Rescue Matters: How to Find, Foster, and Rehome Companion Animals: A Guide…

How I wish I had this book when I started doing Border Collie rescue 18 years ago. Most people who go into rescue, do so wearing rose colored glasses. With topics like "the risk of fostering", "pitfalls of rescue work", and "burnout", this book arms the novice rescue person with the realities of the job prior to taking it on. The book also has sage advice for those people doing the organizing and for those in charge of fledgling organizations. How to find volunteers, get financial support, delegate responsibilities, handle the legal ramifications: all important subjects that few people understand when first starting to organize and they were admirably covered in this book. But for me, the most significant chapter in the book was "The Human Side of Rescue Work"--people skills. This was something I had not been able to master over the whole 15 years that I did rescue, so I was somewhat disappointed that this chapter was one of the smallest. However, author Sheila Boneham does cover other aspects of this topic in other chapters, for example, in the chapter "Volunteers, The Heart of Rescue", where she says "Trust your colleagues...Don't try to micromanage...Be as kind to people as you are to animals. Be slow to judge, avoid gossip, and shun 'shark fests'..." It's sage advice.

This is a "must-have" book for anyone thinking about starting or volunteering for any animal rescue program. ( )