How to Start Fostering

I can primarily speak from my awesome experience with Waggytail Rescue. Prior to contacting them, I had reached out to two other organizations and received no response - not because I wasn't qualified but unfortunately, many of these groups are understaffed and simply don't have the time and resources to reply back to all applicants. This means that many dogs who could be pulled from shelters don't because there are no approved fosters available. If you are interested, I would suggest reaching out to multiple groups. I am of course quite bias and strongly recommend Waggy. We are desperately in need of fosters and we have made it a priority to respond to each and every application that comes in and match a foster with a dog that is well suited for them.

For more info on fostering through Waggytail, you can go straight to our Foster a Waggytail website for more information. You will need to fill out an application and email it back to us. Once everything checks out, we will set you up with a foster advisor and match you up with a dog. Please note that the majority of the dogs on our Petfinder site are already in foster homes, so you will most likely be paired up with a dog directly from a shelter.

Since Waggytail is primarily a Chihuahua and small dog rescue group, there are other organizations that focus on larger dogs, for a full list of organizations that work with the Mayor's Alliance for Animals (the larger organization that oversees foster groups), you can go here for the full list of Alliance Participating Organizations.

I cannot say enough about Waggytail. I feel like all of the fosters and foster advisors are one big family, working together to do the best for these little animals. It is not always an easy job. We often don't have full backgrounds on these animals and some come to us with a whole host of problems (which is how they end up being fostered instead of directly adopted from the shelters) but many of the issues quickly resolve themselves with the consistency and TLC that these dogs can only receive in a home, not in an overcrowded, noisy, scary shelter.

Please, open your heart and your home to these animals, and I promise that you will be rewarded many times over. Sure the dogs reap great rewards, but the joy one gets from helping these dogs just cannot be described in words.