01/10/2026
LONGER POST 🚨🐾😘
There’s an old saying that beggars can’t be choosers. Apparently nobody passed that message on to animal welfare.
The reason for this post is partly a detailed email we received recently from two experienced animal lovers who went somewhere genuinely wanting to volunteer and came away feeling ignored, unnecessary and unlikely to return. But it is not just about that email. It is also about the other messages we receive, the stories people tell us privately, and the things we repeatedly see and hear ourselves. Put them together and the same ridiculous pattern keeps appearing.
Shelters and associations are full. Animals need homes. Volunteers are needed, foster homes are needed, adopters are needed, promotion is needed and money is always needed. Yet when capable people actually step forward, some parts of welfare become remarkably selective about who is allowed to help, how they are allowed to help and, crucially, whether they are sufficiently compliant while doing it. Driving good people away when you desperately need them is welfare su***de.
One story sent to us recently summed it up perfectly. A volunteer spent years helping improve a struggling shelter, brought in other volunteers, helped improve facilities, created better enrichment for the dogs and helped open up completely new adoption opportunities. Then the atmosphere changed. Personalities and territory took over, good ideas became a threat, sensible improvements were undone, and eventually that volunteer walked away. The person who had helped cause much of the conflict disappeared shortly afterwards. The shelter was left without years of experience, energy, contacts and practical help, and according to people who knew it, things went backwards.
That is the bit we find staggering. Somebody can give years of their life, money, contacts, ideas and practical work to improve animals’ lives, yet instead of asking “how do we keep this person involved?”, somebody decides the bigger issue is who is in charge. You could hardly design a better way of damaging your own organisation.
We know of more than 15 people currently willing to volunteer at one facility who still cannot participate, while other volunteers apparently can. We hear from people who have offered help and been ignored, fosters who have encountered unnecessary barriers, and potential adopters who simply give up because getting a response becomes harder than adopting the animal. In any other walk of life, repeatedly turning away capable people while insisting you desperately need help would be recognised for what it is: ridiculous.
The same mentality appears with promotion. We have even been criticised because we “don’t have our own animals” and apparently just promote everybody else’s and “take the credit.” Quite right about the first bit. Promoting animals that weren’t getting enough exposure is exactly why this whole thing started. If somebody has a homeless animal and we can put it in front of a few thousand more people, why on earth wouldn’t we?
And apparently another terrible crime is that we use AI. Can you believe it? Yes, of course we do. If there is a tool that helps us write better posts, translate faster, improve images, organise information and get animals seen by more people, why on earth would we not use it? You still have to know what you want to say, what information matters, what is accurate, what tone works and how to use the tool properly. AI doesn’t somehow magically run an animal welfare page while we sit around drinking tea.
The really ridiculous part is that some people try to use this as a way of discrediting the work. They should be using these tools too. If technology can help an animal reach more people, improve a photograph, translate an adoption post or save volunteers hours of work, then use it. This is animal welfare, not a competition to see who can make life unnecessarily difficult for themselves. But of course, some people would rather sneer at a useful tool than learn how to use it.
The uncomfortable part is that when you fill a gap, you also make the gap visible. Sometimes the people who should be pleased that somebody is helping seem more annoyed that the weakness has been exposed. Instead of “thanks for helping,” it becomes questions about ownership, credit, control, criticism, technology and who is allowed to do what.
That is where welfare starts disappearing up its own backside. If you need volunteers, don’t drive volunteers away. If somebody brings good ideas, listen to them. If they improve outcomes, keep them involved. If you need foster homes, don’t make fostering unnecessarily difficult. If you need adopters, answer them. If an animal needs exposure, don’t complain about who is giving it exposure or what perfectly legitimate tools they used to do it.
Nobody is suggesting that every offer of help should be accepted blindly. Animals need protecting, proper checks matter and organisations need structure. But there is a huge difference between safeguards and ego, between management and control, and between protecting animals and protecting somebody’s little kingdom.
The most damaging people in welfare are not always the ones doing nothing. Sometimes they are the ones who make sure nobody else is allowed to do too much.
Beggars can’t be choosers. Animal welfare, remarkably, keeps trying to prove otherwise.
Team Frankie
