Free Speech Rights for Animal Shelter Volunteers and Rescues

A municipal animal shelter that must take in all strays and ­owner-surrendered animals depends on volunteers and rescue groups to accomplish its mission. Staff provides the direct care (kennel cleaning, feeding, ­medical care, and administration) but ­relies—to a great extent—on volunteers to get the animals out of their cages and kennels for exercise and socialization and to promote them to adopters. The shelters don’t have enough money to employ sufficient staff to walk all the dogs, provide enrichment to scores of cats or take all of the photos and videos to promote the ­animals for adoption. Animal shelters simply cannot accomplish their goal of re-homing as many animals as possible without a committed group of volunteers. The same is true for rescue groups. While many animals leave the shelter directly with an adopter, many other animals are pulled from the shelter by rescue groups who then hold them (usually in foster homes) until they can find an adopter. The active involvement of volunteers and rescue groups thus allows the shelter to have a much higher “live-release rate” and euthanize fewer ­animals. By way of example, at the Animal Care and Control Team of Philadelphia (ACCT Philly) in 2015, 37 percent of the dogs they took in and 25 percent of the cats left in the arms of a rescue who was taking on the responsibility, financial and otherwise, of placing that animal, allowing the shelter as a whole to achieve a 76 percent live-release rate.

Despite this close relationship among shelters and volunteers and rescue groups, there can also be significant tension. Volunteers and rescues often get frustrated with management over conditions for the animals or policies they believe fail to maximize lifesaving. Shelter management often believes that volunteers do not have the full picture and criticize them unfairly. They sometimes dispute the meaning of the facts or interpretations of photos as presented by volunteers or members of the public. In order to maintain their public image, shelters sometimes seek to restrict photography in order to ensure that no ­negative ­images (dirty or overcrowded housing, dead ­animals, etc.) are shown to the public and punish volunteers and rescues for critical speech. This type of restriction on expression presents obvious constitutional problems.