Should Rescues Import Dogs When Local Shelters Are Full?

Should rescues and shelters be importing dogs from other states when local shelters are full and dogs here are being euthanized for space? It feels like there should be an obvious answer. Help the dogs already here first.

But the obvious answer misses too much. And the dogs caught in the middle of this debate are paying for the fact that nobody is asking the right question.

This week’s episode opens with Gouda, a long-stay resident at the Pennsylvania SPCA who was rescued alongside several other dogs after being found tied up on heavy chains in a West Philadelphia backyard. Gouda spent 15 months waiting for someone to choose him. While he sat in his kennel, transport vans were pulling into the parking lots of rescues across the region, full of puppies brought up from high-intake shelters in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina. Most of those puppies were adopted within a week.

Why does that happen? And what should responsible advocacy look like in response?

Penny takes a mediator’s view of one of the most contentious debates in animal welfare. Drawing on 20 years of mediation work for the US Court of Appeals, she walks through what the “no imports” side gets right, where the “imports are necessary” side has a stronger case than its critics often admit, and how the field can stop arguing in circles and start setting the standards every responsible importing rescue should meet.

The episode lands on two specific minimum standards, the questions every adopter and donor should be asking any rescue that imports dogs, and a friend-with-a-puppy-photo scenario that turns this conversation into something you can use this week. Plus a long-overdue update on Gouda.

In this episode, you’ll learn: 

• Why the “no imports” argument is consistent with advocating for the dogs who need help, and where it falls short
• The economic argument that explains why rescues import easier-to-place dogs from out of state
• What “benefactor dogs” are and why some rescues fail without them
• The 2 minimum standards every responsible importing rescue should meet
• What the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement says about transport in its own guidelines
• The 2 questions to ask any rescue before you adopt or donate

Key Takeaway

The way out of the binary import-or-don’t-import debate is not to pick a side. It’s to set baseline standards every responsible importing organization should be meeting, and to give every adopter and donor the questions that make those standards stick.

Episode Highlights

Resources Mentioned:

Shelter Animals Count

The Four C’s of Legislative Advocacy for Animals

Related Episodes:

How We Choose Dogs

Transcript

Welcome back to the Animal Advocate. In the last episode, I talked about being at the Pennsylvania SPCA where they had, I think, 191 dogs waiting for homes. One of those dogs was Gouda. Gouda was rescued alongside several other dogs after being found tied up on heavy chains in a West Philadelphia backyard. Didn’t have food or water. Gouda is still in the shelter waiting 15 months after that rescue. Maybe it’s because he can be a little shy when you first meet him, but he loves going for walks, he enjoys playing with other dogs, and yet he’s still being overlooked. While Gouda sat in his kennel for yet another day, waiting for someone to choose him, somewhere in our region, a transport van pulled into the parking lot of a rescue. Inside that van were puppies brought up from a high intake shelter in Texas or Georgia or North Carolina.

By the end of the week, most of those puppies will have homes, and Gouda will be sitting alone in his kennel.

Welcome to the Animal Advocate, where we arm animal lovers with the information and inspiration you need to become effective advocates. I’m your host, Penny Ellison, and I’ve taught animal law and advocacy at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006. If you’ve ever thought someone should do something about that, I’m here to guide you on your journey to being that someone. You can find us on the web at animaladvocacyacademy.com and that’s where you’ll find show notes and resources, and you can send us your comments on episodes and ideas for topics you’d like to hear on future shows. So on to today’s topic.

Why do shelters and rescues import dogs from other states, and sometimes other countries, when they know there are dogs waiting and sometimes dying in shelters locally We certainly don’t need more dogs, but as we talked about in the last episode, people often choose a dog based on the breed they want rather than the dog who looks different but might be a good fit. And it’s not just breeders delivering what they want. It’s often shelters and rescues, too, because shelters in the south and west have dogs that don’t usually sit in Northeastern shelters. So rather than market the dogs who are waiting, they bring in different dogs to fill the shelves. Is that right? Well, it’s complicated.

Last episode, we talked about how we choose our dogs, about the difference between choosing based on appearance and breed and choosing based on personality and fit. And underneath that conversation was a bigger question. How do animal advocates focus our attention on the dogs who truly need our help? Today, I want to stay with that question because it leads pretty directly to into what’s been a contentious debate in animal welfare for quite a while. Should rescues and shelters be importing dogs from other states or other countries when our local shelters are full and dogs here are being euthanized for space? It feels like there should be an obvious answer, right? Help the dogs that are already here first. Well, I spent the last 20 years as a mediator, and one thing mediation teaches you is that when an issue gets framed as a clean binary choice and when both sides are convinced the other is either heartless or naive, it almost always means the real interests underneath haven’t been named yet. So I want to take a mediator’s view of this debate today because I don’t think the obvious answer is quite right. And the way out of the binary choice is not to pick a side, but to set baseline standards that any responsible importing organization should be meeting. A mediator’s job is to get clear on what each side really wants and look for a resolution that addresses the underlying problem instead of just picking a winner. So let me try to do that here because I think this is a conversation that has been stuck in its binary form for too long. By the end of the episode, I’m going to give you two specific questions to ask any rescue that imports dogs, but they only make sense after we walk through what the simple answers on both sides miss.

Let’s start with what’s true on the no imports side.

It is genuinely painful to watch a dog sit in your local shelter for six months, in eight months, more than a year sometimes, and then watch a transport van pull up loaded with puppies from out of state who will be adopted within a week. From the perspective of the dog who’s been sitting in your local shelter, those puppies that were trucked in just took the home that might have been his. For shelters operating at the edge of their capacity, every kennel counts. Every adopter counts. And the no imports argument is consistent with what I’ve argued. Advocates should be directing their energy toward the animals who genuinely need rescue. They’re sitting right here. No need to truck in cuter, more marketable competition that guarantees they stay right in that kennel.

Now let’s look at the other side, because that’s what mediators do.

The picture there is more complicated than some people are willing to admit. In Philadelphia and across most of the Northeast, the dogs sitting longest in shelters are overwhelmingly classified as some kind of pit mix. That’s not an accident. That’s the downstream result of years of intentional and accidental breeding combined with breed based housing restrictions, insurance company breed bans and persistent breed bias among adopters. Walk through almost any open admission shelter in our region and you’ll see the pattern repeated kennel after kennel. The national data backs this up, at least as to size. Shelter Animals Count’s 2025 annual report released in February shows that large dogs have the longest length of stay of any group in shelters.

And here’s the part that people who have not worked in shelters sometimes miss. A lot of would-be adopters can’t take a pit mix even if they want to. Their landlord prohibits it, their homeowner’s insurance refuses to cover it or charges a premium they can’t afford. Their condo association has a list of breeds that you can’t have. And even for the adopters who could legally take one home, some won’t because they don’t feel they have the experience to handle a strong large dog in the city. Others have absorbed decades of bad press and won’t get past the breed label no matter what the individual dog is like. That’s not a bias I’m endorsing. It’s a fact about the adoption market that has to be taken into account. It’s just harder to find a home for an adult large dog that looks like it might have some bully breed in him.

So when a rescue says “we import some easier to place dogs from out of state,” what they often mean, even if they don’t want to say it clearly, is the quick turnaround and higher adoption fee for that southern puppy helps pay the bills for local dogs who sit longer. That sentence is the economic argument for transport in one line. If we only took local dogs, we’d run out of money and close, and that helps no one. That southern puppy helps pay for the local pit mixes they’re likely to have to house and feed for a while before an adopter comes along. Responsible rescues have to figure out how to break even. I’ve seen rescues fail when their business model had them only pulling hard luck cases from the local shelter. That’s great, but dogs that need medical care, behavioral help, or are just in their senior years are almost always net losses for the rescue. You need what we used to call “benefactor dogs,” dogs whose adoption fees help subsidize other dogs who will stay longer and cost more money. Of course, all of this assumes that the rescue is helping locally.

There’s a second piece too, and this is where last week’s episode comes back in. The adopter who walks in set on a smaller dog or a particular type of dog — the kind of appearance driven choice we talked about. If they find nothing they can take home, they don’t suddenly decide to adopt a 70 pound bully breed. Sometimes they do, but probably not usually. They go to a pet store, they go to  Craigslist, they go to some guy their cousin knows who breeds Doodles in his backyard. None of those outcomes are good for animals overall, including for the local pit mixes whose long term solution depends on more responsible owners entering the shelter system, not fewer.

And in the places sending dogs north, the rural southern shelters, the high intake municipal pounds in places like Texas, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, those dogs we view as easier to place are actually at risk and they’re still being euthanized for space when no northern rescue will take them because there is no infrastructure to hold them long enough to find a local adopter. So the choice in front of a transporting rescue is rarely “save the local dog or save the imported dog.” It is more often “save the out of state dog or no one saves that dog.”

I’m not saying any of this to defend transport programs.  I started out hating them and I’m just trying to take a more nuanced view at this point. Some of them are clearly irresponsible. They drop dogs into communities they have no relationship with, take no responsibility for what happens after the adoption, and quietly add to the local overpopulation problem they claim to be solving. When an imported dog is returned, runs away, bites someone, or develops a medical condition the adopter can’t manage, where does that dog go? Right into the local shelter system.That is what turns an understandable practice into an indefensible one.

So, if a rescue or shelter is going to import dogs into a market that is already struggling with its own overpopulation, two minimum conditions should apply. Not as suggestions, as baseline professional standards. The first condition is that the importing organization should provide significant demonstrable assistance to the local animals already in shelters in their area. That can take a lot of forms. They can pull a meaningful number of dogs from the local open admission shelter. They can fund medical or behavioral work for dogs they don’t pull. They can subsidize, spay/ neuter for the breeds and the neighborhoods feeding the most animals into local shelters. They can host adoption events that feature harder to place local dogs.

The specific form matters less than the principle. If you are using this community’s adopter base, you are participating in this community’s overpopulation problem and you owe something back to the local animals that that problem hits the hardest.

The second condition is just a yes or a no. And, to me, it’s non negotiable. Every dog brought in from outside the area should be microchipped to the organization bringing them in. And that organization should commit in writing to taking that dog back at any point in its life for any reason, no questions asked. If the adoption falls apart in three weeks, three years or 15 years, that dog goes back to the rescue that brought it in. Not to the city shelter, not to an SPCA, not to a stranger on Facebook.

That second standard does two things at once. It guarantees that imports don’t become a hidden cost shifted onto the local shelter system. And it forces the importing organization to right size its operation to the responsibility it’s taking on. If you can’t promise lifetime take back for every dog you bring in, you’re bringing in too many dogs.

I’ve seen huge adoption events helping out southern shelters by either inviting them to participate or taking dogs from them for the big event. And when the adoption doesn’t work out or the dog gets loose, that dog is microchipped to a distant shelter. And no one is driving hundreds of miles to return that dog. So, it ends up adding to the local shelter population. So now you’ve taken up many of the potential homes that dogs like Gouda could have gone to, and you’ve added to the local shelter population. That’s not real rescue.

Neither of these standards I’m suggesting -helping local dogs and taking all returns – is radical. One is just help your neighbor. The other means clean up after yourself. You’ve probably heard rules like that since kindergarten.

In fact, the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement, which is the major professional organization for shelter and rescue leaders, already includes both of these ideas in their Companion Animal Transport Model Practices. They list microchipping transported animals to the destination organization as a recommended practice. They state that the destination organization is responsible for the outcomes of the animals it brings in. They explicitly raise the question of whether bringing in animals from outside diverts resources from harder to place dogs already in the local community.

Responsible shelters and rescues should already have a policy that they’ll always take back the animals they adopt out. The same rule should apply to anyone who brings dogs in from out of state or organizes a mega adoption event that includes animals from out of state shelters. These standards shouldn’t be viewed as best practices or recommendations. They should be the floor. An organization operating below that floor is running a transport program that pushes its costs and its problems onto local shelters.

So how can you Be the Change? Here’s an example. Your friend texts you a photo of a puppy she’s about to adopt. Of course the puppy is adorable. All puppies are adorable. The puppy is also coming from a rescue that’s bringing her in from out of state. Your friend’s really excited, and she wants you to be excited with her. Here’s the moment.

Don’t lecture her. Don’t send her a link to this episode. Just ask her two questions. What is that rescue doing for the dogs in our local shelter? And have you asked them whether they’ll take this puppy back if the adoption doesn’t work out five or ten years from now. She probably won’t know the answers. And that’s the point. Now she knows to ask. That is what advocacy looks like in real life, not anger in  a comment section at midnight. Two questions passed from one person who cares about animals to another. Until the rescues importing dogs start hearing those questions from every adopter who’s considering bringing one of their dogs home.

And I want to end on a positive note. Remember Gouda, who was sitting in his kennel for 15 months? His shyness hurt his chances at getting adopted, but someone said they’d take him for a test drive, a short visit to their home to see how it worked out. He acted like the gentleman we expected he would, and they invited him to stay for good. There are lots more dogs like Gouda spending up to 23 hours a day in their kennel waiting for someone to give them a chance. They are why those two questions matter.

That’s it for today. The Animal Advocate is brought to you by the Animal Advocacy Academy. If today’s episode got you thinking about what you can do to change things for animals, I want to make sure you know about the four Cs of legislative advocacy for animals. It’s a free audio series I put together that gives you a real framework for making legislation happen. You can find it at animaladvocacyacademy.com/fourcs. and you can find all our episodes and show notes at animal advocacyacademy.com. Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and if you know another animal advocate who should be listening, send this one their way. Questions on today’s topic or anything else, just email us at podcast@animaladvocacyacademy.com we’ll write back, or we’ll feature your question in a future episode.

Remember, compassion is great, but compassionate action is infinitely better. Until next week, Live with Compassion.