Without our foster carers, Oldies Club could not function as a rescue. Rather than using kennels, we place our dogs in temporary foster homes until they are ready to be advertised for adoption and then rehomed to a permanent home.
We usually have between 40 and 50 dogs in our care at any one time, so that’s around 40 to 50 foster homes in use at any one time. That’s a lot of homes! Each home has the kindest people, offering their time, energy and dog-experience, to help us care for and thoroughly assess the dogs in our rescue.
Interested in becoming foster carer?
We do have certain requirements for foster homes, as our older dogs obviously deserve the very best care, so let’s go through a few of those requirements.
You need to be able to take a dog for good walks each day. They might be older, but this doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy getting out for a long walk, and some of our oldies can be quite strong and might pull on the lead. We need the walks to be done by the foster carer themselves, rather than a dog walker, so that you can assess, and potentially do a little training with the dog if needed, and then feed your assessment back to us. This ensures that we know how the dog reacts to its surroundings, and to other dogs and people, which helps us when we are selecting a permanent home for the dog.
You need to be at home for the majority of the day. A lot of our oldies come from homes where they have hardly been left, so to place them in a strange home where they are expected to be alone for hours each day simply doesn’t work for them.
You need to have a safe and secure garden that is easily accessible for a potentially sick or frail oldie. Sadly, some of our dogs come from situations where their owner hasn’t been able to take proper care of themselves, let alone their beloved dog, and so we do have a fair few dogs arrive that aren’t in the best of health. Common issues are heart problems, arthritis, liver or kidney disease, urinary infections, allergies, digestive issues, dental problems and so on. Most of these dogs will improve massively once their issues have been diagnosed and are being correctly treated. Some take a long time to get well though, so being able to just amble out easily into a safe garden when they need to is a godsend for them.
If you have children, they need to be aged over 5 for us to accept you as a foster carer. Foster homes without children are always needed as a lot of oldies come to us because they are unhappy about living with the youngsters that have become a part of their original family.
If you are cat-free or pet-free this is helpful as it increases the chances of us having a dog on the waiting list at some point that we could place with you. Most of our foster homes have resident pets, but not all dogs on our waiting list can live with dogs and cats.
You will need access to transport, preferably your own car, so that you can get a dog to the vet easily, potentially as an emergency, for example if your foster dog was to suddenly become unwell during the night.
You will need to be happy to communicate with us regularly, and be IT-confident enough to fill in forms and provide the assessments, photos and videos we need.
Find out more
You can read more about fostering for Oldies Club here.
If you’re ready to get in touch, please email fosterrecruit@oldies.org.uk with a brief description of your circumstances and why you’d like to foster.
