Foster Care Program Option for Foreclosure

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We received this email that we want to share with you as a response to our foreclosure article about pets being left behind.



A lot of shelters have foster care programs. These are especially important when the shelters go through crisis periods of overcrowding. Maybe you could write about that and suggest to people that even if they can't adopt a dog permanently, they could volunteer to foster one or more until the shelter crisis has lessened. Although this isn't a foreclosure story,

I recently picked up a young lab/shepherd mix from the center of the road (photo attached) where she was happily trotting along behind my car. She is adorable and sweet, superbly trained, and obviously well cared for, and we all fell in love with her. We thought her owner would certainly be looking for her, but all of our extensive efforts to find the owner failed.

Unfortunately, our house is so small that we already trip over the two 90-pound canine babies that we already have, so we preferred not to keep her. After two weeks, a wonderful retired woman called and asked if she could have her if we didn't find the owner.

She had seen the picture on the internet and said she'd been looking for a young, white, female lab mix just like that one. Now the dog lives with someone who gives her all the love a dog could want, and all the time and attention she needs. They live in a beautiful retirement community with walking trails and even a "dog area" for socializing with other dogs every day. And to top it all off, we've made a wonderful new human friend.

My family was torn up to see "Elinor" go, but the story really couldn't have had a happier ending. This experience tells me two particular things. First, people like us who cannot adopt another pet can still manage to foster one temporarily. Second, while trying to find the owner of this dog, I became familiar with various Internet resources (such as the pet section of Craig's list) which can help people find homes for animals they can't keep - either lost animals which they find, or animals they can't take when they move.

Perhaps you could also write about Internet resources for finding homes for dogs that you cannot keep. If you haven't already, you could write tips for finding dogs that get lost (e.g. Internet resources, ads in the paper, and listings at the local shelters in case someone turns them in)

Rebecca Wolfe