Sometimes I hate living in LA. I’m all for forward thinking but the better-and-smarter-than-you attitude is pervasive. It’s gotten to the point where you can’t just get a dog anymore- you need to "rescue" it or you’re some kind of horrible monster.
I understand that pet stores don’t have the most humane practices and that declawing cats is getting frowned upon these days. Times can change for the better. And if you want to rescue animals that is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. But if you’re just a normal person who wants to get a dog or cat, you are allowed to do it the old fashioned way and buy it from a family who just had puppies and kittens.
I had a friend find a puppy on craigslist, buy it from a household, and tell me that it was a rescue. She didn’t say this in a made-up-cover-story kind of way. No, instead there was some very sketchy self serving logic reasoning that things would be bad for the puppy if it wasn’t adopted by her. To avoid being judged my friend felt like she had to appear philanthropic, when really all she wanted was a dog.
This kind of societal pressure probably just comes with the territory when living in LA, but honestly, we shouldn’t care about appearances so much. Enlightenment is great but sometimes it gets a bit preachy for my tastes.