By Erica Wilson

Imagine walking through an animal shelter and seeing rows of pets in cages. Some come right up to you, wagging their tails, smiling and trying to greet you through the metal bars. Some sit in the very back corner, tails tucked between their legs, looking wary and afraid, just waiting for the chance to come out of their shell. Fostering gives them that chance. 

At Best Friends Animal Society in Northwest Arkansas, each dog received is placed in a foster home within the community. It frees up space for other animals in need and keeps them from being held in kennels for long periods of time, said Nicole Smith, foster coordinator for NWA’s Best Friends Animal Society. But it also allows the shelter employees to gain valuable information they cannot get in the shelter: discovering how these animals live their normal lives.  And while fostering means temporarily opening one’s home to an animal in need, for these animals the difference it makes will last a lifetime.  

Foster homes provide a more individualized personal approach to animal care, Smith said. Fosterers are able to really get to know the animals in their care, learn about their personalities and create a bond with them, which is more difficult for shelter employees. They share these profile points with the nonprofit employees, who are then able to publish the personalized information on social media or website so the animals can be adopted. 

Smith points to a current dog in the nonprofit’s program named Maggie, who came into the shelter with awful hair loss and scabby skin. After treating her skin allergy, all of Maggie’s hair is growing back, and her personality is shining through too. 

“She was a little bit shyer in the shelter, and now she is out of her shell,” Smith said. “She comes up to every single person that she meets and says hello.”  

Smith said it truly makes her day seeing animals get to go home with their new foster parents, and it makes such a difference through providing “a loving, quiet place for pets to learn and grow,” according to the shelter’s website. 

Boston Anne 

Fostering shy and frightened animals in need requires patience, compassion and kindness, which reminds me of caring for my own rescue dog Boston Anne. 

On a warm morning in June 2017, I laced up my tennis shoes and started my jog. My watch had just died, so I decided to change paths, one that I knew the distance of down to the cracks in the sidewalk. And that is where I found Boston Anne. As I rounded a corner, my footfalls slowed as I spotted a small animal at the edge of the tree line in the distance. I wondered if it could be a fox, but as I got closer I realized it was a small dog.

 I slowly reached my hand out, and she immediately backed up, a low growl emerging from her throat. I sat down on the curb and for the next 30 minutes slowly coaxed her toward me. I could see that she was covered in mud from head to toe and likely was covered in fleas as well. Once she seemed comfortable enough, I slowly began to pet her on her back. I could see that she was wary, but her eyes had a small glimmer of relief. 

Bringing her back to my house, we began reaching out to shelters and posting on social media to see if we could locate her owners, but we never found them. She became a member of the Wilson family. It took her a long time to warm up to each of us, growling and bringing her tail between her legs as each new person approached. It was obvious something had occurred in the past to make her fearful of people. But over time, we slowly began to earn her trust, and I think she is one of the sweetest dogs I have ever come to know. My friends steer clear of her whenever they come over, referring to her as mean and scary, but we know differently. I’ve seen the smile across her face, the playful joy she has, the excitement she displays when we come home, the comfort she feels finally sleeping under a warm blanket and so much more. We decided to name her Boston Anne because we thought the name sounded “tough yet sweet.”  

Today, Boston plays joyfully with my new puppy Maisie and hangs out happily all day with my mom as she works from home. But sometimes, the same wariness and fear she had when I first found her briefly emerges, such as when we tried to put her in a kennel while we went on vacation. She was there maybe an hour before I got a call that she was scared of the employees and I needed to come get her. When I arrived, she sat cowering in the corner of her cage, distress written all over her face that disappeared the second she saw me. She jumped right up, tail wagging and licking my fingers through the cage. It makes me think of how she would have fared had she ended up in a shelter. Would anyone have seen through her tough demeanor and recognized her sweet, happy personality that was hiding underneath, just waiting for the chance to come to light? 

Fostering in College 

Throughout my time in college, I have had several friends foster animals through Best Friends, some of whom have been my roommates. Another of my friends, fifth-year senior Kyle Burks, was inspired by my roommates to start fostering as well. 

Burks has fostered around fifteen cats since January 2021. Everytime I visit there seems to be a new animal, with a new personality and temperament. He usually fosters the cats anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks and has found it to be a great way to continually help animals, he said. 

He remembers one cat, Gloria, who had a particular impact on him. 

“A lot of people adopt younger cats, but then the older ones still need a home too,” Burks said. “It was a good feeling to have participated in the process of finding her a home.” 

Burks has found fostering to be a rewarding experience, one that he plans to continue long into the future. Compared to the shelter, bringing animals into homes allows them to socialize with more people, which makes them more likely to be adopted at adoption sites, Burks said. With each foster cat, Best Friends provides him with forms to fill out about the animal’s personalities, likes, dislikes and other character traits. 

For those interested in fostering, Best Friends’ fostering form can be found here. The nonprofit provides the needed resources to care for the animal and works to match fosterers to a pet suitable to their daily routine. 

And next time you are walking through a shelter, take the time to consider each animal’s story, where they could have been and what they could have gone through and what they could become if just given the chance to let their personality shine through.