Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
Maybe not as an entire class, but these two specifically.
We finally came around to getting another dog about a year ago and began the search, and I handed the reigns to my significant other who knows about these kinds of things. We settled on the idea of show-quality dog from a show-quality breeder and put down a hefty deposit for a specific make/model. Well the first litter was spoken for as I recall, and they promised us if a puppy came out to our specs we would be in the running for the next litter, provided the breeder (owner of the parents) and co-breeder (who cared for the litter) didn't take their pick at the 8 week mark.
Finally, a litter came with a puppy that fit what we wanted, and we went to go meet it a few days before the 8 week evaluation, not knowing whether he would be ours. An agent belonging to the breeder was dispatched to conduct the evaluation, and luckily enough our boy wasn't picked by either breeder or co-breeder, so he was ours and we scheduled a pickup date of this coming weekend.
...or so we thought. Last night, we received a call that the actual breeder had met the litter and changed the evaluation, and our pup was her #1 draft choice, so we could either take one of the other puppies we didn't want or could go pound sand. Keep in mind that since we met the dogs and made the confirmation that we were getting the one we wanted, not only had we made significant expenditures to get our house back to dog-ready and then some, but we'd both fallen in love with the dog of choice, and had picked out a name and been referring to him as such in giddy anticipation.
The rub is, my SO had designs on being friends with this show breeder after the sale, so all of my protestations and suggestions at getting a lawyer involved whenever I felt they were giving us the run-around were rebuffed, and now she's hesitant to invoke lawyering to resolve this dispute, whereas I want to go nuclear. I tried explaining to her that this kind of shit happens because people passively learn they can get away with it when others are too shy to even broach the subject of speaking to a lawyer about disputes, but to no avail as of yet.
So fuck me, I guess, but mainly fuck them too.
I'll say this as someone who has rescued all of the dogs my family has ever had as pets. While I appreciate and support rescuing a dog, having a dog as a pet is so fulfilling in many ways, and helps teach humans many valuable lessons that having a dog in your life in any way is just incredibly rewarding. They are the best and often times bring out the best in us.
The story you told is terrible, it's just an awful way to treat someone that was invested in the process financially and emotionally. I will say that I suspect the dog you eventually get is going to be absolutely perfect, if only because they are all. Enjoy the puppy, whichever and whenever you get him/her.