Foster dogs: What we learned over just one week

Taking in foster dogs — or foster anything — is rewarding. But it's by no means easy …

If you're in the market for a pet, there's little need to buy one. There are lots of pets waiting to be adopted. Pet shelters get them all the time: all ages, sizes, breeds, and backgrounds.

Though the initial financial outlay for adopting a dog can be less than buying one, there could be more outlay later due to the dog's history. The previous owner brought the dog to the shelter (or the dog was brought there by someone else) likely because the dog wasn't getting the care it needed, or because the owner couldn't take care of it the way it needed. So, the dog likely has some baggage that the new owner gets to deal with.

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Foster dogs: Come in and stay a while

I wasn't a dog person growing up. My grandmother had a dog, and I was a mean little bugger to it. (I was more allergic to dogs then than I am now, so that didn't help.)

Fast forward a couple of decades. I marry a dog person.

Fifteen years later, I'm still married to said dog person, and I've become a bit of a dog person myself. Marriage and dogs have mellowed me out tremendously.

We currently have two dogs. Both are some mix of beagle. One we got as a puppy over seven years ago. It was the runt of a large litter from a very small mother dog. The second we adopted a couple of years ago from an organization called Pen Pals.

My wife had been toying with the idea of getting a third, and was drawn to a older blind beagle mix from our local SPCA — named Stevie (comment if you get why!) — and brought her home.

Fostering a dog is different than adopting one. One doesn't own the dog until it's adopted, and there's a defined end date for returning the dog, which is required. So we knew going into it that we couldn't keep the dog, even if we wanted.

More than even my wife bargained for

My wife will bend over backwards for her animals, but Stevie was the biggest challenge she's had in a long while. The SPCA managed to find another suitable foster home for her a week into it, and we took them up on their offer, returning Stevie two weeks earlier than we initially agreed.

Most dog owners are used to taking care of their dogs. (For most, it's another child, after all.) To be fair, Stevie was very, very affectionate with my wife. Love to be cuddled, carried, and all that.

With our other dogs, though, Stevie was a whole new level of “taking care of.” Yeah, she bumped into things for a bit but that calmed down after she'd been around for a day or two. But she was quite a bit underweight when we got her, and I think she viewed our two dogs as competition for food. She staked out the kitchen and got aggressive with our dogs. She also all but commanded my wife's full attention for that week. She had the Jekyll-Hyde thing going.

We would have made it through the three weeks, but it was just as well that the SPCA found a more experienced foster dog person (who seemed eager and elated to take her in).

Foster dogs: What we learned

Think fostering a dog of the same breed as your own dogs makes a difference? Think again. We have two beagles, and the foster dog was a beagle. They still didn't get along. I'd think that having only the foster dog would be the best: no competition. We were told that this isn't very common; most foster homes already have pets.
Foster dogs can be nearly a full-time job. My wife had fostered before but not like this. She's creative but also spent many hours trying to make things work with the foster dog and our dogs. At the same time, though, this is a labor of love.
Fostering a dog once gets you on the short list. After we brought Stevie back, we got a call the next day with another fostering opportunity. Less than 24 hours later. There's always a need. (We turned it down, if for no other reason than to recover!)
It's not easy returning the dog. Even if it's a relief to return the dog and bring some sanity back into the household, it's still sad to say goodbye. Returning the dog is a little easier if the shelter is no-kill, which this one was.
It's very easy to feel guilty or second-guess your motives. Don't. This you can take for what it's worth, but pushing through a trying situation like this out of guilt kind of misses the point. The people that will feel guilty about not doing enough for a foster dog will be the same people that are likely making the dog's life much better than it would be otherwise. (We're hardest on ourselves.) In my estimate it's better to see what the dog has gained by being fostered instead of worrying about some far-off, yet-unrealized happy dog state.

All in all, I think we were successful, but we'll be waiting a bit before trying this again.

Edit: I initially ended the post right there. My wife felt some part of the story was missing. She read it as a post that argued against dog fostering. Although that wasn't my intent, I agree with her observation. (And, I did use “we” throughout, so it should indeed reflect faithfully what we learned!)

Dog fostering is a critical part of the adoption process. Someone needs to do this. Otherwise, many of these dogs under trauma would not heal properly. Putting up the dogs in a real home (as opposed to a kennel in a cage) speeds up the healing process and gets the dogs ready for adoption. It's a bit of a “halfway house” on the way to their “forever home.”
Dog fostering lets shelters become no-kill. Shelters have only so much space, and dog fostering frees up that space so that they can take in more (or take in dogs more quickly) without putting any dogs to sleep.
It can be hard, but it's incredibly rewarding. It's a calling, really. People do it because they love it, not because it's easy. There's something fulfilling about taking in an animal that desperately needs stability. It's a way to make the ugly parts of this world a bit prettier, even if just for a little while.