I was aghast that a younger couple with the financial means would allow their innocent nephew to enter a system most people know is not conducive to success to put it lightly.
So I ask you was this selfish of them? What would you childfree folks do in such a situation? Am I being unfairly judgmental of them and they shouldn't feel obligated or guilted into such a life changing burden?
I'd expect them to do exactly what most people WITH children do when asked to foster a relative: refuse. It's far kinder than taking the child in and then having to call a few weeks or a few months later to have the child removed when he or she is acting out in a destructive way that endangers the current inhabitants of the house. That happens a lot in trauma cases, and being removed from one's parents *is* traumatic.
Make no mistake, kinship foster care is still foster care. You've still got round after round of investigation, examination, mandatory training, and repeated invasive questioning by authorities. You've still got to be prepared to open your home for inspection on a moment's notice. You've still got to jump every time a social worker says "frog", and you're still going to live under a microscope. The only person who can do whatever they want to whomever they want is the bio-parent, who is a little tin god as far as the system's concerned. They're permitted to walk all over you, sabotage your relationship with the rest of your extended family, and do whatever they wish in order to get revenge for "you" taking their kid.
Then of course there's the logistics drama. Do you travel for business? Oops: you've got a court date! Better drop everything and reschedule. Are you attending a relative's wedding? Oops: your social worker needs to see the kid now-now-now because it's the end of the month. Oops! Oops! Oops! Oops! Oops! Expect to get jerked around by everyone and his dog, particularly the bio-parents Who Have Rights (which you incidentally don't). Such money as is available is not enough to cover the cost of keeping the kid if you do it right, and it doesn't even come close to repairing the damage that some of the more destructive ones can do to a house and its contents. The upshot of it is that very few normal families can actually function while taking care of a foster kid, unless they rearrange their lives to revolve around Being A Foster Family. It pretty much precludes being a two-career family; one of the partners has to give up his or her job and become a full-time stay-at-home
punching bag parent.
The system is set up to encourage and reward professional foster care givers: people who earn a substantial part of their living by taking in foster children. There's an economy of scale. If you have more than three and they are constantly circulating in and out every 7 months or so, all of a sudden you get massive tax deductions and the income starts working out. But you have to get into it as a home based business.
By the time the child welfare authorities get involved in an abuse or neglect case, the recipient of the abuse or neglect is frequently so traumatized and badly socialized that he or she requires expert professional assistance and frequently a far more structured environment than any normal family can provide. The aunt and uncle in your story are not experienced parents, much less highly trained treatment foster care providers. If the child has behavior problems that made animal abuse likely, by the time the authorities come knocking the extended family is generally well aware what the child is or isn't like. Dumping the kid into a home that is not even remotely equipped to meet his or her needs guarantees only one thing: disaster.
The fact the couple in your story have no children in no way makes them different from any other family that realizes they don't have enough space in the lifeboat to take on even one more niece, nephew, cousin, or sibling. What makes them unique is that they were mature enough to recognize it and admit it immediately instead of making the problem worse.
If you (I'm talking about the general "you", not you personally) don't have the wherewithal to provide 24x7 in-person supervision, access to a sizable support system including therapists, counselors, mental health providers, pediatricians, school administrators, and a treatment team, if you're not part of a larger group of people where fostering or adoption is the norm, and if you can't drop everything and respond now-now-now to an emergency several times a day plus driving the child to appointment after appointment (including mandatory meetings with the bio-parents if they still have parental rights), you need to recognize that your life is going to shift to revolve around just such a lifestyle. If that's impossible given your work schedule or other existing responsibilities, you should absolutely not consider fostering or adopting out of foster care.
The selfish thing for the couple to have done would have been to go off on a big ego trip about how they were going to "save" their nephew despite having a household and lifestyle that were most likely not even remotely conducive to raising any child at all, much less one who needs substantial extra help, guidance, and attention due to trauma effects.