Fostering Dogs, Part I

When I started this blog, I didn’t want it to just be about books.  I wanted to share a little bit about myself as well.  I love connecting over books, but I think sharing about our personal lives is where the real friendships are formed, even in the blogging and social media world.

Animal rights has always been a huge passion of mine.  I love animals.  In high school and college – this was in the 1980s and 1990s, before email – I wrote countless letters on behalf of animal rights.  For over 30 years, I have tried my very best not to buy any products that were tested on animals (thankfully, this is getting easier and easier as more and more people are interested in the ethical treatment of animals) and I have raised two girls who are very conscious shoppers. I have been a vegetarian for 30 years for ethical reasons, and more recently I have been trying to be vegan–I have vegan days, usually 3-4 days a week I am completely vegan and the other 3 or 4, I am vegan until dinner – I just have not found enough purely vegan recipes that my whole family will eat.

I grew up with dogs.  My parents had a mutt and Black lab when I was born.  Later, we had more mutts and a very sweet German shepherd.  When I first got married, in 1996, we were living in an apartment that was the top floor of a house.  Our landlords had said no pets, but we took great care of the place, their kids were in our wedding, the wife was a dog groomer, they knew we loved dogs and they relented and said we could get a puppy.  My husband told me to get something tough.  I came home with a purebred cairn terrier who had been dropped off at the shelter with papers.  Our Sydney Bean.  Two years later, when we bought our first house, we tried adopting a greyhound and an Airedale and I was allergic to both.  We finally got her a purebred cairn terrier brother, Oliver.

Christmas 2009

Since I was able to have two cairn terriers, I didn’t think much about the allergies.  Until 16 years later when both Sydney and Ollie had passed on and we wanted to adopt a cairn terrier puppy and I was allergic to it.

I am of the belief that a home is not a home unless it has a dog.  I could not, would not accept that I was allergic and so I have had so many allergy treatments over the last few years…from sublingual drops to shots to NAET treatment to eating actual dog hair.

We decided this past winter to sign up to foster dogs.  I could commit to living with a dog and dealing with allergies for a period of time and we would all go into it emotionally knowing that it would not be long term.  We decided that since I had been fine with two cairn terriers for 16 years, we would look into cairn terrier rescues.