This is very good advice, but I wish it wasn't presented without qualifiers. There are good reasons to get a shelter dog: - You are potentially saving a dog's

This is very good advice, but I wish it wasn't presented without qualifiers. There are good reasons to get a shelter dog: - You are potentially saving a dog's life that would otherwise be put down. - They are often initially cheaper than buying a dog from a breeder. People rightly focus on the strong moral argument of the first point and they even emphasize the second to imply that it's a good self-interested choice too. But they advocate so strongly that they often omit the real downsides: - The long-term cost may be higher. There are breeds that are known for significant health problems, but many breeds don't have them and if you buy a puppy of those breeds, their health is closer to being a known quantity. With a shelter dog, you are rolling the dice. There is maybe an argument that hybrid vigor makes shelter mutts statistically more healthy, but that has to be balanced against the facts that (1) the dog may have ended up in the shelter because of health problems or (2) the dog's life pre-shelter may have caused health problems. - There may be long-term behavioral problems. Dogs in shelters may have been feral, living on the streets, abused, or relinquished because of behavioral problems. If they were feral and weren't potty trained well as a puppy, you may never train them out of marking. Even if the dog was homed, the kind of people who don't spay and neuter their animals (thus leading to puppies that end up in the shelter) are often the kind of people who don't train them well either. There also seems to be a correlation with shelter dogs coming from dog fighting communities. You see a ton of pitbulls, which are wonderful sweethearts when raised right but are not when they aren't. Even non-pit breeds may have been abused as bait dogs. I love the dog I got from a breeder, and I love my shelter dog (who is snoring next to me as I write this), but the latter was not the pure win that shelter advocates often make it out to be. The right way to think of it is sort of like getting a used car: it can save you money and be a morally good choice (in the case of a car, less waste and better for the environment), but it's also an unknown quantity where you need to do more due diligence to know what you're getting into, or accept that you are taking a risk with higher variance. But, unlike with a car, you're signing up for the dog for life. So, yes, please consider a shelter first. Any future dogs I get will likely be shelter dogs. But consider it cautiously and take your time finding the dog that is right for you.