Chins that aren't ready yet

So, I wanted to share with you something that I suppose hasn't really come up much before -- chins that aren't ready yet.  As you may have noticed, there's separate sections on the website, sort of like categories.  Chins that are available, other critters that are available, chins / animals that are under evaluation, and animals on hold.  So today, we'll be talking about the animals that are under evaluation.

Critters find themselves in that category for a variety of reasons.  First, every animal that comes in, is "under evaluation" for a period of time.  That period of time may vary -- anything from a few days to 30 days, or even longer, depending on what's going on with the animal.  If we have an animal that's sick, not eating, or not doing well, they may be under evaluation for quite some time. 

One of our chins that is here at the rescue now is battling chronic eye infections.  He's been shown as "under evaluation" for quite some time, and he will be there until we clear up those eye infections and he's set to go home.  We have another chin, a female, who has not been eating well, since she has been here.  She's an older female, been picking at her hay... but not eating much of her pellets, and is slowly dropping weight.  Not much, but as we typically see in the culled breeders, she'd dropping a bit... and she'll take a little while to settle in, level off on her weight, and be ready to go to her new home.  The culled breeders are notorious for taking awhile to settle in -- after all, they've pretty much lived their entire life out in one cage... and then were picked up, transported here, handled and weighed... and they're like, "omg wtf happened?"  Their whole world turned upside down.  Don't get me wrong, 99.999% of them find great pet homes, but they sit here, drop some weight, and eventually realize... hey, this pet life isn't half bad!  They have hay, food, water, occasionally some treats, and once they realize that they're safe and everything's cool... they're ready to go.  But... they need to get to that point first.

Same goes for the younger chins.  Some of the young ones for sale are chins that are bred here that don't turn out to be show quality.  Some are from other breeders, same thing, not show quality.  The ones brought here from elsewhere need to stay for a bit to gain weight, make sure they're eating, and so on.  This doesn't always happen overnight.

Anyway, the point of this post -- because these chins aren't ready *snaps* like that, you see chins that stay in the "under evaluation" section until they are ready, and typically, unless we are having a shortage of chins, you don't see any descriptions or pics or anything, of those chins until they're ready.

So today, I was talking with someone about what chins we had available, and I told them what we had, and I guess none of those looked appealing, because they asked me for pics of several of the chins that are still under evaluation.  So as to not reinvent the wheel, here's what I said:

The chins that aren't ready, typically aren't ready because they aren't eating, due to being stressed from being shuffled around and coming to the rescue. That's why you don't see pictures until the chins are ready to go, because taking them out and taking pictures in a wide open cage with nowhere to hide, only stresses them more... and definitely doesn't help get them to feel comfortable, set in, and eat.  If you want pictures of any of the chins that aren't ready, you'll just need to hang on, until they are ready... cause there's no reason to stress them out more and set them back....

For the good of the chins -- that's the truth.  If they're already not settling in just quite yet, it's not going to help them at all, to put them in a wide open cage, nowhere to hide, under the lights, to snap some cute pics.  It's not that I wouldn't like someone to love them and think, "oooh, I can't wait for that chin to be ready so I can take it home!!", but for the sake of their health, further pestering the chin isn't going to help that chin out.... so no, I won't stress out a chin that isn't ready yet, and get you pics.  Sorry, but not sorry... I feel this shouldn't even need to be said... but if the chin is "under evaluation" -- there must might be a reason for it.