Having a pet in your life can be a true joy, but, committing to caring for an animal isn’t feasible for everyone. With shelters increasingly overwhelmed with abandoned animals – all in need of a responsible and loving home – there are alternatives, which allow you to have a furry house guest stay with you once in a while. That, and the small matter of saving animals from being put down too.
For all the animal lovers out there, fostering a cat or dog is one of the best ways to bring a pet into your life. It simply involves you taking care of a homeless creature for a fixed amount of time, or until they’re found a more permanent home. With severely limited shelter spaces and brutally short waiting times as a result, opening your doors is a huge help to your local shelter in freeing up kennel space. It also happens to be a huge boon for the pet you house, in more ways than one.
Most importantly, there are so many animals to help. Sometimes, it’s a farmed puppy too young to be placed with a family, or a stray cat who find shelters stressful and hard to settle in. Occasionally, a shelter will take in a former fighting dog who is recovering from injury, though more often than not, it’s an owner abandoned pet who need to be socialised before finding a forever home.
Whatever the situation, there are many opportunities to give an animal the love, care and attention they need and deserve.
Even better, your generosity makes for more adoptable pets long-term. An initial loving home can help an animal settle more easily with its final owners, and working with the shelter directly, you can advise on where best to place a pet based on its character and temperament. It’s these personality-filled pets that make for the most incredible companions, though.
If fostering isn’t enough of a fill – it’s this that allows for a better understanding of the animal you’re inviting in to your home should you choose to adopt. There are many cases of ‘foster fails’ where the individual or families get attached and fall in love with the animal in their care and they simply can’t bear for them to leave. But as there is already a bond there is no transition period.
Happy homes all round, and until there are more shelters with no kill policies in place, fostering and adoption are both perfect ways to save a pet from a less than happy ending.
With so many would-be rescuers out there, the euthanasia list that animals are often placed on a few days after arriving at a shelter can be a thing of the past. Through Pet Pardon, we’re looking to make both fostering and adoption an easy option. Bringing together a community of people willing and able to help our overwhelmed shelters, we designed the Pet Pardon app where people can network, place animals swiftly and save lives!
Even for those who can’t stretch to fostering or adopting an animal, you only need donate or share our Pet Pardon shout outs on social media to help find an animal a temporary or permanent home, and some lucky human a lovely new friend.
