Archive for the ‘Dog Fostering’ Category
When the email arrived, Tim came away from his computer with such a sad face that I thought someone had died.
I was at the table writing holiday cards while festive music played softly in the background. Shamus, the Newf, was romping in the snow and Emmett, our foster of six months, was resting in his bed by the fire.
“Somebody is interested in Emmett,” Tim said.
I felt sick.
Tim sat down.
We wrote more cards. We took in the holiday scene, the romance of it. We saw our boy so content in the other room. We each shed a few tears while the other wasn’t looking.
Having asked Tim in early December if an adoption contract was in our holiday future (Emmett was the only present I wanted), Tim said he prefers to perpetually foster. I didn’t push the issue, promising to never back Tim into a corner the way I did to keep Bill, the first foster I couldn’t let go. While I want to make this a decision together at the right time, getting the first bite of interest for Emmett meant a real conversation was in order.
I know Emmett could make a great pet for the right person but, after talking it through, Tim and I are also sure that Emmett’s progress would revert in the face of change. We watched Emmett go back to square one for a full five days after spending just one week at the kennel. How will a new situation effect his sense of security? I also worry that Emmett’s nervous antics (he ate another cushion today) will incite anger with somebody new. The truth is, sometimes we get angry and we’re pretty darn tolerant. So yes, there are many questions about whether Emmett is adoptable yet or whether we can emotionally let him go.
The debate has not been settled for nearly a month, in part because the inquiring family never asked after Emmett again. Still, this is the moment of truth. As I see it, we have 3 options.
- We continue to foster and eventually send Emmett out into the world.
- We make a lifetime commitment to him.
- We ride this out and have the conversation all over again the next time a query arrives.
I’m opting for 2 while Tim opts for 3.
For now, I leave you with this video of what life with Emmett is like. Six months of our fostering experience has been condensed into less than 6 tasty and digestible minutes for your viewing pleasure. (To satiate your appetite for more ridiculousness not caught on camera, visit my previous post, “The Forever Foster?“). Perhaps you, dear reader, can offer some perspective. We’re obviously too in love.
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THE REWARDS OF FOSTERING
Fostering is one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever known. I rank it right up there with my month-long volunteer experience in Ghana. If one could measure such things, my satisfaction with fostering might rank slightly higher because, with the dogs, I know I have had an immediate, direct and positive impact on a life for the long haul.
Tim and I have had several foster dogs, each with amazing personalities and various degrees of challenges. You can read about Jack, Bill, Petey and Moo on the Dogs We’ve Fostered page. Relatively new to this list is Emmett, a high-energy Britney mix and our toughest dog to date.
MEET EMMETT
When Emmett was wandering the streets, he was so filthy that rescuers thought he was dark brown. After a good, long bath, it took two days more to pick the ticks from his poor body. Under the filth and parasites was a dog with beautiful, glowing white fur, liver colored spots, a split ear, one scarred lip missing a half-inch chunk… and a non-stop wagging tail.
Emmett became an AnimaLover’s dog and lived in the safety of Creekside Kennel for 8 months. While other dogs up for adoption came and went, Emmett waited for his own forever family until, finally, one entered the scene. Unfortunately, after several weeks, Emmett didn’t do well in his trial adoption. He needed more patience and firm guidance than a family with children could provide.
What the family did provide was significant insight into Emmett’s behavior (or lack thereof) in a home setting. We learned that Emmett has a penchant for being in charge and he’ll push every button along his way to being top dog. This was a side of Emmett’s personality we had no access to at the kennel. Thanks to this trial family, we knew Emmett had to learn to mind his manners (and what manners are) before being reconsidered for adoption.
CAN WE DO THIS?
With no foster homes available and little hope beyond perpetual kennel life, Tim and I considered taking Emmett in. Our two old boys had recently passed away and Shamus, a Newfoundland in need, had rescued us from our enormous burden of grief. Our household was only beginning to settle in and Tim and I strongly questioned our emotional abilities as foster parents at that time. Did we have the patience to train an infuriating dog? Could we do the job well without being short or, worse, getting downright angry? Would our animals be safe? We had no idea. We only knew we had to try.
FLIGHT OF THE DEVIL DOG
The first time I walked Emmett on a leash, he literally took flight. Repeatedly jumping 4 feet in the air, he tried to maneuver out of his collar for what felt like an eternity. Stunned, I planted my feet firmly and held on tight until, in a fit of exhaustion, I eventually dragged him back into the house. Placing leash walking on the to-do list, Emmett’s main outings were shuttled through the dog door.
Taking flight of a different kind, Emmett has crashed through me at the front door and Tim at the gate on two separate occasions, making us traipse through the woods for hours looking for him. He also made his way under the fence (one that has effectively contained 7 other dogs in our care over the course of 15 years) by working at a weak point until he escaped and took our Newf with him.
A DOG OF TASTE
Emmett has a taste for fabric, paper, Newf and cat fur in the most playful sense, but he rarely knows when enough is enough. He initially played too rough with Shamus and required constant intervention. Let me say, inserting oneself between two torpedoing dogs while assuming a position of power is a real trick and one I wasn’t crazy about learning.
Emmett would go after household items with the same intensity and stealth speed as he did Shamus. I would find him sleeping in a cloud of stuffing from a pillow I never heard him shred. Blankets, towels, dog beds, you name it, all have been dragged through the dog door at one point or another, and some more than twice. Daily, I struggled with the balance between crating Emmett and reporting to Tim about items decimated on my watch. I often felt like I was failing one, the other or both.
While most of the thieving has finally stopped, aside from a stray piece of recent mail and a Christmas card that fell from the wall, we still work on many other issues. There is no climbing up for attention allowed and we still, months later, have to remind Emmett to sit before he gets a head scratch. Because he strongly dislikes sharing his dog bed at night, we now stand over him to demonstrate that the bed belongs to us, not him, and we invite the cat and Shamus in too. The bottom line is that, while Emmett has come such a long way, he still has so far to go.
EMMETT’S FOREVER FOSTER HOME?
For all the issues Emmett has and all he has destroyed, I still find having him in my life extremely rewarding. He makes me laugh more than any dog I have ever known. He also makes me beam with pride when he takes significant steps toward change. Tim and I have grown very fond of him, as have Shamus and our cat, Kringle.
People have told us to stop pretending Emmett doesn’t already belong with us and, in all honesty, it feels like he does. After six months, of course we have grown attached. I asked Tim over the holidays if an adoption contract was in our future, but he said he’d prefer to foster indefinitely… until he received an email from a family interested in Emmett.
I’ll address all the issues that this new query brings the next time I write. For now I have to go. If I don’t, Emmett will continue to jam his face into my keyboard for attention and destroy this post like he has my office carpet…
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Foster A Lonely Pet for the Holidays – The Kick-Off
Being a foster mother to several dogs over the years (and keeping an eye on one now who enjoys dragging the Christmas tree skirt out through the dog door), I was happy to watch Hallmark’s Hall of Fame movie “A Dog Named Christmas” (airing on CBS Nov. 29) kick off the “Foster A Lonely Pet for the Holidays” program. The program, spearheaded by Petfinder.com, works with over 2000 shelters and rescue groups across North America. The aim is to ease the holiday burden on rescue organizations, to provide an animal with individual attention, and to offer families the experience of having a pet in their homes.
A Dog Named Christmas – The TV Movie
“A Dog Named Christmas,” based on Greg Kincaid’s novel, is a sweet holiday movie about Todd, a young man with a developmental disability who works to convince his family and community to join in the local animal shelter’s “Foster a Dog for Christmas Program.” The story focuses not only on how the family helps the dog, but even more-so on how the dog helps his new foster family. It is the latter that makes the dog named Christmas seem unrealistically independent and I find it important to point out one specific scene that concerns me.
When Todd and his father first leave the shelter with their new foster dog, the dog is let off leash and expected to jump into the back of a pick-up truck. Even if the dog had done as expected, without a dog crate firmly secured in place he could have jumped out at high speed or been bruised and bounced about on the long dirt road back to the family farm. Thankfully, this dog avoids any immediate danger by heading straight for the front seat. In fact, he’s so smart that he can already do many tricks as well as protect the family from danger later in the film. Unfortunately, this kind of dog awareness typically happens only in movies.
Fostering – The Real Story
Animals need people to watch out for their well being, not the other way around. They need safe modes of transport for the same reason that the law requires people to use seat belts. Animals need leashes or cat carriers to prevent their return to the very streets from which many were rescued. And, as for dogs thinking on behalf of their own best interest, really they just want to be dogs. They have no drive to exhibit a high IQ, obey rules without reward or to be the family hero. That said, never let a dog off leash that you haven’t personally trained with the knowledge that - for a fact – your dog will respond to a “come” command without question.
While I have never let Emmett, our foster, off-leash, he has managed to escape from us on several occasions. Once, when I was injured, he pushed past me as I stepped through the front door. Before I could get up off the ground, he was gone. That same week Emmett pulled a similar maneuver with Tim at the dog yard gate. We have since learned to deal with Emmett’s unacceptable habit of ramming his way out, but it caught us off guard as much as our freshly rescued Newfoundland did when he thought, at nearly 100 lbs., that it was fun to take us out at the knees from a running start.
Everybody can appreciate a good survival story, and it’s wonderful when things work out, but fosters and rescues can be unpredictable. This is my journal entry from the day Emmett charged out of the dog yard:
I was in PJs & on the throne when my husband yelled “SH!T!” and our foster broke through the gate. FLUSH AND RUN. It was all I could do. No time for pants or bug spray. After an hour of mucking around in the mud, I’m now obsessed with the itch of ten thousand deer fly bites from trekking through the woods in the rain wearing a measly tank top. The good news: I tracked the dog down with treats and a leash, brought him home and somehow managed to avoid contracting poison ivy while wearing capris bottoms with no socks.
Funny as my tone may read, and fostering is often fun and funny, Emmett later encountered a dangerous situation after he found a weak link in the fence and slipped underneath. In the film, when Christmas escapes under a fence, he is trying to go home. When Emmett did so, it was to track every scent through the woods with no regard for returning. Sometimes the story just doesn’t end humorously. It’s nice to see Emmett sleeping in front of the fire as I type knowing that - this time - everything worked out. Still, I often think he is simply smarter and definitely quicker than we are. We are always on our toes, and that fence required a new chain link section as well as reinforcement at six inch intervals all the way around.
My point is that the perfectly trained and well behaved dog in the film is not likely the kind of dog found in a shelter. As ”A Dog Named Christmas” well outlines, many animals are turned over because people lose jobs and care becomes too expensive, because people move to places where animals aren’t allowed, or because the owner has failing health. Others are turned loose in the streets because, without proper guidance, they become possessive of certain people or toys, they may not be well socialized with other dogs, cats or new babies, or they simply aren’t loved. As emotional beings, animals coming from any one of these situations can become withdrawn, sad for the loss of their owner, protective of food and toys, unsure or frenetic. These are the most crucial moments when positive human contact is so important.
How You Can Foster a Dog for the Holidays
As committed as shelters and rescue groups are, there is nothing more settling for an animal than to be in a home, even if that home is temporary. My husband, the Dog Adoption Director of AnimaLovers.org for more than 10 years, has seen the benefits countless times. To watch an animal emerge from his or her shell and learn to trust is incredibly rewarding. The growing sparkle in a dog’s eyes, many wags of a tail and the purring of little cat engines make the commitment (and, in Emmett’s case, $200 worth of eaten concert tickets) worth every minute.
Make a difference. Give the gift of teaching a dog or cat how to better behave in a family setting and provide them and their new adopting family with a solid base to start from. These new beginnings create a lifetime of change for the better.
If you decide to foster a pet for the holidays, please visit Petfinder.com to locate participating shelters and rescue groups near you. Don’t forget to drop a note about the adventures you have!
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