Rescue & Adoption

She's Fostering 23 Dogs. Nobody Posts the Rest of It.

Millie Bobby Brown's foster count went viral. The part worth copying isn't the number, it's that she takes the animals nobody else will.

By Leila Torres, Senior Living Editor

March 12, 2024 · 6 min read

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The number is doing all the work in the headline, and the number is the least interesting thing about it.

On The Drew Barrymore Show in March 2024, Millie Bobby Brown let slip, almost as an aside, that she is fostering 23 dogs, in addition to the nine who live with her permanently. There was an elderly dog on the couch with them, Barrymore’s. Brown said she has an old one as well.

Then she said the line that actually matters, and which everybody skipped past on the way to gasping at “23.”

“I rescue senior dogs.”

Why that sentence is the whole story

Every shelter in the country has the same problem, and it is not a shortage of homes for puppies.

The animals who sit longest, and who are euthanized most, are the ones nobody wants: the old, the large, the black, the medically complicated, and the behaviorally difficult. A ten-week-old Poodle mix will be adopted before the listing goes live. A twelve-year-old with a heart murmur and a lump on his flank will wait, and wait, and often not go home at all.

Fostering a puppy is a genuinely useful thing to do. Fostering a senior is a different act, and it is the one with the actual leverage, because you are not shortening a wait that was going to end anyway. You are removing an animal from the category where the waiting does not end.

Brown mentioned one in particular: a 17-year-old dog she rescued who had been dumped on the street. Seventeen. Someone kept that dog for most of two decades and then put him outside.

What the number actually looks like from the inside

Twenty-three fosters is not a lifestyle choice, it is an operation, and this is the part nobody posts.

It is twenty-three sets of medical records. It is a vaccination and deworming schedule that only exists if someone maintains it. It is separate feeding for the dogs on prescription diets and the ones who cannot be fed near another dog. It is quarantine space for the new intake with kennel cough. It is a vet bill that senior dogs generate reliably and expensively, because senior dogs have hearts and kidneys and teeth. It is the phone call where the rescue asks if you can take one more, and you have to say no, and then think about that for a week.

And it is, structurally, the thing that unlocks the whole rescue system. A rescue’s capacity is not measured in kennels. It is measured in foster homes. Every animal in a foster bed is a bed freed up somewhere else and a dog who is not decompensating in a concrete run. Fosters are not the charming edge of animal rescue. They are the load-bearing wall.

Brown’s dogs all came from shelters or off the street. That is a policy, not a coincidence.

“Foster homes are the single biggest constraint on how many animals a rescue can save, and the seniors are the hardest slot to fill,” says Dr. Lena Park. “If you want to do the most good with one spare room, take the old dog. He will also be the easiest houseguest you have ever had, which nobody believes until they try it.”

The domestic comedy, which is also a real answer

The funniest part of the interview is also, accidentally, the most useful.

Brown explained that her animals are why she moved out of her parents’ house. She was living at home, she wanted another dog, she asked, and her parents said no, on the entirely reasonable grounds that there was no more room for dogs in her bedroom. She then mentioned that she also wanted a rabbit and some farm animals.

So she moved out. Into the house next door.

“But my parents still do my laundry,” she added.

Underneath the joke is a genuine constraint that stops most people from fostering, and it is worth naming: fostering requires space and permission, and both are frequently outside a person’s control. If you are in a rental with a no-pets clause, or living with family who have said no, that is a real barrier and not a failure of will. Most rescues will tell you that a person who can foster one small dog occasionally is worth more to them than a person who intends to foster ten and never starts.

The other dog: what a therapy dog actually is

Brown’s Poodle, Winnie, has become a minor celebrity in her own right, having beelined into the audience on The Tonight Show before deciding to sit down next to her person.

Winnie was adopted during the COVID lockdown, and Brown has said openly, in a conversation with Miley Cyrus for Cyrus’s series Bright Minded, that Winnie is a therapy dog she persuaded her parents to let her adopt when she began experiencing frequent panic attacks.

She has also described something that anyone who lives closely with a dog will recognize immediately. Winnie, she told Jimmy Fallon, knows when she is acting and knows when she is genuinely upset. She knows the difference between real crying and fake crying. And she knows what a camera is, and works it.

The last part is a joke. The first part is not. A dog who reliably discriminates between performed distress and actual distress is doing something worth taking seriously, and it is exactly the sort of thing the research on canine emotional recognition keeps confirming.

If the number made you want to do something

The honest version of “be like Millie Bobby Brown” is not twenty-three dogs. It is one, and preferably an old one.

Foster, don’t just donate. Ask your local shelter or rescue what their hardest-to-place category is right now. They will tell you immediately, and it will not be puppies.

Take the senior. They are house-trained. They sleep. They do not eat your baseboards. They ask for a soft bed and a short walk and to be near you, which is, if we are honest, the dog most people actually want.

Understand what you are signing up for. A senior foster may need medication, may need help onto the sofa, and may not have years left. That is the cost, and it is the reason the slot is empty.

If you cannot foster, fund one. Rescues run on medical bills. A foster who can house a dog but not pay for his dental extraction is one funded procedure away from taking another.

Brown’s favorite rescue, Joey’s Friends, takes adopters and maintains a wishlist. But the point is not her rescue. The point is yours, and it is nearer than you think, and the dog who has been there longest is almost certainly grey.