Luna, a foster shepherd

Fostering shepherds can be tricky. I sent Lady and Kismet off to new homes in the past two days and both dogs seemed happy to go with their new owners. Those kind of dogs make it easy on me. The dog is happy, new owners are happy, and I'm happy. Fostering shepherds can be a bit more complicated. 

The damn dogs bond to you like white on rice. They don't know they are foster dogs, they think they are MY dog. All dogs love and bond to their owners, but ask any shepherd person and they will tell you that shepherds are different, the bond is different, and it is special. Shepherds need a human for more than food and shelter. They have an emotional need and bonding with a human is an imperative for them. I suspect that somehow they find the most emotionally needy people to bond to, people who need a dog to complete them just as much as the dog needs them. 

When one of those is a foster dog and the other is a person serving as a foster home, it puts the person in a position of being the one to break that bond, to betray that trust, to send the German Shepherd Dog off to a new home. Even if it's a better home, if it's what's best of the dog, and even if it's beneficial to dogdom as a whole by allowing the foster to take in another dog, it's still a betrayal of that hard earned trust, and damn it, you can see it in the dog's eyes. 

It's particularly difficult with dogs who don't give their trust easily, dogs like Luna. Once you've earned that dog's trust, you know what she's something special, and she knows the same about you. It may be two scared, partially broken beings that find what they need in the other to feel safe, to feel trust and trusted, to feel at home. Once Luna trusted me to touch her, and to handle her puppies, she was trusting me with her entire being and would have until death.

Luna was adopted today and she went home with a nice young couple. I have no doubt that she will bond with them, and in fact I heard that she's already getting close and comfortable with the young man. She will bond again because she has the biological imperative to form a human/canine bond; it's a part of her DNA just as much as the erect ears and long muzzle. 

I'm aware that what I'm writing says as much or more about me than it says about Luna or any other German Shepherd or other breed of dog. We raised puppies together, that's part of it certainly. And she had been around here for a while. I know that the role I played in her life can be fulfilled by another person, and will be in a remarkably short time. Actually, knowing that is comforting to me. I know that Luna will trust someone else even if I betrayed her trust today. That makes it possible to foster another tomorrow.