Shelters and animal rescues seek to place homeless pets with good families, but sometimes, these dogs and cats already have loving homes.

This was the case with Glock, a deaf dog who wound up at Santa Rosa County Animal Services without ID tags or a microchip. The chocolate dog certainly looked loved and well cared for, but without any form of identification, staff couldn’t tell for sure if the pup already had a home.

Days turned into a week, and then two, and the deaf dog still remained at the Florida shelter. Then one day, a distraught woman came into the shelter and tearfully insisted she was the deaf dog’s owner, but sadly couldn’t afford the standard “redemption” fee.

″She says, through her sobs, ‘Can I please have my dog? I don’t have any money to get him out,’” operations director Jessica Jade recalled on Facebook. “When I ask who her dog is, she continues to cry and beg, telling me she can’t afford to get him out.”

Fortunately, this shelter was happy to waive the fees so that Glock could be reunited with his owner. “I tell her, ‘it’s okay, we got you. You’re getting your dog back,’” Jade wrote. “We bring Glock back to her. He was jumping and prancing he was so happy to see her, and she was crying and hugging him,” the shelter worker wrote in a heartwarming post that’s gone viral on Facebook. “Their love and bond are deep.”

https://www.facebook.com/lAmourduchat/posts/10223072513418104

This shelter’s caring approach was further evinced by what happened next. Upon learning Glock’s owner also had kittens at home, staff provided the woman with vouchers to get her pets neutered/ spayed and sent her home with a complimentary pet food. After all, Santa Rosa County Animal Services isn’t in this business to make money. The shelter exists to keep families with pets healthy, safe, and together.

″Glock wasn’t a dog who needed rescue; he was a dog who needed to go back to the loving home he already had,” Jade wrote. “Inflexible redemption fees and policies prevent animals from returning to their homes and unnecessarily add to shelter populations. Innovative shelters remain flexible to ensure as many positive outcomes as possible, ensuring animals go back to the families they belong to where they are already loved.”

We couldn’t agree more!