Have you ever heard of an animal foster and wondered exactly what it is? According to Foster Care – Maryland SPCA, foster care is when foster volunteers open their homes to provide temporary care for kittens, puppies, cats, and dogs.

     Foster Care – Maryland SPCA also reports some benefits of fostering is that “you decide what foster pet you want to care for and for how long, provide all necessary supplies, including food, toys, treats, and medications, provided medical and behavioral support, including a 24-hour emergency hotline, You get to experience the unconditional love of a pet without making a life-time commitment, and you’ll feel awesome knowing you saved a life.”

    Junior Alyssa Dunn  runs a dog foster at her home with her mother. Dunn and her mom have run the dog foster since 2014.  She was out at dinner when they decided they were going to start holding a dog foster at their house.

     “I was eating at Fridays with my family and convinced them to foster dogs;  it was mainly my dad to convince, but I was wanting to make a difference knowing that so many dogs are being put down because they don’t have families in shelters and stuff and my mom was all in on it.” After that conversation, they decided to start the dog foster and save many dogs’ lives.

     She said, “we reached out to, I don’t remember the first group’s name was but now we do it for OPH [Operational Paws for Homes], we have a five by ten kennel in our sunroom and it’s divided into two so we have a clean side where they sleep and then we have the bathroom side where they can go to the bathroom and we clean it like two or three times a day.”

     Dunn adds, “we pick the dogs up from shelters like down in the south, like Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Alabama, and then bring them up because they’re high kill shelters down there. We like to foster puppies and small litters because we don’t have a huge space, mainly small breeds because big breeds take up a lot of space and they’re a huge mess.”

     “We have done a lot of terriers; we have some hound puppies but mainly terriers. I’ve been doing this for a really long time so I’ve learned not to get attached to them but our first litter, I cried for a good amount of the day.”