table, hold tight, inject, and thwupppp.
Lift up, hold tight, thwupppp.
Lift up, hold tight, thwupppp.
Sometimes, especially with the big muscular dogs, Lily had trouble finding
the vein. Some dogs panicked at the prick of the needle, struggling desperately
in Jessica’s grasp.
One large black dog struggled, breaking loose from Jessica’s strong grasp,
jumping on the floor. The dog dashed frantically around for a few moments, then
its rear legs collapsed. It rose, took a few steps, collapsed again as the
Fatal-Plus seeped into its brain.
With some of the larger dogs, especially the obedient German shepherds,
Jessica lifted the front paws up, so that they rested on the table, the rear
haunches on the floor. Lily injected the animal, then Jessica tugged at its leash,
pulling it off the table, trotting ahead of it five or six steps to the outside
door. “Come on, boy, come on, boy,” she said, gently, swinging open the door
and getting another six steps out of the dog, until — a few feet from the
incinerator — the dog suddenly stopped, falling over on its side, dead.
Obedient to the end.

Meanwhile, next door, in the vet’s lab, the vet had the hound from the
day-care center on his scale. He was examining her, but when he saw her teeth, he
shook his head. “Eight years,” he scribbled on the card. “No person is going to
adopt a dog so old.” An assistant trotted the dutiful, anonymous hound back
to Run 9.
And the vet was right: The hound was too old. Several days later, she was
injected with Fatal-Plus. No new owner stepped up to adopt the chow. He, too, met
with Fatal-Plus. So did the pit bull pup found in the state park. So did the
two black Lab-mixes picked up at the South Dade nursery. As for Chica, the
beautiful viszla with fleas: She was adopted, but escaped from her new home. She
just fled, said her new owner. “Volo como una paloma.” She flew like a
pigeon.
Could she still be running the streets, foraging for food, desperately
seeking her original owner? Was she hit by a car? Or was she picked up a second time
by Animal Services and put back in the shelter? All we know is that for
Chica, as with most dogs and cats, the odds are horrendously against her.

John Dorschner is a staff writer for the Miami Herald.