Home for Wayward Dogs

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Sometimes, the best experiences get forced upon you—black diamond slopes, Botox, mystery pills in a London nightclub.

As it was with the first foster dog—and the 100 that would follow.

It went a little something like this…

I was minding my own business in an east coast PetsMart, stopped to greet some dogs at an adoption event, and before I knew it, I was headed home with one. I barely had time to argue, probably had bean-eating hippie written all over me, and figured that “foster” meant “please just fall in love with her.”

Low and behold, it was not a complete disaster. I fed, I watered, I walked, I cared, and I let Sugar go when the right family came along. And it was a pretty rewarding experience.

Then I learned that thousands of rescue groups across the country take in stray, injured, or abandoned animals, shut down their production parts, and work continually to find them good homes.

Every weekend, these organizations host adoption events, and the good people who refuse to buy from breeders and pet stores do come out, they do adopt, and it does work. In the meantime, these pups just need a place to stay and a bit of training. Fostering is just one of the many ways to volunteer. If you’re a “people person,” for example, you could screen potential adopters, explaining to some of the dimmer contingent why they can’t tie the dog to a tree while they work/clip her ears/breed him and so forth.

Me, I’ll take housebreaking any day over bearing witness to human reasoning.
Poop, I understand.

More than a decade has passed since Sugar opened my eyes, sweetened my disposition, and awakened what little mothering instinct I possess. The most amazing part of fostering, without question, is witnessing their transformations. I’ve met starving beagles abandoned by hunters, skittish dogs who think moving hands are bound to hurt them, and dozens of others dumped at shelters because someone failed miserably at basic training.

Many, of course, are just overflow, the unending tidal wave of dogs and cats we’ll keep on having to deal with until we get it together like New Hampshire.

Foster stories are diverse, but the endings, in my experience, are usually the same. They learn, they blossom, and they become the dogs they were meant to be. I wanted to chronicle some of their experiences.