Why you should consider fostering:
If you’re looking for a way to help animals, consider fostering! It’s an experience like no other. There’s a foster out there for just about any situation or lifestyle. All you need is a little patience, a little space, and a lot of love.
Fostering Helps Increase Animal Adoptions
Every animal that moves into a foster home frees up space for a cat the rescue wouldn’t be able to take in otherwise. It’s that simple. More foster homes mean more animals saved. We as a rescue, remove an animal from a negative situation — be it a stray, victim of abuse, pet in need of medical care, or pulled from an overcrowded shelter – and rely entirely on foster guardians to home the animals until they’re adopted.
Some animals come into the rescue in great physical and mental shape and can go up for adoption right away. They may not need fostering. However, the support of foster families who take in other long-term cases means more resources are available to quickly transition the ready-to-adopt animals. This reduces stress on the animals and the rescue organization.
Fostering Keeps Adopted Cats in Their New Homes
Foster homes provide a much-needed opportunity to see how a rescue animal will react in a home environment, before going up for adoption. It’s a chance to discover and work through any behavioral issues, provide training and socialization, as well as allow them to decompress and readjust before adoption. This can be the difference between a successful adoption and a return to the rescue.
Fostering Helps Rehabilitation
For those willing to take rehabilitation cases, fostering is wonderful for animals going through medical recovery, resolving behavioral problems, or in need of socialization. Having a calm space, and someone dedicated to helping them heal, makes for a smoother and speedier recovery.
Fostering Helps Animals in Need
We tend to think of rescue animals as strays living on the streets, needing medical attention and finding a bit of relief with a rescue. While that’s true for many cases, it’s certainly not every case. Often times, owners may give up a pet if they feel they are not able to care for them properly. Sometimes elderly pet owners may find they’re unable to keep up with the physical demands. There are many reasons why beloved cats find themselves in rescues. You never know what life holds.
Fostering Provides Pre-Adoption Assessment and Adjustment
It’s a safe bet that an animal in the shelter environment isn’t showing their true personality. Shelter staff conduct behavior assessments and get to know them as best they can. But it’s not always a 100% reliable evaluation with all the stress and stimuli of a shelter environment.
Move that animal into a foster home, and it’s a totally different story. As a foster parent, you have the opportunity to see what kind of lifestyle the cat will thrive in, their likes and dislikes, whether they have any training or behavioral issues, fears, or special needs to be addressed. This insight is invaluable when we are trying to place the animal with the perfect forever family. We count on these insights to find the best possible adoption match for the animal.
You’re also giving the cat a chance to settle back into themselves, shake off past negative experiences, let down their guard, and become a family member again before they step into their forever home. The last thing anyone wants is for an adoption to turn negative and a pet to be returned. But it happens. Allowing the animal to flow through a foster home first, sets everyone up for a more successful adoption and happy ever-after.
Fostering Animals is Good for Mental Health
Most foster cats generally stay in their room, separate from your own fur babies. You come to enjoy those moments, during a busy day, when you go into the foster room, close the door and can just sit in the quiet, focusing on nothing more than bonding with a cat who needs love.
What About Giving Up Your Foster Cat?
While we’re on the subject of health, it’s natural to wonder what happens when the time comes to say goodbye. Here’s the way we look at it — our ultimate goal, at the end of the day, is to say goodbye to our fosters. That’s why we do what we do. It’s not a bad thing. It's success and means we did it — we got this little fur ball through. We showed them love and kept them safe. We helped them heal. All so they could have a beautiful life with a family who needs them.
We’re only a step in their journey, not their destination. To sum up the emotions in one word … well … you can’t. One word isn’t enough. So here are the thoughts that come to mind: overwhelming happiness, sadness, a sigh of relief, a new opportunity for another foster cat in need, the start of the most amazing life for an animal.
Please consider fostering for AATC. If you have additional questions you can contact us at AATCRescue@gmail.com.