Okay, I AM one of those rescue people so let me weigh in here. Although my experience is more dog and cat, I have rescued rabbit and I think I can lend a little insight here.
I hate shelters despite working with them. I have seen times when good people cannot adopt as well. I hate that, and rudeness. No reason for it. Our society should be taking better care and doing a better job. Sometimes it means the community needs to get involved.
We improved our local shelter by putting complaints together and giving them to the board of directors. Eventually, a bad manager was let go. Things improved. More money was donated and they built a nice large beautiful shelter. Things are much better now. But the community has to care. Many people don't like to think about the shelter. Or they give blindly. When the terrible manager was in charge, so much money was squandered....
In any event....rescues.....are populated by overly emotional people who cannot "let things rest" and must "do something". They are opinionated, hard boiled and get burn out when we are not on our soapboxes. There are some who are hoarders.....us legitimate rescuers resent however being compared to them, it is not the same thing. You can usually spot the "good" ones as we are all about spaying and neutering and don't have too many at one time, and we provide basic good health management to all in our care.
I do screen people who adopt animals from me, but so would anyone who spends the time, money and compassion it takes to do this. I am not going to let people I feel are inappropriate adopt my fosters and since I'm the one volunteering, I feel it is my right, I saved their life and get to choose. People often do not know what they want or need and discard pets that do not work out. When I can see a situation that does not look optimal, I will not adopt to that situation. I wait until the right thing comes along. Sometimes it is a matter of just not being able to trust strangers to do the right thing. But we have managed to find the RIGHT home 378 times now for dogs, and about 53 times now for cats, three rabbits.
Rescues have a hard time with staffing. Only very very large groups have paid help. Everything else is volunteer. Can you imagine a workplace where no one was paid and you did not really want to fire anyone because of short staffing, so you had to make do with what you have? And these folks usually have day jobs too. So people who are in charge can get terribly terribly overinvolved and have way too much on their plate. This does not make for efficient "help". While I'm talking about my own experiences, there are well run and poorly run rescues, they cannot be lumped all together. There are a few places that really lead the pack, mostly in San Francisco and Utah, and the "good"people want to copy those models in both shelters and rescues.
Rescues dealing with one specific breed tend to be very particular about who gets to adopt their dogs because they can and do choose the very best homes for these dogs they can possibly find, often there are wait lists. This is because there is not an oversupply of these dogs.
Rescues dealing with all breeds and mutts usually are more lenient, but again you are dealing with these emotional personalities and people who just love animals just a little too much and have put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into THOSE particular ones.
I've volunteered also in rabbit rescue and found most of those folks to be extremely "overboard". They believe all rabbits must live inside homes. They would be appalled to hear I am currently raising meat rabbits. That would be sinful to them and a reason to ban my name forever from adopting from any bunny rescue. However, I respect that. But you see, they are fulfilling their purpose for helping those pets in the first place. People are not rescuing animals to help people. They are helping the animals so they may be cared for as they see fit. So the rabbit folks may be extra particular, it is their choice.
Now shelters being mean to potential adopters is just plain old bad management. You should complain to the proper authorities. They do listen, believe me, especially if you get other people together to complain.
Sometimes you need to DEMAND better things of your community. In mine, I made this a "mission" in my life and the fact that I helped play a small part in removing that man from his job is one of the biggest accomplishments of my rescue "life". He was a perfect example of the things you describe here at the bad shelters.
Unfortunately, I can no longer do so many of the things I used to for the animals of my community because of my health. I could really not be doing anything at ALL if it were not for the fact that my whole family is involved in this project. Rescuing dogs and working in shelters is very hard...very taxing and shows you the dregs of society and the sickos.....if those people in the shelters were not hard bitten and tough, they might not be able to work there. While rescues can pick in choose whom they deal with, shelters cannot. Food for thought.
Well my two cents turned into several dollars worth, but this is a world I understand.
I love you all, hope I did not ruffle any feathers with my comments.
