We discovered Rodrigo (the puppy being squished above) and Sydney on PetFinder.com
My boyfriend and I are finally ready to start seriously discussing adding another dog to our pack and I set up a search on PetFinder.com with notifications (it didn’t work). It took several tries to set up the search and it still didn’t keep all of the options I selected (which weren’t many) and I never did get an email alert although new dogs were being added daily.
And then the unforeseeable happens. PetFinder.com crashed!
Well, it didn’t exactly crash, it just stopped working. I first noticed when the links to their Monopoly-ish game weren’t working. Since I was on the site already, I decided to search for our next pack member and I learned that there are no available dogs within 100 miles from our zip code.
I knew this was a mistake, so I tried 500 miles. No dogs! Could it be that all the homeless dogs on the west coast are happily ensconced with their forever families?
I doubt it too.
So I visited Petango and Adopt-a-Pet to start our search for our next pack member with no luck, yet. I even did a simple Google search and discovered pages and pages of breeders who breed Australian Shepherd / Australian Cattle Dog mix (they call them hybrid) dogs. Are these reputable breeders? I don’t think so, but I’m don’t know and I’m afraid to call. But I did find Rodrigo’s picture when I did my first search…
So I signed off the computer, because today will not be the day when we find our forever dog. But my mind kept returning to the backlash the loss of PetFinder’s functionality can have on rescues and potential dog owners.
So, yeah, it kind of sucks that I can’t search the Pacific Northwest quickly for our perfect dog. But it more than sucks that rescues can’t add listings, update listings, and delete listings of adopted dogs. Plus they’re losing traffic from people like me who are coming up with Zilch when we conduct a search. I’d love your thoughts; what other downside does PetFinder.com’s downtime have on the rescue community.
This has been an ongoing discussion over on the PetFinder.com Facebook page, where people are notifying the site about it’s failures and receiving the response…
“Your feedback is very important to us, and we’ll pass your message along so that our team can look into this. Please email us at pets@petfinder.com for additional assistance.”
I can’t imagine that the person manning the Facebook page is familiar with the technical issues of the site and given the size of PetFinder.com, I imagine that they’re working day and night to get things up and running, because with each hour that their site is down, more people are clicking over to other adoption sites.
PS – I found a breeder posing as a rescue on PetFinder.com a few weeks ago. I notified the site and wanted to warn you to do your homework about the rescues you find on there. This breeder bred mix breed dogs from several breeds and based on her feedback, she’s very unpopular in her area, but Internet savvy enough to hide her true identity.
So when you search for dogs, which adoption site do you use?
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