Sarah Anne Diamond hugs Tequila Sunrise.
Not all of the pandemic’s effects have been negative, especially for pets.
With more people working and attending school from home, Richmond SPCA saw 950 animals placed in foster care from May 2020 through February 2021 through its “Meet the Fosters” program, an increase of 175 animals over the same period the previous year, according to Tabitha Treloar, director of communications. There were 470 care providers who fostered pets in their homes during the same period, an increase of 149 over the previous year.
“It's been a tough year for everybody,” Treloar says, “and having those motivators –– whether it's a cat to feed who just sits and purrs in your lap or a dog who gets you out to walk and run –– that's been vital to people.”
Fostering differs from adopting a pet in that it is temporary. Foster care providers volunteer to house and look after animals in their homes as they await permanent adoption. Sometimes this means waiting for months; other times a foster animal may be in and out within hours. Some fosters are older animals that need a safe place to live out the rest of their days. Richmond SPCA provides foster hosts with all the supplies an animal may need, which members of the community can help pay for through an Amazon registry.
Sara Sewell, a mother of five, began fostering with Richmond SPCA as a way to teach her children the responsibility of owning a pet.
“Fostering felt like a good way to help in a broader sense of community and also teach my kids what it's really like to own a dog without the long-term commitment,” she says.
Last year, Sewell and her family fostered a mother dog along with her 11 newborn puppies, one of which they ended up adopting while the others were adopted out to other homes. “It was a constant learning experience for me, and I would do it again in a heartbeat,” she says. “It was so much fun.”
Sewell says the one bittersweet part of fostering is that at some point the host must say goodbye. “It is a little sad every time we say goodbye to a foster, but it’s far outweighed by the happiness of knowing they’re going home,” according to Kate (who declined to give her last name), a mother of two and frequent foster host with Richmond Cat Adoption & Rescue Efforts (CARE). If it is too hard to say goodbye, hosts can choose to adopt their foster animals at any time.
CARE is a network of foster homes that house cats that need a place to live out the rest of their days in comfort or await adoption, according to the group’s president, Amy Tankoos.
“All four of us [in my family] were home due to the pandemic, obviously, and it was great to have something to turn our focus to other than fixating on the uncertainty going on in the world,” Kate says. “In less than a year, we’ve fostered 18 kittens and cats, from orphaned neonatal kittens that needed to be bottle fed, to adults and everything in between.”
Katie Gantt holds Larry.
Christie Chipps Peters, director of Richmond Animal Care and Control (RACC), says foster programs are especially helpful for newborn animals and those with special needs.
“I would say that the bulk of the animals that go into foster care are our neonatal kittens, tiny kittens and puppies,” Peters says.
Treloar says Richmond SPCA has seen a 45% increase in foster placements for “bottle babies” –– newborn kittens — which require more attention. “We definitely attribute that to people being at home more,” she says. “If they are more flexible and not needing to go to work for eight hours a day, that gives them a chance to care for these kittens.”
More people working from home also means fewer pets running away and getting lost. For RACC, the number of intakes has dropped by more than 1,000 animals during 2020, Peters says. “We have an entire dog ward that has been bleached and empty and sitting for a year, which is a wonderful thing.”
RACC closed its shelter to the public in March 2020 to comply with social-distancing guidelines and has not yet opened. “We sort of changed how and what we do,” Peters says. “Online, we started using our social media platforms much more heavily than we had before. We started doing shelter tours, where people would walk through [using] FaceTime and ... Instagram, and they could see every animal in our shelter in real time.
Richmond SPCA has allowed visitors by appointment only since last March.
Because it does not have a fixed location, CARE has avoided any negative effects on its ability to provide for cats rescued from shelters and cats that are surrendered, Tankoos says. “The biggest thing that's happened is that we can no longer have adoption events at the pet stores. We couldn't go in and care for the cats, so we took all the cats out [of the stores]. And even though things have gotten better, there still is no way that you can do an adoption event and social distance.”
CARE adopted out 100 more cats in 2020 than in 2019. “I don't think that we have suffered in any way, not being able to do adoption events,” Tankoos says.
The teams at Richmond SPCA, RACC and CARE all see fostering as a trend that will continue.
“We do thousands of animals a year in that capacity,” Peters says. “I think the foster program really just grows every year in popularity. Right now, we have more [foster hosts] than we have animals available to foster, so it's a wonderful place to be in.”
