by Lin Barrett

Created on: June 02, 2009

An actual home is always preferable to the impersonal and, to a dog, puzzling situation of living in a shelter.

Homes offer stimulation, an environment which is much more like the animal's eventual home, and the single thing a dog needs most: consistent, caring human contact.

A shelter is at best simply that, shelter. The animal's place of confinement will be a cell. If the dog is fortunate, once or twice a day a human will take it outside for bathroom purposes, or even a little recreation. For the greatest amount of time, a dog confined within a shelter will live in a situation which offers it no intellectual challenges at all. There are entire breeds of dogs which unravel mentally when faced with this: any of the herding dogs, and many terriers, need to be kept stimulated. A dog of mixed ancestry may also possess this trait.

Shelter dogs can usually see other dogs across an aisle, but they cannot make any physical contact with them, nor with the neighbors they can smell, but not see, to either side. The shelter cells are so constructed to ensure the safety of the dogs. (All dogs are pack animals, but that is no guarantee of individual compatibility, so they must be separated unless supervised. Still, this is not a natural environment for an animal which has a pack mentality.)

Shelters usually lack home-like furnishings. Dogs cannot get used to such things as stairs, vacuum cleaners, lawns, books, shoes, food which may not be eaten just because it's there, other animals which may not be caught and killed, and small humans who hug, kiss, and pull ears.

In a shelter, no worker can afford to repeat often the searing emotional experience of bonding with a dog, then having that bond severed when the dog goes to a new home. Their care is impersonal - not begrudged, but of emotional necessity impersonal.

In a foster home, while the situation is somewhat similar, there is sufficient time and energy available to the dog to begin a bond. (And there is always the possibility that the foster home will become permanent.) This beginning is critical, because it teaches the dog how to bond to the human. Once learned, the skill can be transferred to the "forever home."

Yes, a foster home is vastly preferable to a shelter. But a shelter is vastly preferable to a situation of abuse, neglect, or outright abandonment. Donate to shelters, send your friends in need of a companion animal there to seek one out. Volunteer to be a foster, if you can. There are animals out there who need us, and to whom a shelter would be heaven, a foster home nirvana.

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