Good points. Some animal shelters (we adopted a cat from one in a small town in PA) will let you return an animal if you have to. Although I would feel guilty about doing that without giving another donation. We were happy with the cat by the way, so that didn't come up. Some people manage to foist pets off onto friends or relatives with an excuse like "my new baby is allergic", we got a cat that way. I suppose "I didn't know what I was getting into" would be a much harder sell, unless you have dog-lover friends, in which case maybe not so hard. Having an exit plan would probably be a good idea.