Help Animal Shelters Save Up To $1400/mo - 9 Great Reasons to Foster
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When you foster for an animal shelter or rescue, you are helping to save lives, reduce heartache, find purpose, create joy and save non-profits loads of money.
All it takes is temporarily welcoming a homeless animal into your home for a couple days to a couple months. The shelter provides the food, supplies, vet care and adoption services, and you provide 1-4 hours of basic care and love each day.
If you have considered fostering, or starting or expanding a foster program, here are nine great reasons to give it a try!
1) Fostering Saves Shelters HUGE Amounts of Money
Any shelter with a physical location has a lot of expenses that come with operating their facility. One of the biggest expenses is labor. Not many shelters can rely solely on volunteers, so having employees is critical. Say a shelter has 50 dogs and 50 cats who require 60 minutes and 30 minutes of basic care per day, respectively. That’s 75 hours of labor per day.
Taking into account an employee’s hourly rate, plus the cost of benefits and payroll taxes, let’s say a kennel worker costs the shelter $12/hr. That’s $900 every day and $27,000 each month, just in labor costs. As a foster, you are usually caring for only one animal at a time, which works out to $12 per day for dogs and $6 for cats. That may not seem like much but
$12 per day x 30 days = $360 per month for one dog
Specialty animals like orphans requiring bottle feeding need about four hours of care per day which increases labor cost to $1,440 per month!
4 hrs x $12/hr = $48 per day x 30 days = $1,440 per month for specialty animals
Most adoption fees don’t come close to covering this amount. The $360 per month it costs to shelter a dog doesn’t even include expenses like food, potty pads, toys, spay/neuter surgeries, vaccines, microchipping or vet care. Add to that all the expenses associated with running a shelter like utilities, rent, marketing, insurance and community outreach programs, etc. and you start to get an idea of how expensive it really is to maintain a shelter. Fostering animals for your shelter can make a huge difference in their ability to make ends meet.
When you foster a shelter animal, you are effectively donating $150-1,400 per month!
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2) Fostering Brightens Your Day and Gives You a Sense of Purpose
After fostering 200+ animals, I still get excited when I pull up to the shelter to pick up a new bunch. You feel such a sense of relief as you load them into your car and bring them home. They are usually scared at first, but it doesn’t take long for them to start to enjoy life again. When you see that…well it feels darn good and you’ll smile a lot. If you’re feeling a bit lonely, a foster animal is great company, and they are always happy to see you.
For the duration of your foster experience and for the rest of your life, you’ll know that you made a significant difference in that animal’s life, and it doesn’t get much more meaningful than that. You may be sad to let them go, but you can take comfort in the fact that you helped prepare them for their next adventure with a new, loving family. Besides, letting go of your first foster animal just means you have a new opportunity to open your heart and home to another animal that desperately needs you.
Plus, a new study indicates that fostering a dog increases your physical activity and improves psychosocial well being. (3)
Nearly half of study participants saw large increases in physical activity
Nearly three-quarters saw improvements in mood after fostering for six weeks
More than half met someone new in their neighborhood because of their foster dog
3) Fostering is a Great Experience for Kids
Puppies and kittens are the safest and most fun fosters for kids, but child-loving adult animals can be great too. When done safely, involving children in fostering is wonderful for everyone. The animals become socialized to these strange little humans and the little humans get to learn about responsibility, being a part of something bigger than themselves and about letting go of something they care about—which can be hard. I definitely shed a few tears as a kid when my mom and I had to bring our fosters back (who am I kidding…I still cry a little to this day). It does get easier, especially if your kids are lucky enough to see their foster with its new family, along with the happiness they helped create. If that’s not enough, there are always new fosters to fill the void.
In addition to these valuable life lessons, you have the opportunity to test drive your kids’ interest in having a pet. If you discover that their interest fades with time, then fostering may be a perfect short term way to keep your kids engaged and occasionally have some animals in the house. Summer is a great time to foster, what parent hasn’t heard, “I’mmmm booooored” three weeks into June?
4) Many Different Levels of Commitment
If you’re not sure how much time and energy you have but still want to foster, there are so many ways to help. You could start by volunteering to walk dogs at the shelter for 30 to 60 minutes per week, which is a kind of “mini fostering.” It saves the kennel staff time, you get to be the best part of that dog’s day, and after spending time getting to know them you can help get them adopted by sharing your experiences. Some shelters even have special hiking programs where a whole group of dogs and volunteers venture out for a couple hours of adventure. READ: 13 Ways to Foster a Pet - Find the Right Fit For You
Good mamas do most of the work
If you think you’re ready to bring a shelter animal home, your commitment options range from just a weekend to several months. Foster Field Trips or Foster Sleepovers have become more popular, and these programs are designed to give shelter animals a break from shelter life for a weekend or so. Animals recovering from an injury or illness who are in need of a couple weeks to recover are another low commitment option. Kittens are probably the most common type of foster, especially in the spring. Fostering two or three six-week-old kittens who where just separated from their mother is a reasonably short but very cute and fun option. Kittens of that age are very playful, don’t require much space and would only stay with you until they were 8 or 9 weeks old. A mom cat with kittens is pretty easy, especially in the beginning because Mom does all the work. If you have some extra time, raising a litter of puppies is incredibly fun (and my personal favorite type of fostering. If you really have some extra time and a heart of gold, there are always orphaned kittens who need to be bottle fed every three or four hours (yes, that’s overnight too) until they are three weeks old.
If you’re not sure, just start small. The shelter or rescue will help pair you with the foster that is right for you. If you love animals and want to help there are many ways to foster.
READ: How to Prepare For and Pick Up Your New Foster
5) Fostering Gives Shelter Animals Time and Space to be Themselves
This mama was so scared when she first arrived that it took three weeks before she even wagged her tail. By the time she left our home, she was galloping around the yard and walking beautifully on leash.
Some animals are amazingly resilient and more or less behave normally at the shelter. But many others fail to thrive or even worsen in that environment. Sending the more sensitive animals home with loving foster families gives them a calm, quiet place to come out of their shell and express their true personality. In my experience, it takes one to three weeks for an adult animal to start to feel comfortable in a new place. In that relatively short amount of time, you’ll have a chance to get to know them in a way that just isn’t possible at the shelter. Puppies and kittens bounce back quickly once they are healthy, so the fun starts almost right away!
6) Helps Get Homeless Animals Adopted
AAs you spend time with your foster you will have opportunities to take pictures and video clips of them, showing what they are actually like in a home. These images can be shared on social media, which is a great way to attract potential adopters. Plus, your personal experience with your foster provides helpful information the shelter can use to pair pets with appropriate families, which is crucial to the permanent success of an adoption.
7) Fostering Reduces Animal Suffering
Shelters are a very stressful environment, despite the very best efforts of the staff. Pets often have very little control over their day to day lives; we decide what, when and how much they eat, where they sleep, go to the bathroom (hopefully) and spend their time. We decide who they meet and whether or not they leave the house. At least a pet has a routine, a home and a family that is predictable and familiar.
When an animal first arrives at the shelter, it is unlikely they have any idea what is happening to them. After the initial shock wears off, some of them handle shelter life quite well. But for many it causes stress, which can make them more susceptible to disease, cause behavior problems and make them harder to adopt—all costly problems to solve. This is especially true for vulnerable animals such as puppies and kittens.
8) Fostering Reduces Shelter Staff Heartache
The animals aren’t the only ones that benefit from fostering. Working at a shelter is rewarding but very challenging, and shelter staff experience varying levels of stress and heartbreak on a daily basis. They routinely encounter new animals in need of saving, but once the shelter is full they have no choice but to turn them away or euthanize to make room. These dedicated individuals want nothing more than to say “Yes!” to that sweet pregnant mama because they have lots of foster volunteers and know the perfect foster family to take her.
When the shelters are full, animals have to be put down. That fact negatively impacts everyone involved, from the people who have to make the decision to euthanize to the unlucky but dedicated people who humanely end these lives. What a day of celebration it will be when this heartbreaking deed can be laid to rest!
9) Most Importantly, It Saves Animals’ Lives
The pregnant mother of this litter of nine was rescued and fostered just before being euthanized
Thanks to increased adoption rates, spay/neuter programs and better return rates of lost pets to owners, the number of pets euthanized each year has fallen from about 13.5 million in 1973 to around 1.5 million in 2018 (1). Unfortunately, that still means that about 4,000 adoptable cats, dogs, puppies and kittens are euthanized every day in the US due to overpopulation and the limited space available in shelters. By opening up your home to a foster animal you are literally expanding your shelter’s capacity to save the lives of adoptable pets. This act of kindness directly saves lives because even if the animal you foster is not at risk of being euthanized, the next occupant of their now empty cage might have been.
According to The Humane Society of the United States, as of 2014 there are about 3,500 brick and mortar shelters and 10,000 rescue groups and sanctuaries (2). With 1.5M adoptable pets being euthanized each year, that means that each rescue is putting down about 10 animals each month.
What if we changed ‘euthanized’ to ‘fostered’? What if each shelter was able to send 10 more animals per month to a loving foster home rather than to the needle?
Fostering is a fun, rewarding, meaningful way to dramatically change lives and have a positive rippling effect in your community. If you love animals and want to help, there are so many ways to get involved. You won’t regret it! Contact your local animal rescue to learn more.
If you think you’re ready to foster, you might want to read How to Prepare For and Pick Up Your New Foster