Foster Failure Friday..

Foster failure is a term I had never heard before a few days ago. Hi, I'm Vicki and I'm a foster failure!!! Well sort of! Foster failure is the term used when a person is fostering an animal and when the time comes that person cannot bring themselves to part with the animal. It's considered a failure one because fostering is a temporary situation and by definition dictates handing over the animal when a home or other situation is found, and two because most people who fail to hand over an animal now have no room to foster another animal making them one less foster parent available and that is when it's a bad thing!!! I am a type one foster failure I am not however a type two! I still have plenty of room for future fosters. Now let's talk a little about the dog that made me an utter foster failure!!!!

This folks is the one that made it completely impossible for my husband and me to let go!!
Jorge Posada June...


We knew as time went on that we were becoming more and more attached to this guy and earlier this week we knew that letting him go was just not gonna happen, so I called up Lela, my HS contact, and pretty much told her that this guy just had to be ours!!

The day I went to pick up Jorge and his sister they brought him out to me on a little hand towel and told me he had been acting sluggish. They handed me this limp scraggly little thing and gave me very little hope that he would even make it, after all the way he came to be at the humane society in the first place was a pretty grim situation. A man had found a litter of pups in a field he was mowing, they seemed to be about 2 weeks old and there was no mother in sight. No idea how long they had been out there or how long since they had been fed. They were very small and were obviously not in the best of health. They were lucky enough to come at a time when a mother dog had just lost her litter and could step in to let them nurse, but she was running out of milk and fosters needed to be found soon. They were so unsure of how things would go with this litter that they were not even given ID numbers.

I brought him and his sister home and immediately to the vet, they both had pneumonia and were infested with hook worms. After 2 weeks of struggling his sister finally couldn't fight anymore and she passed away. Little Jorge continued to fight and thankfully to get better! In those first weeks he was beginning to come around...


After his sister's passing we took on his brother "Jeter", then another one from another litter, then another one, then another one, until we ended up with 6 foster puppies, basically our own mixed litter. and each one as cute and sweet as the one before it! But there was always something about our Jorge, something we couldn't put our finger on. Maybe it was the many many long nights feeding and warming and praying that this little guy would just live!! Maybe it was the absolute joy we felt the day our vet gave him a clean bill of health, it could also be VERY likely that he was the first one to become potty trained and that was just enough to send us overboard!! lol
But whatever the reason, we just knew this guy was no longer a foster but a part of our family! He just fit so perfectly, like it was just meant to be, and who are we to fight something like that??

So yes as the foster parents of Jorge we failed absolutely and blissfully!!! I know some people in the animal rescue field won't find this to be an especially good thing but we couldn't be happier...annnd I don't think he minds it very much either. ;)