12/02/2025
I just refunded a deposit for someone last night, and they suggested that I post this to make people aware of some of our policies, so here goes.
We have on our original sales post (and will tell people this when they ask us), that we don’t meet or deliver, though we will work with transports. Let me repeat, for those in the back – it doesn’t matter *who* you are, we don’t meet or deliver.
We’ve had too many times when people don’t show up, or screw up the time zone and shows up an hour (or hours) late, to a meet spot… so now everyone gets to come here. Have I occasionally met at the truck stop if someone balks at coming to my farm? Sure. That’s less than 10 minutes down the road (and a public location, for those not comfortable coming to someone’s residence). But other than that… it doesn’t matter if you’re a customer, or a transport, or the president… I’m not meeting or delivering. If I had time for this, I wouldn’t pay farmhands to do all the things I don’t have the hours-in-the-day-to-do every week. Facts, plain and simple. If this doesn’t work for you, that’s fine, I can either call up a transport for you, or if that doesn’t work, I can likely refer you to another reputable breeder or rescue.
Why is this important? Let me explain. When we set up transport (which we do, all the time, for customers), we intentionally set up door-to-door transport. That means, the transport shows up at my door, picks up the furball, does some driving with the furball in tow, and then shows up at the customer’s house (or wherever the customer has agreed to meet them) to hand over the furball. I find this easiest for all people involved, especially because we all (us *and* the customers) have lives and IMO, no one has entire days to spend waiting around for anything.
The confusion here (I guess) is that some transports don’t come directly to your house. Now, some will come to the general area / closest “city.” We met one transport in Lafayette awhile back, maybe 30 minutes away. If we know this ahead of time… maybe we can make this work… maybe not (if I’m out of town that day… I obviously cannot meet the transport). The key here is that I need to know *where* and *when* the meet spot is, before being able to say if it will or will not work with our schedule.
The transport that this customer chose specified that they would attempt to choose pickup / drop-off spots within 90 minutes of where a group of their customers resided, though the spots could be as far as 2 hours away from certain people’s locations (especially rural people).
Can you see where this gets iffy for us?
Add in, the transport could be as much as an hour+ early or an hour+ late to said spot. This would not only create the potential need to drive 2 hours, but also, we’d also need to be there as much as an hour early or an hour late… so that’s carving out basically an entire day to drop off an animal with transport.
Can you see where this becomes difficult? I don’t want to meet someone who’s potentially 30 minutes late… and this is spending exponentially more time to meet a transport.
Ohh… but it gets better! The drop-off time could be anytime between 6 am and 10 pm, plus or minus depending on traffic / weather / etc, and the transport unfortunately could *not* tell you what day / time the stop would be *until* the route is finalized -- which is AFTER payment is sent by the buyer (which is non-refundable). So, you have to agree to meet them whenever-they-say… and you don’t find out when that is, until after they’re paid and transport is secured. To me, this seems inflexible, and actually kind of impossible for people who, you know… work.
So let’s recap. To meet the transport, I may have to drive 2 hours, to arrive as early as 6 am… or as late as 10 pm… (both plus or minus one hour, if they’re early or late), on a day that I don’t know more than maybe a day or so ahead of time… but I have to *agree* to this all and have the buyer pay for this transport before any of us know what day this is. So! If the transport was to tell me, oh the pickup date is Friday the 32nd, and that happens to be my great grandma’s funeral… oh I guess I’m just not going to the funeral! Why? Because I have to drive 2 hours there and be there an hour early… but they might be an hour late. Oh, and don’t get caught in traffic! They won’t wait more than 15 minutes at one of their stops for you to arrive… even though that stop might be 2 hours from you. You just have to catch up with them at one of their next stops (apparently, you’re supposed to break the sound barrier to do so, since they’ve obviously got a head start on you). Wait, what??
Let’s not forget, the route won’t be set until after the 5th, and this is a 15 day route, which means that this could pretty much be any day in December right up until Christmas. Not like we have any chin-appointments, doctor appts, farm animals that need care, mom needing assistance or anything else going on between now and then. Nahhh.
This sort of thing is simply not feasible for us (and I’ll be honest… this was hardly the only issue we had with their 6-page form that required signing off on every little thing ever that they could deny transport for or deny liability for). Maybe it works for some people… we are simply not this flexible. I mean, honestly, I know people can get days off of work, but I’m amazed people are willing to be this flexible. My animals don’t bring in enough money to be worth this sort of headache. Just being honest.
As far as the chin and buyer went -- I refunded the buyer their deposit and told them sorry that we couldn’t make it work. Their reply was to send me a kinda nasty message saying they’re lucky that they didn’t pay the transport already cause then they would have been livid. Since they hadn’t paid, they lost time spent of course (and so did we, if we want to get technical), but no one was out any actual money, so that was good. They then blocked our chin page (hope the door doesn’t hit ‘em on the way out!).
When this person had been sending their deposit (which was sent in two partial payments), I had someone else asking about this particular furball… I messaged that person to let them know the furball was available again, and they ended up sending payment in full, and the chin is going home this weekend… that person is driving over. So happy ending for the furball!
So, I do apologize if our inability to meet / delivery directly impacts you. I stand by what I said about the fact that we *are* willing to work with transports. The thing is, most transports do not require that we give up our entire day to meet them (even if they do require some “meet up,” usually they don’t pick spots that are super far away from everyone), so we *can* accommodate most of their requests and can make most of them work. Just unfortunately, I cannot uproot my entire day for one chin.
The moral of the story – if you (the customer) would like to set up a transport on your own – please, PLEASE, check with us, before you do so, and definitely *before* you pay for anything, to be sure we can work with their requirements.
TLDR – we don’t meet or deliver. I can set up door-to-door transport for customers. Before anyone ropes me into dealing with their transport, first inquire if we can meet their requirements.
