The People Who Won't Stop

The message arrives on a Tuesday evening, through a rescue network group chat shared by forty or so volunteers. A dog has been found tied to a drainage pipe behind a petrol station — thin, untreated mange across its flanks, estimated eighteen months old. The local shelter is over capacity. The dog has seventy-two hours. Does anyone have a foster place?

The person who says yes — they always say yes — already has two fosters and a permanent dog of their own. They have said yes forty-three times in the past three years. They have a waiting list of vets who know them by name and a WhatsApp group of five hundred other people doing the same thing. They have, at various points, cried in their car in a shelter car park, taken out a personal loan to cover a dog's cancer surgery, and negotiated with their partner about whether the phrase "just this one more" still means anything.

This is the unglamorous reality of animal rescue — not the heartwarming adoption story at the end, but the daily accumulation of asks that falls on a small, self-selected group of people who have, for reasons that are partly psychological, partly ethical, and partly inexplicable, decided that the answer is always yes.

The shape of the problem

The scale of animal homelessness is difficult to measure precisely because it is distributed across thousands of municipal shelters, private rescues, and informal networks, each keeping different records. The ASPCA estimates that approximately 3.1 million dogs enter US animal shelters annually, of which around 390,000 are euthanised. The RSPCA in England and Wales took in over 63,000 animals in 2022. In Australia, the RSPCA took in approximately 100,000 dogs and cats in 2021–22, of which a significant proportion required foster care before being placed.

These numbers are the demand side of an equation whose supply side — the number of people willing to foster, transport, fundraise, rehabilitate, and advocate — is chronically insufficient. The gap is not closing. And the burden of that gap falls disproportionately on a small number of individuals who do not know how to say no.

What the research says about who says yes

The psychology of animal rescue volunteers has attracted a modest but growing research literature. Studies consistently identify high levels of what researchers call "trait empathy" — the disposition to feel and respond to the emotional states of others, including animals — as a predictor of rescue engagement. This is not surprising. What is more interesting is what the research finds when it looks at what happens over time.

Compassion fatigue — a concept developed in the context of human healthcare workers by Charles Figley in the 1990s and extended to veterinary and animal welfare workers — describes a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, reduced empathy, and vicarious traumatisation that results from sustained exposure to the suffering of others. Studies of animal shelter workers and rescue volunteers find high rates: a 2020 study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science found compassion fatigue scores in animal rescue volunteers comparable to those reported in emergency medical services workers.

The culture of rescue

There is something specific about the culture of animal rescue that makes compassion fatigue both more likely and harder to acknowledge. Rescue networks are built on a foundation of moral urgency — lives are genuinely at stake — and a set of shared values in which dedication, self-sacrifice, and the willingness to take on more are regarded as virtues. To say "I cannot take another dog this week" is to risk being seen as failing those values. The culture, researchers note, tends to pathologise limits rather than respect them.

This creates a structural trap. The most committed volunteers — the people who have said yes dozens or hundreds of times — carry the heaviest loads and are most exposed to cumulative trauma. They are also the least likely to step back, because stepping back feels like abandonment. Organisations that fail to address this tend to burn through their most dedicated people. The turnover rate in paid animal shelter work — a proxy for the broader sector — has been estimated at over 50 percent annually in some US regions.

The question of limits

Animal welfare organisations are increasingly investing in support structures for their human volunteers — peer support networks, mental health resources, explicit norms around sustainable caseloads — though provision remains uneven. The RSPCA and ASPCA have both published guidance on compassion fatigue for shelter workers. Some rescue networks have introduced caps on simultaneous fosters and mandatory rest periods between placements. The data on whether these interventions reduce attrition are still accumulating.

The person who said yes to the dog tied to the drain pipe picks it up on Thursday evening. They name it, provisionally, after the street. They take it to the vet the following morning. They will have it for six weeks before it is adopted by a family in the northern suburbs. They will cry when it leaves. Then the message will arrive again, through the group chat, on another Tuesday evening.

The science of what drives them has no clean explanation. High empathy helps. A tolerance for emotional cost helps. A belief, tested weekly against the evidence, that the individual case matters. What the research does make clear is that these people are not infinite, and that treating them as if they were is one of the animal welfare sector's most persistent and damaging assumptions.