Twenty Years of Fostering

Twenty years ago today, Harriett and I began what would turn out to be one of the most rewarding projects we would ever undertake. That’s the day our first foster dog, Millie, a beautiful 4-year old Yellow Labrador, and her six puppies came to live with us.

Harriett became a volunteer adoption counselor at the Champaign County Humane Society (CCHS) in 1984. She came home one Saturday with a story about a pregnant 4-year old female Labrador who had been found running loose at Allerton Park with her mate. They were picked up by a park ranger who kept the male and took the female to CCHS where she gave birth to nine puppies. Probably due to lack of good prenatal care, three of the pups died at CCHS. Back then there was no foster program, no staff veterinarian, and medical care was limited to the basics. Knowing our love for Labradors, Sarah Hurley, the shelter vet tech, asked Harriett if we would be willing to take Millie and the six surviving puppies into our home until they were all old enough and healthy enough to be adopted at the shelter. We accepted the challenge.

Millie’s pups grew up here before returning to the Shelter. Harriett had been carrying a stack of puppy pictures around everywhere she went for weeks, and even without today’s internet-based social media, hundreds of people knew about the litter of Yellow Labs. They were all adopted within a couple of hours. Like most foster families, we adopted our first foster animal and Millie became part of our family and what would become known as our Base Pack.

We didn’t give fostering another thought until almost a year later. Peaches, an Akita/Shepherd mix, was rescued with her 11 newborn puppies from under a porch in a snow storm. The Shelter Manager thought it would be better for the pups to grow up in a home, and once again we took them in. About four months after Peaches and her litter left we took in Buttons, a little terrier mix with three pups. Little did we know that the floodgates were about to open. From that point on, for the next several years, we were never without puppies in our house for more than three weeks in a row.

It wasn’t only puppies that came our way. We had Leona the pig, L.K. the miniature horse, Lyvenia the pot bellied pig, Petula the pigmy goat, Mort the duck, and an assortment of cats and kittens. But mostly we had dogs and puppies.

We’ve had almost every breed of dog that’s common in this area: Labradors, Shepherds, Terriers, Beagles, Schnauzers, Coonhounds, Pit Bulls, Pomeranians, Dobermans, Rottweilers, Collies, Shelties, Bassets, Fox Terriers, Malamutes, Greyhounds, Airedales, Mastiffs, Retrievers, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Border Collies, Boxers, Cattle Dogs, Spaniels, Dachshunds, Chows, Akitas, Chihuahuas, Huskies, and every mixture thereof. You name it, we’ve had it, usually with a litter.

Overall we’ve had at least 1,139 foster animals at our house: 96 dogs, 842 puppies, 39 cats, 157 kittens, and 5 other species. Of those, 982 were adopted, 152 died, 3 were adopted by us, and 1 was transferred to a petting zoo. Most of them were from the Champaign County Humane Society, but we have also taken foster animals for Douglas County Animal Control and two local veterinarians.

Our experience with Millie and her pups was the start of what would become the CCHS Foster Program. There are now about 39 licensed foster parents working with CCHS. Thousands of dogs and cats have been helped by the program.

Our mentor, Dr. LeRoy Neitzel, once told us that if we kept taking foster animals we would see many diseases. Little did we know we would see an alphabet’s worth. On Tuesday I’ll post about the types of things we’ve encountered over the last 20 years.