Give Me Shelter - Fostering Rescue Dogs
I've been in dog rescue for 15 years.
Fifteen years of driving two hours to pull a dog from a rural shelter. Fifteen years of vet bills I didn't plan for. Fifteen years of learning to read a dog who has every reason not to trust anyone, and slowly, carefully, earning their trust anyway.
Fifteen years of watching dogs who arrived broken leave whole.
How It Started
I began as a foster volunteer with the Boston Terrier Rescue of East Tennessee & MUSH Husky Rescue back in 2010. Bostons are clowns which make them fun to be around and sadly have some common health issues in the breed that taught me so much about dog health. Huskies are too smart for their own good and routinely outsmarted me, which taught a lot of creative thinking. Then, when we moved to the farm we started hospice fostering for the Great Pyrenees Rescue of Atlanta — big, fluffy, deeply independent dogs who required a certain kind of patience I didn't know I had until I had to find it.
Emma Grace was only my second Husky foster, and she spent her first month living under our bed. I've written about her elsewhere, but the short version is this: she taught me to see what a dog who's been through things is trying to communicate. She taught me to slow down. To wait. To not need the progress to happen on my timeline.
Every dog after her built on that.
Rescue Ranch
In 2014 Renee and I co-founded Rescue Ranch — a rescue focused specifically on medically fragile and special needs Boston Terriers, Pugs, and French Bulldogs. The dogs nobody else was taking.
The ones with IVDD, hernias, and heart conditions, and cleft palates, and neurological issues. The ones who came to us from hoarding situations or from owners who simply couldn't afford the care they needed. The ones whose medical paperwork made other rescue organizations quietly pass.
We take those dogs. We give them what they need. We find them homes that can love them for exactly who they are. We pay medical costs for the lifetime of almost every dog that comes through the Rescue Ranch. We say everyone gets a lifetime membership.
It is expensive. It is exhausting. It is, without question, some of the most meaningful work I do.
What Fostering Actually Costs
I want to be honest about this, because the romanticized version of rescue work doesn't serve anyone.
Fostering costs money. Emergency vet visits at 11pm. Prescription diets. Medications. Orthopedic beds for dogs who need them. Baby gates to keep the new foster separated from the pack while everyone adjusts. Heartworm treatment that costs $1,000s and months of recovery.
Fostering costs time. The dog who won't eat unless you sit next to the bowl. The one who needs to go outside every two hours while they're healing from surgery. The one who needs to be carried up the stairs because their back legs aren't quite working yet. Driving hours each way to specialists and rehab. Waking up every few hours to administer medications every 4 hours. Tube feeding or bottle feeding babies around the clock.
Fostering costs emotionally. The goodbye when a great family falls in love and takes them home. The goodbye when a dog doesn't make it, and you held them, and you were the last person they knew.
I have said both kinds of goodbyes more times than I can count.
What Fostering Gives Back
And yet.
There is a piece of writing that's circulated in rescue communities for years — author unknown, titled "To My Foster Dog" — that describes the arc of what fostering looks like from the inside. The stink and the distrust and the slow, patient, incremental progress. The bath that changes something. The day the dog runs for joy. The phone call six months later from the forever family.
If you want to understand what fostering feels like without having done it, find that piece and read it. It gets it right.
What it can't fully capture is the cumulative effect of doing this for fifteen years. The version of yourself you become. The particular kind of patience that gets trained into your hands and your voice and the way you move around a frightened animal. The capacity for love that expands every single time you think it's already as large as it can get.
Rescue changed the course of my life. It gave me my farm, my community, my business, my understanding of why photographs of dogs matter. Every portrait I make for a client is, in some way, downstream of every foster dog who taught me what it means to earn an animal's trust.
How You Can Help
If you've been thinking about fostering — even occasionally, even just for a dog who needs somewhere to land between rescue and adoption — I'd encourage you to reach out to your local rescue.
If you're in Georgia and interested in fostering medically fragile brachycephalic dogs, Rescue Ranch is always looking for fosters and volunteers.
The dogs are waiting. They're all beautiful.
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