The most common question about fostering we hear is, “Isn’t it hard to give them back?” For us, the answer is “No!” for puppies and “Sometimes.” for adult dogs. Over the years it’s gotten much easier to take puppies back to the shelter. For one thing, we’ve established a great relationship with the adoption staff at CCHS and we trust them to screen adopters and make the best matches possible. Second, the mandatory spay/neuter laws are working and puppies are much less common than they used to be. There’s few enough that pups will get adopted within a week of returning to the shelter.
The moms on the other hand—now that’s a different story, especially if they’re not a popular breed or they’re older. We worry about the moms getting adopted at all. We worry about bully breeds getting adopted for the wrong reasons. But the track record at CCHS with our foster animals is pretty good and we’re confident they’ll give the returning adults all the time they need to find a forever home.
But here’s the thing. The dogs and puppies are going to keep coming to CCHS no matter how we feel. Those animals deserve a chance at a home and better life. The sad fact is there are not enough foster homes to meet the demand. If we stop fostering because we feel a little sad to take puppies back to the shelter, a future litter will have no chance of life. It’s not a tradeoff we’re willing to make.
Base Pack Additions
Of the 1,138 animals we have fostered we have kept three. Like many foster families we kept our first foster animal. We officially adopted Millie on December 29, 1990, the day we took her pups back to CCHS. She died at 11 years of age on March 11, 1997 from mast cell cancer.
Bella was our second adoption in November 2001. She came from a hoarder who had 42 dogs and his invalid mother living in and around a small house in central Illinois. Bella grew up in a pen in his back yard and had not had any human contact for the first four months of her life. She came to us with two siblings, all three being semi-feral. The other two puppies never got over their fear of people and were euthanized, but we saw a glimmer of hope in Bella. Ten years later, she’s alive and still with us, though she has never fully recovered from the bad start she had in life.
Our third adoption was Taylor (aka “Squirt”). Her mother and litter were found living in a drain pipe near CCHS. When Taylor was seven or eight weeks old she developed spots on her head that looked very much like ringworm. After two months of diagnostic tests it was determined that Taylor had a horrible, genetic disease called Dermatomyositis. Because of that disease she was not adoptable, but by the time we had a diagnosis we were very attached to her. We adopted Taylor on January 11, 2005. Taylor’s lifespan was projected to be 18 months, but with expert help from Dr. Curt Thurman, veterinarian for the Base Pack, and careful management, she lived to just a couple of months short of her fourth birthday. She died on August 23, 2008.
On Saturday I’ll wrap up this series of posts with a discussion about the effect of social media on our fostering activities.
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