Saturday, September 22, 2018

Communication After Adoption

So, when people adopt, and I'm caught up on paperwork (ha.. hahahahahahahahahaha), I try to send out emails / texts to people asking if everything's going alright, if they have any questions, and so on, maybe a week or two after adoption.

Since I'm so far behind in paperwork (though catching up!), I haven't gotten to that lately, but occasionally, people will text with questions / concerns / etc.

For example, we had a pair of baby guinea pigs that were adopted out.  Long story short (without going into it, I know *gasp* I'm going to by-pass telling a story within a story), they were returned a few days later due to not getting along with the lady's current guinea pig.  When they were returned, the lady returning them wanted to point out some gunk that had gotten into the one's fur.  I mention this, because she wasn't clear about which one had gunk in it's fur, so I closely looked both guinea pigs completely over.  They went into a clean cage, and had a potential adopter within a day or so.  She came to look at them, and she and her husband and two kids both held and cuddled the guinea pigs for quite some time.  She asked about the health guarantee and I explained it (simply, the pet dies, without it being the new owner's fault, in the first 7 days, we replace).  I asked if there was a reason she was asking, nope, just curious.  She put down a deposit, came back a few days later to adopt the guinea pigs.  Again, held for some time, didn't notice anything odd (nor did I).

Few hours later, I get a text that the guinea pig has some sort of mites or bugs or something.  She wanted to know what they were.  She said they were little white bugs, and I've only seen black / red mites / fleas, etc.  I told her, white bugs, that I dunno, but I explained to give him a bath with blue Dawn dish soap, let it sit on him while lathered up for 5 mins, and then rinse and it should be good.  I explained that while I didn't know what the bugs were, that's a common treatment for dogs with fleas, rabbits with mites, etc etc, so there was no reason it shouldn't work, regardless of the type of bug. 

I checked the cages here that the guinea pigs were in, couldn't find one bug or anything amiss.  Cleaned and completely sterilized the cages just in case.  Checked all the other guinea pigs here, none had any bugs or anything.  Treated them all with ivermectin as a preventative, anyway.  Ivermectin will kill lice, mites, and other small parasitic bugs on animals, so regardless of the type of bug, we should be good.  I have also since checked the pigs, and no bugs.

I googled white small bugs, and it turns out, they may have been lice (that's something you now know, lice tend to be a light greyish color).  Turns out, lice are species specific.  That means, if you have lice, it is human lice.  Versus if your guinea pig has lice, they are guinea pig lice.  Or if your dog has lice, they are dog lice.  These different types of lice cannot go to different species, so your dog's lice cannot become guinea pig lice.

If I had to make an educated guess about all of this, this would be my take -- since I did not find lice (or whatever bugs) on any of my guinea pigs or in their cages, and lice need to be on a living organism to survive due to needing to eat / reproduce (and can't live longer than 24 hours without a host... they didn't come in on shavings or something like that)... my guess would be that the first adopter (who returned the pigs when they didn't get along with hers) may have had lice on her guinea pig, which then laid lice eggs on these guinea pigs... and the timing may have been just right for the new eggs to have hatched, and lice to appear when they went to their new home.  That's my guess anyway.  Anyway, on the whole communication point of this post...

Next day, I send this person a message, asking how the bath went and how the guinea pig is doing.  This was about a week or so ago now, and I have never heard back.  This is actually pretty typical.  Don't get me wrong, I don't expect all adopters to become my best friend after adoption, but even when I do send out the emails / texts that ask if the person has questions / concerns, I only maybe receive responses from 10-25% of people.  That's it. 

Do people really want to adopt and be completely done with where they got the animal from?  I mean, maybe so, I guess I'm different in that I would like to keep in touch, if possible.  I'd like to share updates on how the animal is doing, and ask questions if needed.  But I'm personally amazed how few people will even answer a simple message or email...and I know their email / messages are working, since they used those to contact me not long ago prior to that! 

When I reach out after an adoption, I'm only trying to be helpful.  If someone does have a question, I really would like to answer it and help out, and make sure they have the correct answer to their question, not just the most popular one found by google.  In the case of the guinea pigs, I still wonder how he's doing.  I would assume they gave the bath and the guinea pigs are doing fine, mainly because... since the lady mentioned the health guarantee, I feel like I would have been contacted, had the guinea pig died or something (though that would be quite the extreme response to lice).  So, I assume the guinea pig is doing well, but unfortunately, the adopter didn't take the time to message me back... so I don't know.  And I actually do care about the animals, so it's actually upsetting that she didn't respond.  I just wish people would think about this sort of thing when they wouldn't respond... because here it is quite a bit of time later... and I'm still thinking about that guinea pig. 

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