For rescues and rescue fosters... protect ownership rights in fostered animals

As we have discussed in other blog posts, animal control authorities want people who are being raided to sign over animals to them.  No one should ever do this, as we explained in this entry to the blog.  However it happens, because the person is under stress and duress.

If you are a rescue organization or a foster for a rescue organization, there is another level of protection you should employ:  the animals in a foster home are not the property of the foster, they are the property of the rescue.  Therefore a foster home does not have the ownership rights required to legally sign animals over.  Only the rescue organization itself can sign animals over.

To make this clear, a rescue should have a signed foster agreement with all foster homes spelling out that fostered animals are the property of the rescue organization, not the foster.  This agreement should also stipulate that the foster does not have authorization to dispose of or sign over ownership of the animals to any person or other organization.  To account for normal adoption activity, the agreement might also state that the only way the foster can transfer ownership of fostered animals is through the normal adoption process with an adoption application and all the adoption application processing that the rescue normally performs to complete adoptions.

Also if a foster is keeping animals privately for any other third parties, there needs to be  similar agreements with them available to show that he or she is not the owner of those animals and does not have authority to sign them over.

With these agreements in place, if a foster is raided and is asked to sign over animals, the foster can simply say that the animals aren't his or her property to sign over and that the authorities will have to talk to the board of directors of the rescue to get animals signed over. This can take some of the personal pressure off the foster in the high stress situation, so it protects the foster as well as the rescue.  The board of directors would naturally refuse to sign animals over to animal control, and could get its own legal representation to advocate for the animals and work to get its property returned in the event of a seizure.

If a foster does sign the animals over, either because he or she is  tricked or pressured, the presence of this signed agreement will give the rescue a stronger case to invalidate the surrender of the animals, on the grounds that they weren't the property of the person who signed the surrender agreement.