The Joys of Fostering - Part One

An update on a friend from 6/23/05 - Peaches the Pit Bull, pictured above, was adopted by a young woman who just adores her. The first thing you need to do to foster animals for your local animal shelter is to go in and talk to the Shelter Manager. Shelter rules and procedures will vary. Some shelters will ask you to fill out an application, provide references, do a home check and perhaps complete an interview. Others will do some or none of these things. Sometimes the requirements will vary depending on the type of animal you want to foster. Fostering a litter of two-day old kittens takes a different set of skills than fostering a large active dog that needs socialization training. It's possible that your shelter has rules or requirements in place that make it impossible for you to foster animals. Try to remember that the shelter's first obligation is to the best care of the animal. Secondly, you need to think long and hard about how bringing one or more new animals into your life will affect your own pets. Are you current on your pet's vaccinations? Do you have enough time now to spend with your pets? How will they react to sharing you? Here's an example: One year a co-worker gave me a day-old kitten. The shelter had a mother cat and 5 day-old kittens so I offered to take the whole family home and add mine. Merging the orphan with the Mom went just fine. One day while cleaning their cage the otherwise sweet Mom cat got out and ran hell bent to kill my cats. Fur flew as she attacked them one by one. They didn't even know what hit them. The effect on my oldest cat, Mary, almost killed her. After the attack, the stress of having the Mom cat in the house caused her to quit eating. I was so busy dealing with the Mom and kittens that I didn't notice that she had started to hide. It wasn't until she started throwing up bile that I realized she had lost a great deal of weight. I rushed her to the vet and found out she had hepatic lipidosis, or fatty,caused by not eating. Hundreds of dollars and 6 weeks of feeding her via a tube in her neck later she was fine. It was a close call. And thirdly, before you bring any animals home to foster you have to ask yourself if you and your family are emotionally ready for it. The reality is that the animals have to go back no matter how attached you get to them and it's hard. I cried today as I left my kittens. My house is so quiet without the thunder of them running back and forth. You have to give them back and you don't have any control over where they go. The shelter staff has to be allowed to find them homes. Fostering baby animals brings different emotional risk. Sometimes they die. Of the litter I mentioned above only one kitten and the Mom survived. The rest I had to have euthanized by the shelter staff one by one due to serious and incurable upper respiratory disease. I've had another kitten die in my arms, probably due to FIP. You do everything you can but babies are fragile. But is it worth it? Yes! Do animals shelters need people to do it? Very much so! Will I do it again? Well, if the two little kittens sleeping in the living room right now are any indication I would say yes. Next entry will have pictures and Part Two of what you need to know to be a pet foster home.