Foster

The person filling out the foster application must be 18 years of age or older and will be considered the primary caretaker of the animal(s); other family members and roommates are invited to help with the foster pets, and they can be any age. Foster homes need to have reliable transportation in order to bring their animals to and from appointments at the shelter.  If you have resident animals, they will need to be up-to-date on their Rabies Vaccine – see the section below about fostering with resident animals for more details. Finally, we ask that foster homes have good communication skills and be responsive to the foster team to help us keep these animals happy, healthy and to help find these animals forever homes!

CAHS offers foster homes any of the basic supplies for any animals in foster! This includes food, bowls, toys, any medications, and litter/litter boxes. We cannot reimburse foster homes for additional supplies that they purchase for their foster animal. For small pets (rabbits, guinea pigs, etc) CAHS asks that foster homes supply daily fruits and veggies. Medical care for all shelter animals, including vaccines and preventatives, is provided entirely by CAHS.

Yes, we just would want to make sure the animal you are fostering is potentially a good match for your resident pets!

A majority of animals are brought into the shelter with unknown medical and behavioral backgrounds. Preventative care is administered during a shelter animal’s physical exam which they receive before going to a foster home, but not all diseases or illnesses can be immediately detected. Our behavior staff also evaluates dogs over the age of 6 months to make an educated guess how they might do with resident animals.

We ask that all resident adult dogs and cats are up-to-date on their Rabies vaccine and we highly recommend that they are current on other common vaccines (DA2PP+L, Bordetella) and flea, tick and heartworm preventatives. To further avoid the spread of potential disease, we recommend that a foster has a separation plan in place when bringing a new animal home so that it can be monitored and gradually introduced to the resident pets.

Only certain animals at the shelter are looking for foster homes. Most of the animals looking to go to foster are not yet available for adoption and often have some sort of behavioral or medical need that could be better managed in a home environment.

The reason why an animal is going to usually determines how long the foster period will be. Animals who need to gain weight, most likely need about 2 weeks whereas a pregnant mom will probably need 2-3 months! You will have the opportunity to pick who you want to foster depending on what you are interested in and your personal availability.

Animals come into the shelter primarily from other rescue groups or they are surrendered by their owner. We don’t usually know much about animals who were transferred to us and do our best to provide feedback on how we think they would do in a home from our behavioral evaluations. Unfortunately, we consider a lot of attributes unknown because behaviors seen in shelter environment don’t always translate into a home and vice versa. There are also certain things that we can not safely test for at the shelter, such as if a shelter dog is good with cats. We tend to have more information about animals who were surrendered by their owner and we are happy to pass that along to potential foster homes!

Depending on the volume of applications received, foster applications may take up to two weeks to process. Please make sure that your foster application has been completed in its entirety as incomplete applications will take longer to process. If application is approved, you will receive a welcome email with additional information for you to review before taking your first foster pet!