What is Involved in Fostering an Animal?
Foster caregiver responsibilities typically involve providing a home, feeding and socializing the animal — helping him or her learn appropriate behavior, a first-time opportunity for many pets whose original owners didn’t spend much time or effort on the animal. Foster care providers give valuable insight into the animals’ temperament and needs. They help us make a better adoption for those animals. Fostering provides the priceless service of nurturing and preparing homeless animals for their forever homes.

Foster animals that fit your lifestyle:

• If you live in an apartment, you can ask for an older animal who is low energy or a dog in medical recovery who needs to be kept in a quiet environment.

• If you are an active family, you can ask for a dog who needs lots of walks and plenty of
  exercise. If someone in your family is comfortable working with dogs, you can help a
  dog with some basic obedience or teach him some tricks.

In most cases, it's fine if you already have a dog or cat, as long as your companion and the foster dog or cat are both healthy and get along with each other.

Fostering Considerations
To foster a puppy or kitten, someone must be at home during the day to care for the puppy or kitten. This is not an undertaking for a family in which both parents are working. Also, the animals you foster may not be perfect. Some may need to be housetrained. Some dogs may be un-schooled in other ways. For example, they may be rambunctious or shy, they may be inclined to jump up on people or on furniture. To some degree, these things will depend on the dog's age and breed, but problem behaviors may be what landed them in the shelter in the first place. Fostering will require patience, love and TLC.

The Rewards of Fostering are Plentiful
The addition of a dog or cat brings immeasurable richness and joy to the household. Foster animals will repay you for your patience and love by giving back ten times more love of their own. And when the dog or cat goes off to a loving new home for life, your heart will swell with joy. What could possibly be more gratifying than to save a life and create a "happily ever after" ending?

The qualifications to be a foster parent are the same as the qualifications necessary to be an adopter. Therefore, the process for fostering is the same as applying to adopt. If you'd like to foster an animal,  please fill out the adoption/foster application. If you'd like further information about fostering, please contact .

Note: PLLC will provide any medical care that your foster animal requires. You provide the food, love, and shelter.

History and Background

The idea of fostering was born in response to a problem: overcrowded animal shelters.

Puppies and kittens entering animal shelters under eight weeks of age used to be (and in some communities, still are) routinely killed because they were too young to be adopted. Shelters lacked the staff or adequate space to give these fragile infants the time and care they needed to get them to an adoptable age. The solution: a short term foster home to provide a healthy, germ free environment and lots of tender, loving care. When the animal reached eight weeks, it could be returned to the shelter for placement.

Many shelters have expanded this idea to include fostering for animals in other situations. They may foster cats and dogs recovering from medical conditions (e.g., a broken leg) who just need a few weeks in a loving home to mend. A cat may have stopped eating due to the stress of a shelter environment and need the security of a home situation to get back on her feet. A dog may have a minor behavior problem (jumping up, mouthiness) that a foster family can work on to make the animal more appealing to adopters. Or the shelter may simply have a space crunch and want to find a short-term housing alternative for some of their charges.

In many communities today, foster networks actually take the place of animal shelters. Such networks are generally led by no-kill rescue groups who take cats and dogs out of animal control facilities, place them in foster homes, and then find the pets permanent homes through their own adoption events, publicity, word of mouth, or advertising.