Hi Ed, thank you for keeping this dialogue going. I have been running a dog rescue for twenty years, never once, not ONCE has there been any rumors or questions about what has become of any animal I have ever rescued. I'm not special, I'm just a normal animal rescuer that shares everything online with the general public. I don't just show Freedom Pics, I show taking the dog from a shelter to the vet, then post updates on the dog, if it is medical updates or how a surgery went, or updates on when they are ready for adoption. I do a lot of livestreams, because turning on the camera in a moment when something is happening with a dog that has been rescued, seems to be the right thing to do. Why should I hide everything and keep it to myself? My donors and supporters deserve to share in everything that goes on after a dog enters my rescue group. It's not hard, it's actually so easy that it surprises me how many rescues will pour hours of their time into being defensive - instead of just putting it all out there for anyone to see. So yes, there can be false accusations made against some rescues, but where there is smoke there is fire. If an accusation is truly false, the rescue being asked for transparency can stop it so quickly by making a decision to be transparent. Red flags for me are how rescues behave defensive when asked for transparency.
Cathy, thank you for this! Your approach is exactly the model so many rescues could benefit from following. Transparency really isn’t complicated, as you’ve shown; it builds trust, invites supporters into the journey, and leaves little room for rumor. Your two decades of doing this prove that openness is both possible and powerful.
Break my heart! I love Lee Asher. I think he does a lot to promote dog adoption. Every organization is going to have disgruntled employees. We have a volunteer that gets mad when dish and hand soap at the rescue is not cruelty-free or when other volunteers throw gray water down the drain.
There is an animal shelter in Chula Vista that lists their intakes, transfers to rescue, adoptions and euthanization numbers on their website. They have a group of animal activists protesting at the director's house. I requested information from the protest leader about what the shelter was doing wrong, and got no response. My past dealings with the shelter were very favorable. I assume they are upset at the euthanasia numbers listed on the website, but don't know for a fact.
The dog rescue group I volunteered with got into a fight with the founder. The board members thought she was pulling too many dogs and adopting out unhealthy puppies (a litter with Parvo). They ended up wrestling the organization away from her. The rescue still exists with a good reputation fifteen years later. It felt icky to me that the founder was dumped and the way it was done, so I left to work with a different rescue. I had access to the database which listed the outcomes for dogs. The number of dogs that were euthanized was tiny, and justified (e.g., attacking other dogs and causing severe injuries, severe medical cases). It made my heart hurt, but I knew in those cases euthanasia was the only answer. I can see how shelters or rescues might not want to release numbers as some animal activists would accept nothing but zero for euthanasia...
Suzanne, thank you for sharing this thoughtful perspective. You’re right, transparency can invite criticism, especially from those who will only accept “zero euthanasia” as success. But as you point out, openness about outcomes, even when painful, builds credibility in the long run. Your experience really underscores the heart of the issue: trust is earned when rescues and shelters are willing to share the whole story, not just the victories.
This is a very fraught subject in a multi-dimensional ecosystem and industrial-complex with many mirages, high emotionalism, often with financial rewards that perversely perpetuate animal misery.
It's relatively easy to create a facade and difficult to determine a rescue's authenticity and effective results. Is the rescue more about the emotional/identity needs of the founder or the animals?
In pervious Fog of Rescue series article examining Working Dogs Nevada Rescue, they defended their practices: “Please compare our privacy policy to that of ‘the Asher House.’ We use the same owner surrender policy they use.”
With Animal Politics commenting:
"This comparison blurs two distinct issues. Protecting the identity of owners who surrender pets are about privacy, while policies tracking shelter animal intakes, transfers, and adoptions are about accountability. Conflating pet owner privacy with shelter animal transparency undermines trust and misleads the public."
Refusing to provide documentation of a surrendered or sponsored animal's status has allowed large scale abuses. Asher House, featured on an Animal Planet series, is a cautionary tale of making high-profile animal rescue a business platform reportedly generating enormous personal profits over the welfare of the animals detrimentally used as fundraising props.
Perhaps Animal Politics commentors can recommend an authentic rescue's advice on how donors and supporters can be more discriminative identifying effective rescues. I can think of an established expert rescue founder in my community. Maybe she'll contribute.
100% Carmen! What is interesting is that no one is asking for the privacy of owners relinquishing their animals to be disrespected. What seems to be quite reasonable is that every animal that Lee is showing as intaking, deserves the dignity of having transparency. There are never any videos of the animals getting thoroughly vetted, only the highly curated slick videos that follow the same predictable script. "hope you are having a beautiful day" to draw in the audience, "it's rescue day" to get the endorphins pinging, then "rescuing" the dog(s) and then the dogs mostly are disappeared after that. It's a super effective way to distract donors by continuing to put out constant new endorphin inducing slick videos. There are not "adoption day" videos, there are no livestreams to walk through the entire property to show how all 300 of the dogs are living. It's only a selective few dogs that are used as props in the videos, the rest living on the property are not allowed visitors, there is no volunteer program that someone can sign up for and the biggest red flag is the staff are all required to sign NDAs which I've never heard of before in animal rescue.
Cathy, Excellent description that slick images produce seductive endorphin highs, for emotional and financial investment in the visuals of a large-scale rescue oasis where dogs are rehabilitated, healed and find good homes.
Wanting to believe this is true, basic questions are dismissed or analysis clouded. The latest Best Friends TV commercials are pure "happy valley" with dogs dreamily frolicking thru meadows with motto "Save Them All" thru Best Friends.
Thank you, Carmen! You’ve captured the heart of the dilemma so well. The line between authentic rescue and personal platform is often blurred, and as you point out, conflating privacy with accountability only deepens mistrust. I especially appreciate your idea of highlighting how donors and supporters can be more discerning in identifying effective rescues. Featuring advice from respected rescue founders would be a powerful way to ground this discussion in practical guidance. I’d welcome any introductions if your colleague is open to contributing.
In the noosepaper racket, back when I broke in during the last days of the Lyndon Johnson administration, cub reporters were sarcastically advised to "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. If your mother says she loves you, get a second source. If a hot rock lands on your desk bearing ten commandments, claiming to come straight from God, ask whose God sent it & call the devil for a second opinion." In the early days of the then text-only internet, many of us tried to promote the phrase "Verify before you amplify," in my case as a content provider on the America On Line "Animals & Society" section hosted by the late Dick Weevil. Of course it was all pissing in the wind, since as Mark Twain observed in the earliest days of the telegraphic newswire, a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. These days, we can only remind people that, "As Abraham Lincoln said, don't believe everything you see on Facebook."
Merritt and Beth, I love this! Your comment is both sharp and whimsical. You’ve summed up the heart of the challenge with more flair than I ever could. “Verify before you amplify” ought to be tattooed across every rescue forum. Thanks for sharing this, it adds both humor and wisdom to the conversation.
As someone whose rescue is partnered with Petsmart Charities, does hundreds of adoptions annually through their adoption centers and benefits from their grant programs I would like to raise a counter narrative to your concern about intertwining charity efforts with a large for profit company. Of course Petsmart, as a corporation, benefits from telling the story of their commitment to rescue. My nonprofit benefits from their corporate reach. I am a huge advocate of the economy of scale, amortizing costs, efforts and staff across multiple platforms. It’s efficient. Parsing that out in whatever form it takes is difficult and if you ask any CPA it’s more art than science. On the Petsmart front I can’t tell you what is in their CEO’s “heart”. Does he sit in a strategy session and say “I don’t really care about animals but we know that adopters spend 43% more in our stores than non-adopters so let’s put an increased effort on the charity side”? Maybe, but does it work in favor of more animals in good homes? Yes. And there are a thousand reasons why a private company is not going to open their books…a big reason for not going public. I am concerned that raising these questions, raises concerns for readers that are not valid or thought through.
Same applies to WDN. I haven’t followed this closely, I don’t know what you know. I would just raise two points, one minor, one major. You questioned why they didn’t list their animals on their website but rather on Adopt A Pet. We use a database, Pawlytics. We post our adoptables in our database, that software then posts downstream to our own website, Adopt A Pet, Petfinder and several other sites. The traffic from nationally recognized search sites is 80% higher than from our own site and we have great SEO!!! 😊 Publishing on national search sites is more effective. But you brought it up as one more suspicious issue….one more brick in the wall.
You also have concerns about the profit/nonprofit overlap. I got it. If the concern is that they were running a breeding and boarding facility and underwriting it with the charity then there’s a serious issue. IF, however, their for profit supports the charity in an interesting hybrid, then bravo. That’s thinking outside the box to save animal’s lives. But I don’t know what you know, so I can’t say. Your points are all well taken but perhaps
the most seminal is that rescue is it’s own worst enemy, in-fights more than the tech bros and sadly diffuses it’s power to float a coherent message.
Hi Kelly, I really appreciate your thoughtful perspective. There’s no question that groups like PetSmart Charities have enabled thousands of adoptions and provided resources many rescues rely on. My concern isn’t with the benefits, that’s undeniable, but with transparency and accountability when charity and commerce intertwine. When corporate philanthropy doubles as brand marketing, it’s important for the public to understand who benefits, and how, so trust in the entire system isn’t eroded. I also agree with you that national adoption platforms are powerful tools; the issue is less where animals are posted than whether the reporting around them is open and verifiable. You’re right, rescue can be its own worst enemy when suspicion replaces collaboration. That’s exactly why transparency matters so much, it cuts through rumor and helps us focus on saving lives.
That’s a sharp way to put it! You’re right! The challenges rescues face aren’t just external, but often come from within. That’s exactly why transparency and accountability are so important if we want the movement to strengthen rather than fracture.
Just a reminder that dogs and cats are not the only animals that have rescues (and of course rescue drama). There are also sometimes legitimately different and valid ways to care for the same species of animal. I recently saw a rescue spat on FB that boiled down to "your chinchillas don't have enough free space in their enclosures to run and jump" vs "well YOUR chinchillas don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures, mine love hopping from hammock to hammock and if they miss a jump they just land in a different hammock, yours would fall all the way to the bottom of the cage".
Ed, just curious if you’ve seen Lee Asher’s bizarre videos where he is a polar opposite of the choir boy personality he portrays on his Asher house videos? I didn’t pay attention to the DOJ mess…. I paid attention to the videos of him. He’s scary. He certainly appears to be a Dr Jeckyl Mr Hyde and his followers …. Just like mine do…. Track every single dog he posts about. There are lots of former employees speaking up as well…. And credible pictures and videos. So while I have zero info about the DOJ- I think most people are watching the same thing I am… the missing dogs, bizarre personality flip, bizarre videos and hearing from former people who worked for him.
Thank you Tracy, for mentioning that there are bizarre videos of Lee Asher online, where he appears to be high, or drunk and is forcing dogs to french kiss him on camera. The dogs look so stressed and I am surprised he has not been bitten by forcing himself on the dogs in such an inappropriate (and quite frankly, creepy) way.
Thanks, Tracy, I appreciate you sharing what you’ve seen.
What you describe, conflicting public persona, missing animals, former employees speaking up, is exactly the kind of patchwork that fuels the “fog” this piece is about. Your observations help illustrate the problem: when dramatic posts and anecdote replace open records, suspicion fills the void.
If you’re willing, please send any screenshots, dates, videos, names, or contact info for former employees and posts to animalpolitics8@gmail.com
We’ll treat anything you share confidentially and will follow up to verify specifics. Even a few concrete, time-stamped items make a big difference in sorting rumor from documentation. Thanks for all you do for the animals!
Desal, you’re right! This dynamic isn’t limited to cats and dogs. Small animal rescues often face the same tensions, sometimes over genuinely differing philosophies of care. Your chinchilla example is a perfect illustration of how debates can be both passionate and nuanced. Thanks for broadening the perspective!
Hi Ed, thank you for keeping this dialogue going. I have been running a dog rescue for twenty years, never once, not ONCE has there been any rumors or questions about what has become of any animal I have ever rescued. I'm not special, I'm just a normal animal rescuer that shares everything online with the general public. I don't just show Freedom Pics, I show taking the dog from a shelter to the vet, then post updates on the dog, if it is medical updates or how a surgery went, or updates on when they are ready for adoption. I do a lot of livestreams, because turning on the camera in a moment when something is happening with a dog that has been rescued, seems to be the right thing to do. Why should I hide everything and keep it to myself? My donors and supporters deserve to share in everything that goes on after a dog enters my rescue group. It's not hard, it's actually so easy that it surprises me how many rescues will pour hours of their time into being defensive - instead of just putting it all out there for anyone to see. So yes, there can be false accusations made against some rescues, but where there is smoke there is fire. If an accusation is truly false, the rescue being asked for transparency can stop it so quickly by making a decision to be transparent. Red flags for me are how rescues behave defensive when asked for transparency.
Cathy, thank you for this! Your approach is exactly the model so many rescues could benefit from following. Transparency really isn’t complicated, as you’ve shown; it builds trust, invites supporters into the journey, and leaves little room for rumor. Your two decades of doing this prove that openness is both possible and powerful.
Break my heart! I love Lee Asher. I think he does a lot to promote dog adoption. Every organization is going to have disgruntled employees. We have a volunteer that gets mad when dish and hand soap at the rescue is not cruelty-free or when other volunteers throw gray water down the drain.
There is an animal shelter in Chula Vista that lists their intakes, transfers to rescue, adoptions and euthanization numbers on their website. They have a group of animal activists protesting at the director's house. I requested information from the protest leader about what the shelter was doing wrong, and got no response. My past dealings with the shelter were very favorable. I assume they are upset at the euthanasia numbers listed on the website, but don't know for a fact.
The dog rescue group I volunteered with got into a fight with the founder. The board members thought she was pulling too many dogs and adopting out unhealthy puppies (a litter with Parvo). They ended up wrestling the organization away from her. The rescue still exists with a good reputation fifteen years later. It felt icky to me that the founder was dumped and the way it was done, so I left to work with a different rescue. I had access to the database which listed the outcomes for dogs. The number of dogs that were euthanized was tiny, and justified (e.g., attacking other dogs and causing severe injuries, severe medical cases). It made my heart hurt, but I knew in those cases euthanasia was the only answer. I can see how shelters or rescues might not want to release numbers as some animal activists would accept nothing but zero for euthanasia...
Suzanne, thank you for sharing this thoughtful perspective. You’re right, transparency can invite criticism, especially from those who will only accept “zero euthanasia” as success. But as you point out, openness about outcomes, even when painful, builds credibility in the long run. Your experience really underscores the heart of the issue: trust is earned when rescues and shelters are willing to share the whole story, not just the victories.
This is a very fraught subject in a multi-dimensional ecosystem and industrial-complex with many mirages, high emotionalism, often with financial rewards that perversely perpetuate animal misery.
It's relatively easy to create a facade and difficult to determine a rescue's authenticity and effective results. Is the rescue more about the emotional/identity needs of the founder or the animals?
In pervious Fog of Rescue series article examining Working Dogs Nevada Rescue, they defended their practices: “Please compare our privacy policy to that of ‘the Asher House.’ We use the same owner surrender policy they use.”
With Animal Politics commenting:
"This comparison blurs two distinct issues. Protecting the identity of owners who surrender pets are about privacy, while policies tracking shelter animal intakes, transfers, and adoptions are about accountability. Conflating pet owner privacy with shelter animal transparency undermines trust and misleads the public."
Refusing to provide documentation of a surrendered or sponsored animal's status has allowed large scale abuses. Asher House, featured on an Animal Planet series, is a cautionary tale of making high-profile animal rescue a business platform reportedly generating enormous personal profits over the welfare of the animals detrimentally used as fundraising props.
Perhaps Animal Politics commentors can recommend an authentic rescue's advice on how donors and supporters can be more discriminative identifying effective rescues. I can think of an established expert rescue founder in my community. Maybe she'll contribute.
Thanks for covering this important topic.
100% Carmen! What is interesting is that no one is asking for the privacy of owners relinquishing their animals to be disrespected. What seems to be quite reasonable is that every animal that Lee is showing as intaking, deserves the dignity of having transparency. There are never any videos of the animals getting thoroughly vetted, only the highly curated slick videos that follow the same predictable script. "hope you are having a beautiful day" to draw in the audience, "it's rescue day" to get the endorphins pinging, then "rescuing" the dog(s) and then the dogs mostly are disappeared after that. It's a super effective way to distract donors by continuing to put out constant new endorphin inducing slick videos. There are not "adoption day" videos, there are no livestreams to walk through the entire property to show how all 300 of the dogs are living. It's only a selective few dogs that are used as props in the videos, the rest living on the property are not allowed visitors, there is no volunteer program that someone can sign up for and the biggest red flag is the staff are all required to sign NDAs which I've never heard of before in animal rescue.
Cathy, Excellent description that slick images produce seductive endorphin highs, for emotional and financial investment in the visuals of a large-scale rescue oasis where dogs are rehabilitated, healed and find good homes.
Wanting to believe this is true, basic questions are dismissed or analysis clouded. The latest Best Friends TV commercials are pure "happy valley" with dogs dreamily frolicking thru meadows with motto "Save Them All" thru Best Friends.
Thank you, Carmen! You’ve captured the heart of the dilemma so well. The line between authentic rescue and personal platform is often blurred, and as you point out, conflating privacy with accountability only deepens mistrust. I especially appreciate your idea of highlighting how donors and supporters can be more discerning in identifying effective rescues. Featuring advice from respected rescue founders would be a powerful way to ground this discussion in practical guidance. I’d welcome any introductions if your colleague is open to contributing.
In the noosepaper racket, back when I broke in during the last days of the Lyndon Johnson administration, cub reporters were sarcastically advised to "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. If your mother says she loves you, get a second source. If a hot rock lands on your desk bearing ten commandments, claiming to come straight from God, ask whose God sent it & call the devil for a second opinion." In the early days of the then text-only internet, many of us tried to promote the phrase "Verify before you amplify," in my case as a content provider on the America On Line "Animals & Society" section hosted by the late Dick Weevil. Of course it was all pissing in the wind, since as Mark Twain observed in the earliest days of the telegraphic newswire, a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots. These days, we can only remind people that, "As Abraham Lincoln said, don't believe everything you see on Facebook."
Merritt and Beth, I love this! Your comment is both sharp and whimsical. You’ve summed up the heart of the challenge with more flair than I ever could. “Verify before you amplify” ought to be tattooed across every rescue forum. Thanks for sharing this, it adds both humor and wisdom to the conversation.
As someone whose rescue is partnered with Petsmart Charities, does hundreds of adoptions annually through their adoption centers and benefits from their grant programs I would like to raise a counter narrative to your concern about intertwining charity efforts with a large for profit company. Of course Petsmart, as a corporation, benefits from telling the story of their commitment to rescue. My nonprofit benefits from their corporate reach. I am a huge advocate of the economy of scale, amortizing costs, efforts and staff across multiple platforms. It’s efficient. Parsing that out in whatever form it takes is difficult and if you ask any CPA it’s more art than science. On the Petsmart front I can’t tell you what is in their CEO’s “heart”. Does he sit in a strategy session and say “I don’t really care about animals but we know that adopters spend 43% more in our stores than non-adopters so let’s put an increased effort on the charity side”? Maybe, but does it work in favor of more animals in good homes? Yes. And there are a thousand reasons why a private company is not going to open their books…a big reason for not going public. I am concerned that raising these questions, raises concerns for readers that are not valid or thought through.
Same applies to WDN. I haven’t followed this closely, I don’t know what you know. I would just raise two points, one minor, one major. You questioned why they didn’t list their animals on their website but rather on Adopt A Pet. We use a database, Pawlytics. We post our adoptables in our database, that software then posts downstream to our own website, Adopt A Pet, Petfinder and several other sites. The traffic from nationally recognized search sites is 80% higher than from our own site and we have great SEO!!! 😊 Publishing on national search sites is more effective. But you brought it up as one more suspicious issue….one more brick in the wall.
You also have concerns about the profit/nonprofit overlap. I got it. If the concern is that they were running a breeding and boarding facility and underwriting it with the charity then there’s a serious issue. IF, however, their for profit supports the charity in an interesting hybrid, then bravo. That’s thinking outside the box to save animal’s lives. But I don’t know what you know, so I can’t say. Your points are all well taken but perhaps
the most seminal is that rescue is it’s own worst enemy, in-fights more than the tech bros and sadly diffuses it’s power to float a coherent message.
Hi Kelly, I really appreciate your thoughtful perspective. There’s no question that groups like PetSmart Charities have enabled thousands of adoptions and provided resources many rescues rely on. My concern isn’t with the benefits, that’s undeniable, but with transparency and accountability when charity and commerce intertwine. When corporate philanthropy doubles as brand marketing, it’s important for the public to understand who benefits, and how, so trust in the entire system isn’t eroded. I also agree with you that national adoption platforms are powerful tools; the issue is less where animals are posted than whether the reporting around them is open and verifiable. You’re right, rescue can be its own worst enemy when suspicion replaces collaboration. That’s exactly why transparency matters so much, it cuts through rumor and helps us focus on saving lives.
I would say that stores that sell animals are rescues' worst enemy, but rescues are their own second worst enemy.
That’s a sharp way to put it! You’re right! The challenges rescues face aren’t just external, but often come from within. That’s exactly why transparency and accountability are so important if we want the movement to strengthen rather than fracture.
😊
Just a reminder that dogs and cats are not the only animals that have rescues (and of course rescue drama). There are also sometimes legitimately different and valid ways to care for the same species of animal. I recently saw a rescue spat on FB that boiled down to "your chinchillas don't have enough free space in their enclosures to run and jump" vs "well YOUR chinchillas don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures, mine love hopping from hammock to hammock and if they miss a jump they just land in a different hammock, yours would fall all the way to the bottom of the cage".
Ed, just curious if you’ve seen Lee Asher’s bizarre videos where he is a polar opposite of the choir boy personality he portrays on his Asher house videos? I didn’t pay attention to the DOJ mess…. I paid attention to the videos of him. He’s scary. He certainly appears to be a Dr Jeckyl Mr Hyde and his followers …. Just like mine do…. Track every single dog he posts about. There are lots of former employees speaking up as well…. And credible pictures and videos. So while I have zero info about the DOJ- I think most people are watching the same thing I am… the missing dogs, bizarre personality flip, bizarre videos and hearing from former people who worked for him.
Thank you Tracy, for mentioning that there are bizarre videos of Lee Asher online, where he appears to be high, or drunk and is forcing dogs to french kiss him on camera. The dogs look so stressed and I am surprised he has not been bitten by forcing himself on the dogs in such an inappropriate (and quite frankly, creepy) way.
Thanks, Tracy, I appreciate you sharing what you’ve seen.
What you describe, conflicting public persona, missing animals, former employees speaking up, is exactly the kind of patchwork that fuels the “fog” this piece is about. Your observations help illustrate the problem: when dramatic posts and anecdote replace open records, suspicion fills the void.
If you’re willing, please send any screenshots, dates, videos, names, or contact info for former employees and posts to animalpolitics8@gmail.com
We’ll treat anything you share confidentially and will follow up to verify specifics. Even a few concrete, time-stamped items make a big difference in sorting rumor from documentation. Thanks for all you do for the animals!
Desal, you’re right! This dynamic isn’t limited to cats and dogs. Small animal rescues often face the same tensions, sometimes over genuinely differing philosophies of care. Your chinchilla example is a perfect illustration of how debates can be both passionate and nuanced. Thanks for broadening the perspective!