FOSTER PUPPIES UTAH AND CHINA VIDEO

FOSTER PUPPIES: Utah & China

Ok, this video isn't about wildlife (although the puppies are watching birds in one part of the video, does that count?), but I thought it would be a good place to share this. My wife and I brought home these two puppies from the Memphis Humane Society several years ago. Their mother was a stray who was killed by a car, but the person who hit her stopped to help and found a new litter of puppies nearby. He took them to the Humane Society -- I think there were six in all -- and they went to foster parents in pairs.

This foster program is not the kind where you keep the puppies until someone adopts them; in this program you keep the puppies for about four weeks, during which they get their shots and get spayed or neutered. Then they go back to the Humane Society to be adopted. Part of the reason for fostering is that the puppies can't be with the other dogs at the Humane Society until they've gotten their shots, and part of it is so the foster parents make the puppies more adoptable. This could be through housebreaking, basic training, getting used to being around people and other dogs, or just getting used to being in a house, which these puppies had never experienced.

We brought them home on the first day of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, so we named the boy Utah. Since we thought we'd have the puppies about four weeks, which was the length of the Olympics, we named the girl China to represent the "global bookends" of the event. We had one dog at the time, Chance, who wasn't thrilled to have them around at first, but he grew to love them.

The puppies had very different personalities. China was very independent and a little stubborn. Utah would cry anytime China got to go outside without him. They were both very smart and were housebroken almost immediately (I was working out of the home at the time so they never had to hold it very long). We got them fairly comfortable with being on a leash -- China fought it a lot more than Utah did.

We ended up having them for five weeks. At the first mobile adoption they went to at a pet store (and my wife and I were there as volunteers), Utah got adopted. China was adopted two days later at the Memphis Humane Society. People ask us if it was hard giving them up. We knew from the beginning we wouldn't be able to keep them because they were probably going to be over 100 pounds each, and our house is way too small for that; so that part of it wasn't hard. What turned out to be the hardest thing was seeing them get split up, but the likelihood of someone adopting 2 puppies that were going to get that big was very small. We do wonder how they're doing now and if they would recognize us if we ran into them.

We haven't fostered any puppies since then because I started working outside the home again, and we just wouldn't have much time to devote to them at all (I think this would make housebreaking impossible). But if you've got the time and the desire I would highly recommend looking into being a foster parent through a local humane society or rescue group. And please get your pet spayed or neutered if you haven't already. There are already too many animals out there who can't find homes.