Golden Beginnings Golden Retriever Rescue

We adopted our wonderful GR from Golden Beginnings just over 4 years ago. Our GR has been a wonderful addition to our family. GBGRR not only found the right GR for us, but worked with us to make sure both our family and our new dog were happy. GBGRR maintained contact with us throughout the process and after. We are now looking to adopt our second GR and are looking again at GBGRR.

This so-​called «rescue group» is utterly ridiculous, and seems to be mainly interested in money only, instead of actually helping golden retrievers find safe, loving homes, which is one of their main tenets, according to their mission statement.
My wife and I were considering adopting a Golden Retriever from a rescue group, rather than going to a breeder to find one, especially with the massive numbers of these special wonderful dogs needing safe, loving homes. After reading news articles and seeing great numbers of investigative reports about «puppy mills» we decided to contact Golden Beginnings.
Sadly, we weren’t given a «beginning», but instead ended up with a rather an extremely condescending, hateful brush-​off which amounts to a proverbial middle finger given to us along with a big «&@$# You!».
My wife and I contacted a «volunteer» from this group last week and inquired about starting the adoption process for one of their goldens. She explained to the volunteer that we had just had to put down our beloved golden Molly after 12 long, healthy happy years with us. She talked with the vol at length, explaining that both of us had owned goldens basically our whole lives and both of our kids have become attached to large-​breed dogs rather than the smaller ones. She explained that we lived outside Austin in a small town which is extremely dog-​friendly. My wife had a very informative, yet pleasant conversation with the first vol she was in contact with, whom said that our family appears to be a type of family they were looking for to place one of their goldens with. The vol assured my wife that although we lived outside the Houston area, that factor wouldn’t be a problem due to our experience with this breed and she even went on to say that they had placed several of their dogs in homes outside the Houston area… and she encouraged us to submit to them an adoption application along with a $ 10 processing fee payable through PayPal, which we did.
Let me stop here and add some information straight from their website:
” We primarily serve Houston, TX and surrounding areas. We will occasionally consider out-​of-​area/​state applications. However if you don’t live near Houston, you must be prepared to travel here to visit a dog. If you adopt from GBGRR, you’ll also need to arrange and pay for all expenses associated with transporting the Golden.“
Ok, there you go. They will consider out-​of-​area applicants. Travel fees, expenses for transporting, blah, blah, blah, all of this is perfectly fine with us, and nothing about that seems unreasonable. Awesome for us, right? Not exactly. This is where this situation starts to go bad. We wait for several days after submitting to them the application. Not a word from them. We call their number and leave a message. No return call, nothing. We wait another few days, and give them another call, leave a message and get a return call later on that evening. The woman returning our call had such a thick, foreign accent we could hardly understand her. Along with this accent came a snooty, condescending, hateful, tone neither of us were prepared for. She snotily told us that «she» would not even consider adopting to us because we weren’t near Houston and therefore she couldn’t do the required «home visit».
Again, let me add some more from their website, under the Adoption Process section:
«6. We may opt to conduct a home visit, which is the last step in the approval process.»
They may «opt». It is not mandatory, as the second person stated it is. It kinda has to be, with all of those out-​of-​area/​out-​of-​state adoptions they supposedly do. Yeah, right…
So after this second rude call from their second vol, we both seem to think we are victims of what I will call, umm, geographical discrimination. The adoption application wasn’t looked over. No references called, backgrounds checked. No visit for us to meet any of the people involved in the adoption process. No chance for them to see how much we love the breed itself, or how knowledgeable our young daughters were about the Golden Retriever.
In short, we were railroaded. It was like night and day talking to these two different volunteers for this group. It seems to me that this group does a huge disservice to the GR breed itself by eliminating potential homes for their dogs before even getting the actual adoption process started. A loving, safe, stable, secure home provided to one of their dogs means little when contrasted against your proximity to their «headquarters». In fact, the farther you are from Houston, the less it matters to them apparently.
Or does it? Looking on their website, under success stories I saw many people from areas outside Houston. Austin, San Antonio, «the Pacific Northwest» as it was described, etc… hmm…their hypocrisy apparently has no limits .
If you’re thinking about adopting a Golden Retriever, please do. They all need loving homes and a stable environment. Look elsewhere, this place blows!