Okay, I don’t know if this is the right page or flair to use, but I really needed to talk about this - warning, this is going to be extremely long, so I apologize in advance. I don’t want to use names since I don’t want any trouble and I’m still a minor. (Also, this is NOT hate to rescues as a whole, most of my pets are rescues. This is specifically talking about my experience since it actually just came up in the news where I live)
I live in WA and am currently in high school. About a year ago, two of the staff at my school sent out emails to students about volunteer opportunities at a dog rescue. I was interested, followed up on the email, and ended up getting in contact with the owner of the rescue. I helped out with them for about a year until about a month ago they completely stopped reaching out with volunteer opportunities. In that time, I helped out with adoption events (the ones you see at Petsmart) and helped when they would get in transports of dogs; I even fostered some of the dogs. I should’ve noticed the red flags from the start (even when I did, I thought some of the issues might just be cause they’re a small rescue, so that was my fault), so here’s my list of examples;
1) I took in a foster the owner of the rescue told me had no reactivity to anything, low and behold, she was reactive to cats and men (to no fault of the dog), and would bare teeth and growl at my dad. When I reached out and said I couldn’t foster her, it took multiple days to get someone to take her despite me explaining how she was trying to attack cats and was becoming too much of a risk. It happened to be INCREDIBLY common for the rescue to drop off dogs, and when trying to return the dog, they would literally ghost you for days - one time, I agreed to foster for a week, and when the week ended, it took ANOTHER WEEK for someone to get this dog.
2) They required no paperwork for me to foster. Maybe because I had volunteered for so long that they knew me and how to reach me, but I was surprised when I asked if I (a minor) would be able to foster and what the process would look like, and was met with “that’s fine, just let me know what dog you want to take”. Not to mention, there were multiple times I was asked if I could foster, even though they knew my family said no, and they would continue to press.
3) They were very elusive with information about the dogs. When I volunteered at adoption events, I would often communicate with customers about the info of the dogs. Most of the time people would ask about breeds, specifically two cases I can remember are when we had a litter of puppies that were possibly malinois/shepherd mixes and another time we had pit mix puppies. With the malinois puppies, there were a bunch of people interested, and I tried to be as honest as I could that these were going to be high energy and need lots of training and exercise (literally a family came in with their toddler and asked if it would be like their golden retriever). I understand that I probably drove a lot of people away from adopting them cause of this, but I didn’t want someone to take them only for them to either return, dump, or just kennel the dog all day; this was met with one of the staff telling me not to tell people that they’re malinois, because “people have negative feelings” to the breed, and just told me to tell people they’re shepherds. Same thing happened with the pit puppies, and I was told to just say they’re terrier mixes.
Furthermore, they would get a consistent transport of dogs every month from Mexico (I actually had no idea what the problem with this was when I started, so that was my fault for not seeing it as a red flag). I would help out with these transports when they got them in, which consisted of me going to this persons house, a van coming filled to the brim with dogs, and having to unload them into this persons yard (a lot had fresh stitches from surgery, so putting all of them together in a yard was asking for problems). Literally no info given to me in advance on any of these dogs, and almost got bit a few times cause many of the older ones were reactive.
4) They had no set location. I was informed they’re entirely foster based, which I thought was amazing at first (and a lot of the people who fostered actually were great people who had no involvement in what I’ll mention later), but turns out with having literal shipments of dogs every month, you end up running out of fosters. So, the owner would “foster” them in their house; leading to them having over ten dogs in their one story house at once.
That last point leads into what made me post about this now; I found a video on instagram where animal control seized 17 animals from them, all of which being in kennels inside the garage. I looked it up, turns out multiple news outlets have posted about this; they are now facing an animal cruelty lawsuit. I genuinely am at a loss for words, and I feel like a complete asshole for even helping them out. A lot of the reason for why I was doing this was to help out animals in need, but also because my school has connections to my local zoo for internships, and having experience in animal welfare can help get you in. I feel like I am fucked. Like, what the hell? Do I take this off my resume? Am I a jackass for volunteering with them that long? Obviously the most important thing is the welfare of the animals, and I don’t know how to react. I don’t know where to go from here, I’ve always wanted to work in animal welfare, and was hoping this “experience” could help me land that internship and future jobs. I want to back out of the interview I had set up for that internship position, because what do I even say? For fucks sake, two of the dogs they seized were injured when they took them. It’s genuinely disgusting to me that I was helping out people who could do something like that; especially to see one of them, a person I have met and talked to numerous times in person, in this video where they removed animals from a deplorable situation.
I am sure from this post alone you can find the “rescue”, but I want to say that I am not trying to start drama or say anyone is guilty in anything. I just needed to rant. I know this post was long and not well put together, so I apologize. If this post goes against any of the rules, I am also sincerely sorry and will promptly delete. I did not know where else to go.
