Fostering Doggos: How did we start and why do we do it?
Some of my most frequently asked questions from followers who have been on my Instagram for a while have to do with fostering! For those who may not know, my husband and I foster doggos with Squishy Face Crew of Virginia a non-profit pet rescue. At the moment, the rescue has no shelter for the animals, it is 100% foster-based. This means the more foster doggos we take in, the more animals the rescue is able to help.
We actually intended to start fostering prior to getting a doggo to “help out” and maybe help us find the perfect dog for us in the meantime. SURPRISE, we ended up adopting Josie before we ever fostered a single dog. Truth be told, if we had fostered her first, she probably wouldn’t be ours right now…homegirl was WILD. Anyway, once we had Josie a while, we found out she LOVES other dogs. I’m talking of all the dogs she’s ever met, she loves 99% of them. She also has a LOT of energy and having another dog around helps encourage her to get that energy out—by way of chasing each other around our back yard. So we started fostering!
Since we started, we have had 23 fosters in our care and counting! It’s so much fun to get to watch the doggos go from timid and confused when we first get them to outgoing and playful when we see them get adopted by their furever family. It’s also fun seeing Josie interact with so many other dogs and the things they learn from her while they’re here. Our most recent foster, Gravy, was part of a hoarding case so he hadn’t had much interaction with humans when we got him. He was very timid, wasn’t so sure about receiving pets, and definitely didn’t know how to play. By the time he got adopted, he would go up to new people and ask for pets, and finally started playing with toys with Josie and us! Seeing their transformations is what makes all of this worth it!
The question I get asked the most, without a doubt, is “how do you not keep them all?” Trust me, it is hard. And the better the dog fits in our house, the harder it is to let them go to their furever family. But we have a 2 dog limit in our house right now and if we adopt another one, we won’t be able to foster anymore. Going into each foster with this mindset helps. If you go into a foster thinking you might foster fail and keep them, you probably will! You have to have a long term mindset!
This seems a little silly too, but we know at this point, many of our friends and family are willing to watch Jo when we go out of town. She is a well-behaved dog so that helps, but we know finding someone willing to watch two dogs would be a lot harder. Either that or we would have to pay for boarding when we leave (which we definitely don’t want to do; we’d prefer our doggos be in a friend or family member’s house if possible).
Finally, getting to see our fosters meet their furever families is such a happy time. When they finally leave my side and go to their new momma and daddy’s side, it’s one of the best moments. I also LOVE getting updates from their new families, which doesn’t always happen, but I love when it does. We have the sweetest foster doggos and knowing they’re going to good families who will love them as much as we do makes it so much easier to let them go.
So that’s it…how did we start fostering and why we do it. If you have any questions about fostering, how you can start, want to know any tips I might have, etc. please let me know in the comments or feel free to send me a DM on Instagram or an email. I’d love to hear from you!