When you think about dog rescue the image that comes to mind for most people is a busy shelter with lots of full kennels and loud barking and dogs jumping up, jamming their faces through kennels doors trying to be the one that attracts your attention and gets taken home. But there is also the quieter side of dog rescue that some people don’t even realise exists and that is dog fostering. Fostering isn’t just done for dog rescue but for cats and lots of other types of animals too. We’re not allowed foster cats though here in Kinvara Collies cos Mrs. KC is the crazy cat person and definitely wouldn’t be able to let the cats go 🙂

In Kinvara Collies fostering means taking a rescue dog that is still looking for it’s forever home out of the busy shelter and into our home. We are not a rescue. We do not have kennels. We open our home to a rescue dog, one at a time, to help get them socialised and ready for their forever home when it comes along.

Fostering has a few difficult sides:

  • First of all every foster dog smell of what we affectionately call “kennel smell”. It’s not very nice but a groomer friend of Mrs. KC’s gave her some tips and a fab shampoo so these days we get kennel smell under control on day one. Thanks Sarah if you ever read this 🙂
  • Secondly, foster dogs are very rarely house trained. Some of them learn it quicker than others so this can range anywhere between cleaning up 1 or 2 random pees over the 2-3 weeks the foster is in the house to having to clean pee and poo every morning from their crate and from random other places around the house during the day.
  • Thirdly there might be a bad habit to deal with like chewing for example. You need to be on alert in the first few days for signs of these habits. In the end a chewed bottom step of the stairs (thanks Pearl) and a chewed leg of the coffee table (thanks Charley) are only cosmetics and they serve as nice reminders of the dogs we have helped along the way.
  • Probably the most difficult side of fostering though is the day you have to say goodbye and give the dog away to his/her new forever family. People always ask if we find it hard to give the dogs away when a forever home comes along. We can never give a clear yes or no answer to this. Yes, it’s emotional, there are always tears. Sometimes we manage to get back inside the door before the tears come as the new family drives away with the foster but a lot of times Mrs. KC makes a show of us and bawls as the new owners are putting the foster in their car 🙂 But at the same time we never find it too hard to give a foster dog away when we know that it is going to a fantastic forever home of it’s own. Our family unit is complete (for now, you never know!) and we can’t keep them all so we have come to terms with the fact that the dogs will always leave and we are prepared for that as soon as we pick them up from the kennels on day one. As the foster saying goes – “Goodbye is the goal” 🙂

Fostering has some amazing rewards too:

  • Operation Transformation happens on day one. This is when we wash, comb and brush the foster until it resembles a normal shiny pet dog. This is actually great fun. I suppose fun is all about your individual perspective so you’ll have to judge this one for yourself. The chances are you will be soaked at the end of it cos some dogs will not stand in the wash basin, others will shake while standing beside you and sometimes you drop the hose and it squirts you in the face – that’s par for the course. When it comes to brushing and combing I think we have only had 1 of fosters so far that actually enjoyed this and licked our faces as we sat on the ground beside her to brush her coat. The rest were all wriggly or wanted to eat the brush or play with the comb… but that’s good fun right…
  • You get to see each dog blossom in their own ways from scared, lost souls into happy confident dogs. Not all of them will get to their full confidence level before they leave since they are only here usually 2 to 3 weeks and the scars of some previous lives take longer than that to heal but you do see a remarkable improvement in all the dogs without exception.
  • You get to see each dog learn new things. Jess and I are the best teachers when it comes to our foster dogs. Some don’t know how to play and we show them how to do that. Some are scared and will not jump into the car to go for walkies but we show them that jumping in and out of the car can be great fun. We show the new dogs where we sit for dinner and most will come and sit beside us and wait for their meal to be served. And the best thing is that we teach them what chewie sticks are for – this is usually achieved by stealing the first chewie stick the foster dog is given so the next time they won’t leave it out of their sight until it is devoured 😉
  • You appreciate every day how good the permanent resident animals in your household are
    • the dogs for teaching the foster dog where to sit for dinner, how to play with toys, what chewie sticks are about and that you don’t have to be afraid of the humans
    • even the cats for accepting all the strange dogs, still coming into the house and teaching the fosters with lots of nose rubs that cats can be their friends too
  • There’s nothing more satisfying than giving a hungry skinny dog a good meal and seeing them wolf it down happily. It’s only surpassed by the ones that at the end of the meal do a big burp of satisfaction as they curl up on the sofa for a post dinner snooze 🙂
  • And last but not least, your heart might feel like it’s breaking when the foster leaves but it also has a great feeling of warmth and love and this outweighs the sadness every time. There’s a great sense of pride when someone comes to see your foster dog and you can see it’s love at first sight and all your hard work has been worthwhile.

So really to summarise you really need to have a strong stomach and some strong willpower to get you through fostering but you will be rewarded with fun times and new friends 🦊