Animal shelters are often blamed for many things that go wrong. However, before you go pointing fingers, you might want to learn a few things that can help you understand. The people that work and volunteer at animal shelters truly care about the well-being of pets. Find out why you shouldn't blame them for these 4 things!

Shelter work is difficult, demanding and too often thankless. For instance, pet overpopulation and animal hoarding? Yes, shelters get blamed for those things. Considering that they’re actually trying to stamp out these terrible situations, it’s a bit nuts, no?

While I’m at it, here are 4 more things everyone can stop blaming on shelters.

1. Being Too Busy
Visit the shelter on a Saturday during the summer, and you’ll find that you aren’t the only one. The lines and crowds mean you’ll have to wait your turn.

It may be a little boring and cut into the rest of your schedule, but a busy shelter probably means there are lots of adoptions going on.
2. Irresponsible Or Abusive Adopters

Shelters do all that they can to place their pets in great, loving homes.

Unfortunately, it’s an imperfect process, and sometimes bad people get their hands on homeless pets. But blaming the shelter benefits no one — especially when no solution is offered.

3. Not Having the “Right” Pet
Everyone has some requirements to adopt a new pet (the animal must love children or even, simply, just need a home), but you wouldn’t believe how many visitors get annoyed because the shelter:

Didn’t have any teacup breeds
Didn’t have any purebred pets
If visitors kept an open mind and heart when strolling through the shelter, they might find the furry friend they never knew they were looking for.

4. Strict Adoption Policies

When adoption is too lax, shelters are blamed for allowing irresponsible people to take pets home (like poor Star above). But when adoption is too difficult, shelters are attacked for having “unreasonable” expectations.

Adoption policies are put in place to protect the animals. As long as you keep that in mind, you’ll be more forgiving of those pesky questionnaires.

It's pretty interesting to see how things can easily get mixed up and misunderstandings occur. However, now that you know how hard the people at animal shelters work to give animals the very best, putting them to blame for things might not be the best thing. At the end of the day, we all want animals to go to good homes and live happy lives!

For more information on animal shelters, visit Petful.