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Three foster kittens that found a good home through
WHS and foster Joan Schaffner. Photo: Joan Schaffner
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Joan Schaffner is the only human being in her home, but she hardly lives alone. She has 63 cats to keep her company.
Cat trees and litter boxes crowd out the human furniture in her Ward 4 home. But Schaffner isn’t your run-of-the-mill crazy cat lady. She’s a law professor at The George Washington University Law School and the chair of the Animal Law Committee for the American Bar Association.
Five or six years ago, she and Mary Cheh – now the Ward 3 councilmember – started an animal welfare project. “It was supposed to be a one-year project on the animal welfare laws in DC,” she says. “As a result, we started a permanent Animal Law program at GW, which I direct.”
Pretty soon she hooked up with the Washington Humane Society as a volunteer and then as a foster care parent for homeless cats. Her weakness for fostering mother cats and their litters quickly increased her household numbers. (She has a special “animal hobby” permit from the DC Department of Health.)
WHS is headquartered at 7319 Georgia Ave. NW, where it operates a shelter that staff members estimate can house no more than about 60 animals at one time. WHS is also contracted by the Department of Health to operate the DC Animal Shelter at 1201 New York Ave. NE, which has a significantly larger capacity, at about 250 animals.
WHS estimates that its shelters receive an average of 33 animals a day. They are committed to finding homes for as many of them as possible, but shelter space is limited.
That’s where foster parents like Joan Schaffner come in.
‘He Completely Unfolded’
Fosters bring cats and dogs into their homes temporarily while WHS searches for a “forever family” for the animals. WHS Foster Program Coordinator Alyson Burgess says she has a database of about 125 fosters whom she can call on to take animals that need a place to stay. She estimates that about 75 of them have animals now.
Marla Handelman-Greif says she’s probably fostered 20 or 25 animals over the years. Some stand out. Like one little Chihuahua, whose new parents call him Nemo, but whom she dubbed “Diesel” out of irony: when he came to her he was tiny, malnourished and sick with pneumonia. “He was on the brink of death,” she says. “He couldn’t go to a permanent home until we got him healthy.”
For several weeks, she worked to heal him, giving him medicine and tender loving care – “They usually need more of that than anything else,” she says. And then, she says, “He completely unfolded and became a different dog within a matter of weeks. When he got here, he was lethargic; he had trouble breathing. Then he became playful, active and healthy, and we were able to adopt him out to wonderful home.”
She is currently fostering a terrier mix that was “dumped” at the shelter because her owners said she wasn’t housebroken. “That automatically tells me they didn’t work with her,” Handelman-Greif says. “Also, every bone in her body was sticking out. She was a walking skeleton.” After two days with her, Handelman-Greif says, she responded to house training, and she’s “the most loveable, sweet-natured, intelligent animal.” She’s on her way to an adoptive home in Georgetown.
WHS works with fosters to make sure they don’t take on more than they can handle. Burgess makes sure fosters with small homes don’t bring home big dogs. People who are at work all day get animals that don’t need constant attention. Fosters who can’t handle the hyperactivity of an energetic puppy get an older or sleepier animal.
‘I’m Just a Pit Stop’
Jennifer Wolny is a dog person, but she fosters cats, partly because she won’t get as attached, partly because she already has three dogs of her own.
Wolny says as a foster, “You need to be able to emotionally detach from them when you find them a good home. You can’t be attached to every little animal. I just think of them as mine for a little bit of time. I’m just a pit stop … a shelter for a little while till they find a better place.”
She says a foster should love animals and have a lot of patience. “They’ll come to you scared,” she says. “They might have an accident. The puppies might cry.” She says fosters need to spend time at home to help socialize them. Burgess adds that people who really want to adopt should do that, not become fosters. She acknowledges that sometimes fosters adopt the animals they’re fostering, but ideally, they’ll be more of a revolving door, finding homes for the animals and bringing in new fosters that the shelter can’t handle.
WHS pays for spaying or neutering and an initial vet check, but after that, food and veterinary care is up to the foster.
Schaffner may be the star of the foster show. She says she could just never say, no, when Burgess called her up. It’s hard for her to pick her favorite animal-placement story, but a good one happened last December, near Christmas, when she got three foster kittens with no mother. She named them Dancer, Prancer and Dasher. “I wanted to keep them together,” she says. “They were super bonded.” WHS posted the animals’ pictures and profiles on the website, and people kept writing, wanting to adopt just one. But she refused to split them up. After a month or two, Schaffner was beginning to think the cats weren’t going to be adopted – that they’d become “permanent Schaffners.”
“Then I got an e-mail from a woman with three daughters, aged 7, 9 and 11,” she says. “Their cat had died that week unexpectedly. They adopted all three kittens, one for each of the girls. It was a perfect match, with each girl falling in love with each of the kittens.”
Countless Ways to Help
WHS offers opportunities to help. Burgess herself first got involved with the WHS program that traps feral cats that can’t be domesticated, spays or neuters them, vaccinates them, and releases them back into their “colonies.” Athletic volunteers meet at local parks to take the shelter dogs for a run, so they get some exercise. Others teach dogs basic obedience skills that will “help them succeed in their new ‘forever’ homes,” according to WHS.
Shelter volunteers also play with the animals, walk them, and help match up potential adoptive parents who come in with the right animal for them. |
