Animal foster parents fulfill an important role in reducing the homeless pet population without the commitment of adoption.

Story & Photos by Rebecca Leisher
It must have been about 5:00 a.m. when the excitement suddenly disappeared. Kim Edwards dragged herself out of bed and to the kitchen where she saw the source of the commotion: five Beagle mix puppies stared up at her, barking, howling and whimpering. Edwards’ kitchen floor—and every one of those five puppies—was covered in poop.
The previous day Edwards and her youngest daughter, Natalie, who was four at the time, drove to Greenhill Humane Society in Eugene, Oregon. The two of them were familiar with the shelter. The Edwards family visited the animals at Greenhill almost every Sunday after their church service down the road. Natalie and her eight-year-old sister Hannah loved petting the puppies and kittens, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to beg their parents to let them adopt one. With a grown dog, two cats and a bunny already at home, Edwards and her husband repeatedly said no.
But this trip was different. This time they’d reached a compromise. This time the girls didn’t have to hear their parents say no again, yet the parents didn’t have to commit to raising another pet. They loaded those five six-week-old Beagle mixes into the back of the car and drove home with them. The next three weeks would be the Edwards’ first experience as an animal foster family.
Animal foster parents represent a group of the community who share a love for animals and a desire to help them, but can’t always commit to adopting one. “They really like doing their part to help an animal get adopted and find a good home and have a good upbringing,” says Kyla Coy, former volunteer and foster care assistant at Greenhill.
Many families get involved with the foster care program for the same reason the Edwards did. “They may not want the whole commitment of adopting an animal, but they want their kids to have the exposure of taking care of them,” Coy says. “And doing something involved in the community and volunteering their time.”
Besides being a good way to not say no to the girls every time they asked for puppies or kittens, Edwards says it’s important to her and her husband for their children to give back. She wants them to learn that “you can do stuff for other people because we have so much and we give them so much.” Edwards and her daughters also work with Meals on Wheels in Creswell, where they live, and she hopes that teaching them to volunteer their time to help others will help them appreciate the life they have.
Fostering animals has the power to help children in other ways. Betty Lindstrom has fostered more than seventy dogs for Greenhill over the past few years. “We are raising grandchildren and one of them in particular has a disability,” Lindstrom says. “The dogs have been a very meaningful thing in his life.” The puppies have helped Lindstrom’s grandson meet new friends. Another one of Lindstrom’s grandchildren has a reading disability, and reading to the puppies each night helped improve her scores.
Foster care programs are an incredibly valuable part of animal shelters’ efforts to reduce animal overpopulation. At Greenhill, foster parents care for 600 to 800 animals each year, “giving them a chance to get adopted rather than ending up on the street somewhere, in another organization or being euthanized,” Coy says.
Foster parents at Greenhill are able to help care for animals when the shelter runs out of space. Greenhill takes animals that are relinquished by their owners, and when the shelter is full, those animals go on a waiting list. Coy says spring and summer months are “kitten season,” when the cattery sometimes has up to 100 cats on the floor. When it fills up, adult cats go on the waiting list, but because of the foster care program, Greenhill doesn’t need a waiting list for kittens. “We can usually get them into foster and then we’ll stagger when we bring them back,” Coy says.
Greenhill foster parents also temporarily care for animals that aren’t yet ready to be put up for adoption. Some of these animals have behavioral problems that need to be corrected before they can be made available for adoption. “A foster parent can take them into their home, work with them and with a trainer to get the dog to be more adoptable,” Coy says. “That’s just basically giving the dog a second chance.”
Other animals need to gain or lose weight before being adopted, or they need time, space, and exercise to recover from surgery. But the most common reason for animals to go into foster care at Greenhill is because they’re too young and need to be sterilized and vaccinated before waiting in the shelter for adoption. Coy says 70 percent of Greenhill foster animals are puppies and kittens that aren’t protected from certain diseases for three weeks between sets of vaccinations.
This was the case for the five Beagle mix puppies the Edwards family brought home. They found out later that Greenhill doesn’t usually send that many puppies home with a first-time foster parent, but Edwards says judging by the first day she had no idea how much work the experience would involve. “I thought, wow, they were really quiet when they played and they were just so sweet and that first day was so exciting,” Edwards says. “This was before they were pooping or pottying everywhere.”
Coy says that while most people get hooked after their first time fostering, sometimes they don’t realize how much time and effort the job may involve. “We’ve had experiences where we will give someone a couple puppies for three weeks and it’s just too much for them—you know, on top of school and just everything else they have going on in their lives.”
Greenhill requires that at the bare minimum foster parents spend twenty minutes each morning and twenty minutes each night socializing the animals by playing with them and giving them attention. For kittens that have littermates to play with and figure most things out on their own, forty minutes of attention per day is usually sufficient. Puppies, on the other hand, require a lot more work.
While Edwards had experience with her dog, Barney, since he was ten weeks old, she had only had to deal with one puppy at one time. “Five was completely insane. I had never realized how loud they were and how much they pooped,” she says, laughing. When she and Natalie had come home that first day, Edwards organized a pen in the kitchen with beds, toys, puppy training pads, and water. By morning, the bunch had annihilated the set-up.
A few days later, Coy called Edwards to check in. After hearing Edwards’ exhausted voice, Coy found another foster parent willing to take a couple of the puppies off her hands. Edwards and her family considered it and tried to figure out which ones they would hand over. “If it wasn’t just a whole entire family mutual decision then we were just going to keep them all,” Edwards says. The family members couldn’t agree; they decided to stick it out with all five.
Soon after that things started to feel easier for the family. They moved the puppies to the upstairs bathroom and began to develop a routine. “We figured out when they would get hungry and how long they would play before they would take a nap,” she says.
Edwards also devised a useful cleaning system. Her husband works at the hospital, and he started to bring home the blue disposable sheets used for surgery. “I’d lay that on the floor and I’d have their puppy pads, their water, their beds, their toys,” Edwards says. “And then I’d just pick up the whole thing and throw it away.”
Things got easier, and the family had a lot of fun with the puppies. “You couldn’t help but just fall in love with all of them,” Edwards says. She remembers that the girls used to run around with one puppy, Precious, on the leash, and another, Katie, would hold onto the leash with her teeth and run along with them. Although Natalie decided she wasn’t as fond of the puppies after discovering how much they pooped, Hannah took every opportunity she could to help care for them and spend time with them. “Once I had all five in my lap at once and they all fell asleep, and my mom asked me to clean up my room and I’m like, ‘but I’m stuck,’” Hannah says, giggling.
Edwards discovered that the best part of the experience was actually how much it brought her family together. “There was no time for TV or computer games and all that, so it was puppies,” she says. “And we did it together.”
After experiencing those three weeks with five puppies that weren’t house-trained, the Edwards family doesn’t remember cleaning as the worst part. The most difficult thing for them was coming home to an empty house after dropping the puppies off back at Greenhill. When the family came home they spent several hours just crying and talking about the puppies. For days they couldn’t bear to break down the puppies’ pen upstairs. “Oh, it was just heartbreaking,” Edwards says. “I think it took the better part of three or four days to finally get over that they weren’t up there anymore.”
Despite the destruction the puppies had caused and the pain that came with their departure, the Edwards continued to foster. They cared for a single Lhaso Apso puppy and a litter of kittens. “Now that we have a routine down and I know what to expect,” Edwards says. “Oh yeah, we’ll do it again. I don’t think we’ll stop.”
She and Hannah flip through a photo album. Each new image brings on a new set of cooing and the description of a memory. “They would just sleep in this mound—mound of puppies,” Edwards says, and even her eyes beam as she looks at the photos of the tiny Beagle faces. “Who could resist that?”

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