Adoption Process

We take great care to match each adoptive family with an available dog to find their “forever home”.

Please submit an application if you’d like to be placed on our list of approved adopters. Many of our available dogs never get posted to Petfinder because a preapproved adopter on our list is the perfect match for them. Preapproved adopters must be prepared to travel by car to meet their well matched dogs, as we do not prepare our dogs for air travel.

All adoption fees go to the IG Rescue Fund,our 501c3 parent organization to cover the looming costs of veterinary care for all of our foster dogs.
PLEASE NOTE that we do not adopt out of our mid-atlantic region (DE,MD,DC,WV,VA,TN,NC,SC) and we will NEVER ship a dog.

Our adoption process consists of:

• • Fill out Adoption Application
  • Phone or Email conversation to determine what dogs might be a good match for your family
  • Home visit
  • Meet available dogs
  • Fill out Adoption Agreement on Adoption Day!

We caution you about purchasing a puppy from a puppy mill:

If you choose to purchase a non-rescue IG puppy, please shop with caution. ALL puppies sold in pet stores are from puppy mills, where their parents may suffer in horrific conditions. There are no exceptions — a decent breeder would NEVER allow their pups to be sold at a pet store. Pet store puppies will be more prone to health and behavioral defects. Many “internet” breeders are also not reputable, despite what a fancy website may imply. Please, do your homework to locate a good, responsible breeder who works to improve the breed, and does health testing on all breeding dogs.

 

The following are 10 more reasons not to buy from a pet store.

• 1. Pet shop puppies are produced by puppy mills and puppy farms where often the breeding stock is not well cared for. In many cases conditions in these places are filthy and inhumane.
  2. Puppies from this type of commercial breeders are not properly socialized.
  3. Commercial breeders do not test their breeding stock for genetic diseases. They only care about making money, so they do not test for luxating patellas, progressive retinal atrophy (blindness), or other diseases common to the breed.
  4. Commercial breeders do not study pedigrees in order to produce dogs that are as close to their breed standard as possible.
  5. Commercial breeders often inbreed (mother to son, daughter to father, etc.) or linebreed too closely, especially since they have no interest in producing better specimens of the breed.
  6. Puppies kept in pet shop conditions are kept in cages for long periods of time and are likely to learn to soil their quarters, making them difficult to house train later.
  7. Pet shop personnel are not knowledgeable about all the breeds they sell and usually do not offer enough information about a breed to make prospective buyers aware of what they need to know before acquiring a puppy.
  8. Pet shop puppies are not always healthy.
  9. If a puppy purchased from a pet shop doesn’t work out for the buyer, chances are that it cannot be returned. The very presence of cute little puppies encourages emotional decisions to buy on the spur of the moment without doing much needed research and preparation.
  10. Every puppy purchased from a pet shop encourages the store to order more puppies of that breed, condemning the parents of the dogs to a life of hell.