08/31/2026
Recently, this was shared within a group of animal welfare professionals, and it resonated deeply with us. With permission, we are sharing it here as an open letter to the animal welfare community.
Animal welfare is complicated. There is enough difficult work to do without making enemies of one another.
We hope you'll take a few minutes to read this:
When did “rescue” become synonymous with hero, while the people doing animal welfare work every single day became the enemy?
Rescuers make tremendous sacrifices. They give their evenings, weekends, homes, money and hearts to animals who need them. They deserve our gratitude.
But somewhere along the way, we created a strange hierarchy of virtue.
If you rescue animals in your spare time, you are selfless.
If you build an organization capable of employing people to do that work every day, you are suddenly part of the establishment.
If you grow a nonprofit, earn donor trust, build a shelter, hire veterinarians and animal care professionals, and create the infrastructure to help thousands of animals, somehow your success can make you less heroic rather than more.
Why?
The veterinarian working in nonprofit medicine could often make considerably more somewhere else.
So could the RVT. The veterinary assistant. The animal control officer. The nonprofit professional.
Getting a paycheck doesn’t mean someone stopped making a sacrifice.
And building something sustainable doesn’t make someone a sellout. Sometimes it means someone figured out how to turn compassion into infrastructure.
There is another sacrifice we rarely talk about.
Shelter workers bond with animals and sometimes still have to make extraordinarily difficult decisions. They are responsible not only for the animal standing in front of them, but for the hundreds or thousands coming behind it.
They have to think about public safety, disease, behavior, capacity, staffing, resources and whether companion animals can safely coexist in our communities.
That isn’t a lack of compassion. It is the burden of responsibility.
Meanwhile, our movement has normalized language that pits one part of animal welfare against another:
“I pulled this dog from a kill shelter.”
But why was the rescue able to pull the dog?
Often because someone at the shelter cared enough to ask for help.
So who saved the dog?
The rescue?
The shelter employee who recognized the animal needed another option?
The foster who opened their home?
The donor who paid for treatment?
The veterinarian?
The adopter?
Maybe the answer is all of them.
There is room in animal welfare for rescues that save 40 animals a year and organizations that serve 4,000.
There is room for highly individualized rescue and large-scale sheltering.
There is room for the extraordinary case and for programs designed to help the greatest number of animals possible.
But there should not be room for a culture that requires someone else to be the villain in order for us to be the hero.
When we shame shelters, attack their employees, impose impossible purity tests, or measure compassion by who says “yes” most often, animals don’t win.
Organizations become overwhelmed. People burn out. Capacity disappears.
Animals can accumulate beyond someone’s ability to care for them. Good people leave the profession.
And the public is taught that the very institutions and professionals our communities depend upon cannot be trusted.
The heroes of animal welfare aren’t defined by whether they receive a paycheck or have “rescue” in their name.
They are the people keeping pets with the families who love them.
The people fighting for accessible spay/neuter and veterinary care.
The people preventing animals from entering shelters in the first place.
The people caring for the animals who do enter.
The people willing to help the exceptional animal without forgetting about the thousands of ordinary ones who need them too.
The people making difficult decisions when there isn’t a perfect answer.
The people building organizations strong enough to still be here tomorrow.
And yes, the rescuers who open their homes and give their evenings, weekends, money and hearts to animals who need them.
Animal welfare doesn’t need more heroes and villains.
It needs a community mature enough to understand that saving animals at scale is complicated, that responsibility sometimes looks different from rescue, and that none of us succeeds by tearing down the people standing beside us in the same fight.
Different roles. Same mission. The animals need all of us.
