Thanks for the post topic suggestions; keep them coming, please!
Lori asked if we would foster more dogs and the answer is maybe, but not right away.
A lot of foster dogs are a little bit broken. Some are missing their kind and responsible former owners who have died or moved away; some are recovering from abuse/neglect/hoarding situations; some have been living in situations that were not outright unacceptable but that were not a good fit, in which they may have acquired some maladaptive behaviors.
Even during the work-at-home phase of the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty with fostering. Some of the dogs were >90% delightful; some were...not. Stella had a couple of dog interactions that left her feeling cautious about accepting new fosters, and that's a higher priority for me than the fact that a new foster might be fun.
Now that school and work are mostly back to normal, fostering would be more complicated during most of the year. One piece of it is the dogs. Maybe we could take a dog who came to us already crate-trained? There aren't a ton of crate-trained foster dogs, though. And the number of dogs you can comfortably leave alone in your house while you go to work is also small.
Another piece of it is people-related rather than dog-related. A lot of dog foster-ers have very firm ideas about what dogs are owed by their people, and they can get pretty judgy even in an organization that explicitly says, "We're not going to be judgy about people who need to surrender a dog." I sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with the shelter's determination to continue giving second (and third, and umpty-eleventh) chances to dogs with problematic histories. Does anyone remember Cooper, the chihuahua mix who appeared to have dementia? Since we fostered him, Cooper has had three failed adoptions (that I know of!) because he keeps biting people. I am not an expert, but I think Cooper should have been euthanized a long time ago. (I admit that I am biased, because he bit the hell out of my leg with no warning and no provocation.) And yet...Cooper is back on the "to be adopted" page, with his adorable floppy ear obscuring the spawn-of-Satan gleam in his eye. (Take a deep breath, Jamie; it's not his fault he has dementia.)
But but but-- the good parts of having a dog in the house are so pleasant that recently we applied to adopt a lab mix. He went to someone else, because lab mixes get snapped up really quickly, but one of the volunteers contacted me about another dog who seemed like a good fit. (He likes his people to sing You Are My Sunshine to him when there is a thunderstorm. If ever there were a good house for a dog who needs to be sung to by his people, it is this house.) For a few days I thought Tippy would be coming to live with us -- but then he didn't wind up on the transport van after all.
So I think we'll keep an eye on the available dogs page, and maybe we'll wind up with a permanent dog. And maybe we'll think about fostering again in the future -- maybe when I'm not teaching, maybe when Joe is home on break. I'll keep you posted.
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