One Year Retrospective

One year ago today I restarted my effort to blog about our foster dogs. This blog was actually started on August 22, 2006 with a post about a puppy named Max. Max was a three-month-old pup with a broken femur. We took him into foster care for his post-surgical recovery.

My intention was to blog about the foster animals to show the behind-the-scenes work that goes into caring for special needs animals before they can go up for adoption. But the litter we got right after Max was very sick so I delayed my posts. Then the puppies started dying and I wasn’t sure that we should post such bad news on the blog. We wound up losing the whole litter. As a result, I never got into the habit of posting and the blog faded out after Max.

One year ago I started thinking about the blog again. Ironically, Max was back for a visit while his mom was away on a job interview and he was featured as the first post of the restarted blog. At the same time we were finishing up with a dog named Boogie who was about to leave after having had a litter of puppies and we had just gotten a puppy named Madrid in foster for for post surgical care. I thought he would make a good subject for the blog and so it began again.

Two weeks after Boogie left we took in Daisy and her puppies. It was about this time that Mary “Tief” Tiefenbrunn (Executive Director of the Champaign County Humane Society), Barbara Meyer (Designer and Webmistress of the CCHS website), and I started talking about the possibilities of using social media to promote the animals that were in foster care. The idea was to see if we could get interest in them before they returned to the shelter in the hope that their stay in the shelter building would be shorter. We set up accounts on Facebook and Twitter and on March 3, 2009, PuppyCam began broadcasting live from our puppy room. The experiment has been a success. Many of the foster animals we’ve had in the last year have found homes because people saw them on this blog, the PuppyCam, the CCHS website, or Facebook postings.

There are at least two things I hope everyone takes away from this blog. The first is that CCHS makes a huge commitment to the animals they send to foster care. CCHS provides food and medical care and sometimes, as with Daisy, Donald, Mickey, Mini, and Pluto, that can get very, very expensive. The second thing is that although you read about us and see us on the cam, there’s a large group of people behind us (behind behind-the-scenes!) that are absolutely dedicated to helping these animals and providing us critical support. There’s no way we could do what we do without them.

We hope you will continue to find this blog interesting and will keep on following our foster animals. You can make a big difference in their lives by talking about them to your friends. The more people know about them the faster they will find forever homes. And, after all, that’s the whole point.

Here’s a look back at who we’ve had in foster care over the last year. I’ve added Max because he was the very first and happened to have been here when we started up again last year.

Max
Boogie
Madrid
Daisy Annie Gertie Oakley Oliver Wyatt
Lucille Cricket Juno Miki Milano Morel Sierra Tulip
Bonnie Clyde
Sally Shiloh
Ozzie
Daisy Donald Pluto
Nora Ann
Sam
Jack
Geo
Cindy Demo Doogie Kira Mary Rocky Schipp
Ace
Gertie