Room At the Rescue

So, this has been coming up more as of late, so I wanted to mention it.  Regarding there being room at the rescue for people to bring in animals. 

So, people have been calling and setting up an appointment to bring in their animal, and then no-call, no-show-ing on the appointment.  When that happens, I do reach out and send an email / text / call (depending on how the person had initially contacted me) and if I don't get a live person, I leave a message basically saying, hey, didn't see you today for the animal dropoff, did they want to reschedule?  About 95% of the time, I don't receive a call back.

If that was the end of it, no problem... but what's been happening lately is that that person will contact me a couple of weeks in the future, they'll basically tell me that something came up last time, but now they are ready to surrender their animals.  Just assuming, basically, that I have room.  The one person who sort of triggered the writing of this post wanted to drop off some guinea pigs, and when they called, I had only two guinea pigs here, and I had room for more.  When they called back, a couple of weeks later, I had 8, and that's full FULL of guinea pigs (no room for more).  So I told this person, sorry but now we are full.  She asked for a referral, and I told her to check out another place that I thought of. 

I haven't heard back from her... but some people absolutely lose their minds when you tell them that the rescue is full and their current option (other than to go somewhere else, of course) is to get on the waiting list.  Just because I have room today, doesn't mean that I will have room tomorrow.  I've gotten in large batches of animals before, or even just a lot of animals in a short period of time, and things change in an instant.  Same goes for adoptions.  I've had animals sit around for months waiting for that perfect home, and then all of a sudden, 5 people want to adopt them.  If you've heard me lately, I've been talking about how great it is that we had so many adoptions this spring.  Don't worry though -- that'll be off-set by how many surrenders we get here in the summer.  It's all give and take, and us having room here is always relative.  It can change at any time.  That's why people would do well to know that just because we have room right this moment, does not mean we will have room at some random day in the future, and of course, there is no way to predict that.  That is all.