People who love animals often dream of starting their own pet rescue. How is this done?

As a person who worked for five years at an animal shelter, one of the questions I am most frequently asked is “How to I start my own pet rescue?”. Sadly this question is often asked for the wrong reason, the person often wants a cheap way to acquire pets. This is often evident when they specify a type of animal they want to rescue and it is usually an exotic pet, one seldom requiring the services of a rescue organization.

One case would be a farm near me that advertised themselves as a wallaby rescue. Upon looking at their website, they offer no animals for adoption and even have a “willing to buy cheap wallaby’s” caption. No legitimate rescue would directly buy an animal from the public. Additionally their number one goal would be to place (adopt out) as many pets as possible thus enabling them to rescue another.

The only exception to this rule are the horse rescue groups that purchase horses at auctions who would otherwise be destined to slaughter. For the purpose of this article we will primarily be discussing rescue for cats, dogs and small caged pets.

Establishing Need

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A city of 50000 needs shelter space for 100-150 cats, roughly 20 – 50 dogs, and 10 smaller caged pets. If you live in an area where such a shelter already exists, there is no need for an additional rescue facility unless you are going to do something spectacularly different, such as specifically rescuing and rehoming older pets, ones that the regular shelter would likely euthanize. As such you may be able to help more simply by assisting the present shelter rather than having an additional one which may confuse the public.

It must be noted the kind of shelter space I am referring to includes not only pets surrendered by their owners, but lost/stray ones as well. Some cities operate separate pounds where lost pets are held, but many use the shelters to house these pets too. If a city has too many places that house stray pets the public will not know where to look when their pet goes missing.

SPCA and my Cat(rhonda) by Michael (mx5tx). 

Photo source http://www.flickr.com/photos/glasgows/413371172/

Check Area Laws

If you are going to start the shelter out of your own home, very likely you will have some laws restricting the number of pets you can have within. If your city offers special licensing to have additional pets, you will need to apply. Very likely you will need a Business License, and neighbor permission. Will people come to your home to adopt or will you take the pets to an “Adoption Event” at a local supporting store? Establish an agreement with the store first before you tell the city council that is the arrangement.