Animals
Kennels & housing
Kennels are the physical spaces animals live in - runs, condos, cages, stalls, or rooms. Once they exist, every animal record can say exactly where that animal is, and your dashboard can tell you how full you are.
Where to find it
Kennels appear in the left nav for orgs that house animals on site. Foster-only rescues don’t see it, since there is nothing to assign. If you set up your org during onboarding and said how many kennels you have, Fosterling already created them for you as Kennel 1 through Kennel N - rename them to match your signage.
Creating a kennel
- 1Open Kennels and click Add kennel.
- 2Give it a name people actually use out loud - “B1”, “Cat condo 4”, “Isolation 2”.
- 3Optionally set a zone (a building, wing, or room), a species if the space is only ever used for one, and a capacity - how many animals fit at once.
- 4Set the status: Active for normal use, Maintenance while it’s out of service, or Closed when it’s gone for good.
Moving an animal in or out
On the Kennels page, each kennel shows who is currently in it. Use Assign animal to move one in, and the x beside an occupant to move them out. You can also set housing from the animal’s own record, which is usually faster when you already have the animal open.
An animal can only be in one kennel at a time, so assigning it somewhere new clears the old space automatically.
Maintenance and closures
Put a kennel into Maintenance while it’s being repaired or deep-cleaned so nobody assigns an animal to it by mistake. Filter the list by status to see, at a glance, how much of your housing is actually usable today.
Sharing a building with another org
If you share a facility with a partner organisation, the Kennels page also shows their side of the building, so you can see which spaces are free across the whole site rather than only your own.
- Do I have to use kennels?
- No. If every animal is in a foster home, you can leave kennels empty and nothing else changes.
- What happens to a kennel when the animal is adopted?
- Recording the outcome takes the animal out of your care, and the kennel shows as free again.
- Can I delete a kennel?
- Yes, once it's empty. If it may come back into use, set it to Closed instead so its history stays intact.
- Can the Ops Copilot do this?
- Yes. You can ask it to list your kennels and who's in them, create a kennel, or move an animal into one.