Teresa Paradis knew Miss Bell was pregnant, but when she felt the frail Chihuahua’s abdomen for movement, she found none.
The dog’s owner had become homeless with her after a recent separation. They went from the home of a friend to a hotel in Hooksett, N.H., before turning up at Paradis’s animal rescue in Chichester, N.H., the weekend before Veterans Day.
She told Paradis she never imagined having the heart to surrender a dog, but she estimated Miss Bell’s babies were two weeks overdue and confessed to herself that, given her circumstances, she couldn’t afford to treat a dog’s medically complicated pregnancy.
“I said, ‘It happens, life just happens sometimes,’” Paradis recalled telling the woman. “And I go, ‘You’re doing right by her.’”
At Live and Let Live Farm Rescue, volunteers spent hour after hour soothing Miss Bell while a heating pad to ease the chill of an imminent labor radiated under her dog bed. But Miss Bell wouldn’t move. She wouldn’t eat. Her fate seemed decided. Paradis pictured rushing the dog to the emergency room for “a c-section for dead babies.”
Instead, as evening fell, she made what she hoped would be a life-defining decision: She brought Miss Bell into her own home at the rescue. Setting the feeble dog on her chest, Paradis for the first time began to feel her womb bulge and shift under her ebony fur, and at midnight, she awoke to the faint cry of Miss Bell’s firstborn. By dawn, three more puppies — all of them healthy — had arrived.
“I strongly feel that if I didn’t get her by my bed to give her some relief of the stress she was having, that they would not have been able to turn around in her stressful body to find a way out,” she said. “It’s not like I can go in a court of law and say this is what happened, but the experience that I’ve had with animals — their environment to give birth is very important to them, and feeling that their babies are going to be safe is very, very important to them.”
For years, animal welfare workers across the state of New Hampshire, including Paradis, have placed pregnant animals in foster homes where they can receive individualized, around-the-clock care as they give birth.
They believed themselves to be in compliance with state regulations, which stipulate that shelters and rescues may only place animals in foster care for the purpose of medical or behavioral rehabilitation. They said they had never faced penalties for their actions. Over the course of the last year, though, the state’s Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food, which houses the Office of the State Veterinarian, has made clear to shelters and rescues that lax enforcement of the fostering regulation is over.
“Has there been a lack of attention to the practice? Yes, for a number of years, primarily when the department had less staff and no database, it was probably not looked at as closely as it should have been,” Agriculture Commissioner Shawn Jasper wrote in an August email to the New Hampshire Federation of Human Organizations, which the Monitor obtained through a public records request.
“Throughout the 2024-2025 licensing year, every entity that was using fosters for pregnancy was warned that the practice was a violation of the rules, but in order to adjust, we allowed a period of time before full enforcement would take place,” Jasper wrote. “That time is up.”
In a modified statement, Jasper added that the department’s current staffing capacity mandates enforcing the fostering regulation that disallows pregnancy as a qualified medical condition.
“I’m not opposed to the practice,” he wrote, but “the current fostering practices cannot be allowed to continue without adequate oversight by the department.”
Expanded oversight of the animal fostering system could be funded with a “new dedicated fee,” he suggested, but as things currently stand, “we simply do not have enough staff to do what we are already being asked to do.”
Paradis has chosen not to wait until the simmering dispute over increased enforcement is settled, either through increased funding for the Department of Agriculture or a change to the administrative rule that would explicitly permit fostering for pregnancy.
Guided by personal conviction, she has continued to place pregnant and postpartum animals who arrive at her rescue in foster homes. Miss Bell’s puppies have just begun to open their eyes, and lately, she has warmed up quickly to strangers visiting the rescue, which Paradis views as a sign she may be ready for a new temporary home.
Her network of foster families have continued to offer refuge to animals who’ve known neglect and abuse, they have accompanied overnight labors and deliveries, and on occasion, they’ve needed to intervene. They have helped raise litters during their first fragile and formative eight weeks of life, the period before they’re eligible for adoption.
For Amy Shaw, choosing to take in a pregnant dog necessitated that she become a nurse.
In early October, she opened Facebook to see a photo of a dog staring longingly from inside a “tiny little cage.” Paradis, who uses the social media platform as a megaphone to rouse the masses, had penned the blurb above it, which pleaded for help: The mother dog was escaping euthanasia in Georgia, Paradis said, and she urgently needed a home.
Shaw wouldn’t consider herself an ardent animal activist. She’s a mother living in Milton with her husband and two daughters, a former social worker with an “empathetic personality.” But seeing Polkadot, named after her patches of exposed skin, a sign of abuse, moved Shaw to compassion.
“It just looked like no one was stepping up. I foster dogs and I foster cats, but I’m not an avid foster. It’s not that I don’t love animals — I’m just not one of those people that are just constantly out there trying to save the animal world. I just saw the post, I saw a real need, and I thought to myself, ‘I have no reason to say no,’” she said.
Shaw prepared a transitional room, one with a pellet stove and old hardwood floors that her family doesn’t use often, for Polkadot’s arrival. During the school day, while her daughters were out of the house, Shaw sat with the mother dog and gained her trust. From a late night into an early morning, she coaxed Polkadot through delivering her litter of seven, speaking softly, petting her, making eye contact and ensuring she felt safe.
Noticing the second puppy was struggling to breathe, Shaw returned the newborn to his mother, and “miraculously, he started to make noise.”
“I felt like I honestly was like a nurse there to support her, changing her bed sheets and weighing the puppies and making sure she ate and drank,” she said.
For Shaw, the act of caregiving put the state’s increased enforcement of the fostering regulation into perspective.
“Having these dogs give birth in an animal shelter is like asking us to give birth in a homeless shelter. And I don’t mean a transitional living facility, I mean a homeless shelter where you pack up your stuff and leave every day.”
Mo Redmond has come to a similar conclusion.
For years, she’s welcomed pregnant cats and their litters into her Bedford home, finding permanent homes for them through her personal network once they’re ready for adoption.
Before she moved to New Hampshire from Colorado 10 years ago, Redmond’s first mother cat gave birth in the closet of what used to be her children’s playroom — toys were cleared out as kittens were brought in. Every time she embraced a duty to care for a pregnant animal since then, the responsibilities she undertook proved to be numerous and varied.
“I have literally had to unwrap — if the kittens come too quickly, let’s say you have to unwrap the placenta from around each kitten. Usually the mother does, but if they come too quickly, you have to help her out or the terrible thing is they would suffocate in their sack,” she said. “If a cat starts calling out as they’re having kittens, you sometimes have to guide them out. You just put on a pair of gloves and help. It could be deadly for either animal, the kitten or the mom. It’s just like with human births, there’s no real difference.”
On a Wednesday in early October, she drove to meet Indy, who’d given birth to four kittens at Live and Let Live and was showing signs of stress. Home to Bedford they went with Redmond, who weighed the babies, each one a tiny “Twinkie,” in grams on a food scale and kept their carriers lined with clean towels.
When, early into motherhood, Indy had trouble keeping herself and her litter clean, Redmond lent a hand with gentle baby wipes, a first for her despite several litters of experience.
“She’s a good mama, but that’s another reason why I’m glad she’s at our house,” Redmond said.
Redmond has never needed to bottlefeed a litter, but the hypothetical makes her wonder.
“Nobody’s at the shelters in the middle of the night,” she said. “They’re not going to take the 3 a.m. feeding.”
Paradis, too, worries for pregnant mothers and their newborns who might be left alone overnight.
In late September, when she still felt unsure about whether to comply with or defy the Agriculture Department’s direction on excluding pregnancy from the fostering criteria, she received another pregnant cat, Ellie.
She placed the cat in the quietest place she could find: a room apart from the agitation of the kennel where the rescue’s veterinarian typically sees animals for physicals or to administer vaccines. There, she could sheath a cat tower in a black cloth to allow the cat some darkened privacy. “It’s really the best we can do for them,” she said.
The cat spent two weeks in the secluded medical room. One morning, Paradis arrived to find her cowering from a bloodied tangle in her cage.
Only one previous animal had ever experienced a full miscarriage while in Paradis’s care, a mother cat placed in a foster home around 12 years ago, she estimated. The scene shocked her.
“She had done it in the night. She was all done,” she said. “I’m sorry to say, but it put me over the edge. I said to myself right then, ‘I’m finding fosters for them.’”
