The Dark Reality of Animal Rescue
What does a failed rescue look like?
My rescue organization in Vietnam is contacted frequently about animals we have no ability to help and not just because we are not taking more animals into the shelter. Even when we were able to have new intakes, it was nearly impossible to manage the cases we were contacted about. We would have had to buy an island to house the animals and I’d turn to the profession of paid assassin and bank robber to fund it. There is just no way any rescue (or even 1000 rescues where we are) could manage the caseload. Not a snowball’s chance in hell.
When we put out calls for fosters, we almost never get even a single response. Not one. Some people want to take a foster but think locking an animal in a cage or bathroom in a university dorm room is a decent foster home. Some want to help but live with 6 other family members, most of whom hate animals. This has been standard for eight years of our work in Vietnam. There are some parts of the country in which it is far easier to get decent fosters, but I think not only are we lacking in homes in which people can keep animals without them running off since doors and windows are often open in our tropical environment, but we have faced the ever waning support from the community for our work over time as we lost the popularity contest with other rescues.
People turn us off because of many reasons. Sometimes they unfollow us because we told them we are not taking their animals they don’t feel like being responsible for. Other times because they don’t like our message against speciesism and they think saving dogs and eating pigs is just fine and dandy and to hell with those vegan terrorists. Telling me you love animals while bacon grease is dripping off your chin does little to elicit a sympathetic response from me.
What does leadership have to do with it?
Admittedly, often they unfollow the organization because they personally do not like me. I get it. Being likable has very little appeal to me anymore in this job though I prided myself on it at the beginning of the organization before I had watched enough suffering to dull the fake smile of an expert salesman I sported publicly. At this point, I really have lost all interest in being nice to people who write in all caps with no punctuation or by using only crying emojis like a 12-year-old to express their emotions. I have failed to be kind to staff and volunteers who get shitfaced every night, sell drugs out of my shelter, bring home one-night stands, or generally fail to provide basic care for the animals. It is truly shocking the type of people who message us and want to work for us and their inability to understand what it is we actually do. After all these years I have lost my patience for it, like most shelter directors I know. Last I checked being adorable and constantly friendly was not in the job description for someone who faces preventable suffering and death for a living even if the public expects it. I work in a falsely feel-good industry and I do not ever feel good about it after what I have experienced. We have lost a lot of followers because of me, and I am ok with that because I am not a customer service representative at a bank who is paid to smile and be sugary sweet to morons. (I can hear my rescue director friends reading this and cheering because we all know what this is like.)
Sadly, the organization and thus the animals suffer as a result. The lack of fosters for animals in need, much less the very, very low number of families capable of adopting an animal and being responsible pet owners, is what has made our work impossible for cases in which we are unable to just treat and release an animal with the people who reported it in the first place. The object of this work is to keep animals out of shelters, not hoard them, and to enforce the need for individuals in the community to be accountable to the most vulnerable beings around them, not just pass them off to a badly overwhelmed, underfunded, and understaffed shelter.
As we currently do not have staff onsite with experience managing rescue cases and veterinary emergencies, we are unable to provide much assistance and are just trying to hold down the fort with the rescues we have while getting the background work ready to reopen the vet projects. Without vets, we are fighting a world war with a toothpick. These veterinary projects will have a far greater impact on animals in the community than any shelter, as sterilization is what actually prevents us from needing to rescue animals in the first place. Vet projects will be staffed by vets and vet nurses, professionals in the business of caring for animals. This makes a huge difference.
Believe it or not, animal caretaking in a shelter environment is not at all unskilled labor. It’s work that requires a great deal of knowledge about animal behavior, veterinary medicine, and facility management, and being able to clean and pet a dog does not make you a good caretaker. It takes years of case management and ideally, some schooling to be good at this. I know I screwed up a ton of cases over the years, and I have been managing facilities for upwards of 20 years with both large and small animals. It takes exposure and great training through thousands of cases to improve. Shelters rely on people like this who we do not have access to in Vietnam, and if we did, we don’t get enough funding to pay them to stay with us long-term.
The pregnant cat we tried to help last week and pleaded for fosters for gave birth somewhere out on the streets, and there is nothing we can do about that because we did not get a foster and none of the many people around her did anything at all to get her to a safer place aside from trying to offload her to a rescue. If we were to track her down and take her and her babies to our shelter where we do not have quarantine and would be putting our other animals at risk while badly stressing her out, we would not really be rescuing her. The likelihood of getting her or her babies adopted is extremely low, as we have had cats for the entire life of the organization who were in the same situation. Ricky and Lucy were born at the shelter over seven years ago, did not get adopted as kittens, and will probably live out their lives with us because it is extremely rare to get adult cats adopted to safe, lifelong homes here. Rescue is not one day. It is often an entire lifetime which can be 15 years of feeding, sheltering, paying someone to care for them, administrative costs, fundraising, vet bills, etc. The idea that we can just take an animal and not think of their entire future is extremely ignorant of the reality of this work.
This is the unfortunate and inescapable reality of animal rescue which is not adorable. No matter how much you love animals and are passionate about saving them, this job is a total nightmare most days. We exist because individuals refuse to be accountable on their own and because resources that could be used to run year-round mass sterilization projects rather than sheltering rarely get the funding or hero worship they deserve. Sometimes there are just cases an individual cannot manage, but in my experience of eight years of running the organization, that is about 5% of the animals reported to us. If you have a home and a job, the likelihood of you being a better chance for an animal than in an overwhelmed shelter with no quarantine is infinitely higher. Take some responsibility, please. We are happy to consult on cases, but we cannot save everyone if the public will not step up.
Foster and adopt. Spay and Neuter. Go vegan. This is what alleviates animal suffering. Be realistic about animal suffering and how you personally can stop perpetuating it. Everyone can be a hero to animals.
