Rescuing With Harm: What White Animal Welfare Organizations Need to Understand Before Going onto Reserves

by Nina Kolakovic

Parr, Hunting Scene with Four Large Figures and a Dog Team, c. 1961

I work in two worlds that most people keep separate: animal welfare and social work. I spend time with vulnerable people navigating broken systems. I spend time with volunteers who love animals deeply and would do almost anything to help them. These worlds have more in common than people think. They also share some of the same blind spots.

I know this because every time I open Facebook, I see it.

It is usually a photograph. A dead dog on a dirt road. An emaciated horse in a frozen field. A litter of puppies in a garbage bag. The caption below it almost always says the same things: which reserve it came from, how disgusting it is, how “these people” don’t deserve animals, how someone needs to go in and take them all. The post collects hundreds of shares. The comments are full of rage. The donation link is never far away.

I understand the grief behind those posts. I feel it too. The suffering in those photographs is real, and it deserves a real response.

But the response those posts generate is not real help. It is performance. And in my experience working across both sectors, that performance causes its own kind of harm, harm that falls, as it so often does, on communities that have already absorbed more than their share.

Two Worlds, One Pattern

When I began studying social work, one of the first things I learned was how to recognize the colonial logic embedded in helping systems. The idea that marginalized communities are broken, that outsiders must fix them, that the helper’s instincts are more trustworthy than the community’s own knowledge of itself, this pattern runs through the history of child welfare in Canada like a thread. It is the logic of the residential school system. It is the logic of the Sixties Scoop. It is still the logic of a child welfare system that continues to apprehend Indigenous children at devastating rates.

When I look at the Facebook posts about animals on reserves, I see the same pattern wearing a different vest.

The rescue organization arrives. The community is not consulted. The animals are removed. The organization is celebrated. The community is blamed. The photographs, taken without consent, framed for maximum outrage, circulate until the next fundraising cycle begins. And the systems that produced the suffering remain completely untouched.

Jefferess (2023) describes white saviorism not just as an individual attitude but as an institutionalized orientation, one that frames relations between privileged and marginalized groups as rescue rather than solidarity. Pallister-Wilkins (2021) goes further, arguing that humanitarianism itself has colonial roots, structured to consolidate white authority while dressing intervention as benevolence. I did not need those citations to recognize the pattern. I had already seen it play out in two different fields, in two different contexts, producing the same result: communities rendered voiceless in the story of their own lives.

The alternative is not inaction. It is a different kind of action, one that begins with the question: has anyone asked this community what they need? Genuine consultation means reaching out to band councils and community leaders before any intervention is planned, not after the truck is already loaded. It means being willing to hear “not yet” or “not like this” and respecting that answer.

The History Behind the Photograph

The photograph never shows the history. That is part of the problem.

Reserves in Canada were created to contain Indigenous peoples on small, resource-poor parcels of land after colonial governments seized the territories their nations had inhabited and stewarded for thousands of years. The Indian Act of 1876 extended sweeping federal control over nearly every aspect of reserve life, governance, land use, legal identity (Indigenous Foundations, n.d.; RCAANC, n.d.). This was not benign administration. It was the deliberate dismantling of economic self-sufficiency, of traditional governance, of the complex relationships between Indigenous communities and the animals and lands they had cared for across generations.

Then came residential schools. For over a century, children were forcibly removed from their families, forbidden from speaking their languages, punished for practicing their cultures. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) described the system plainly: it was a government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples. Generations of parents grew up without being parented. The transmission of knowledge, including knowledge of how to care for animals and land, was severed.

Intergenerational trauma is the name for what happens when that kind of harm echoes forward through families across decades. Bombay et al. (2014) provide substantial empirical evidence that familial residential school attendance continues to undermine the well-being of Indigenous populations today, through disrupted attachment, chronic stress, and a compounding of collective loss that does not simply resolve itself when the schools close.

The photograph shows the end of this chain. It does not show the chain. And a rescue movement that responds to the photograph without understanding the chain will keep arriving, keep removing, and keep leaving the chain intact.

The Legal Grey Zone Nobody Talks About

There is something else the Facebook posts never mention: the rescuers often operate with no legal accountability whatsoever.

Provincial animal welfare legislation, the laws that govern SPCAs and animal cruelty enforcement, typically does not apply on federal reserve land. Reserves fall under federal jurisdiction. There is no consistent federal framework for animal welfare enforcement. As Forbes (2013) documents, this creates a legal grey zone in which outside organizations can arrive on reserve land, remove animals, film community members, and publish that footage, all with almost no formal oversight.

This is not a technicality. It is a structural power imbalance. A community that has been subjected to generations of unauthorized removal, of children, of land, of cultural practice, has limited recourse when an organization arrives to take their animals and then fundraises off the images. Provincial SPCAs may have no jurisdiction to act on reserves, but they also have no jurisdiction to regulate the organizations operating there. The community can object. But there is rarely a formal mechanism for that objection to mean anything.

In my social work training, we talk about structural violence, the ways in which systems, rather than individual actors, produce harm. This jurisdictional gap is structural violence. It is a hole in the law that has never been prioritized for closing because the people most harmed by it have never had enough political power to force the issue.

White rescue organizations that want to operate ethically have a role to play here that goes beyond individual interactions. Advocating loudly and publicly for a federal animal welfare framework that includes reserve lands, and that centres Indigenous community voices in its design, is meaningful work that most organizations have never thought to take on. Writing to MPs, supporting Indigenous-led policy advocacy, and refusing to exploit the jurisdictional gap for easy rescues are all concrete steps toward accountability.

What Trauma-Informed Practice Actually Asks of Us

Trauma-informed care is a framework I encounter constantly in my social work training. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, 2014) defines it through six core principles: safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration and mutuality, empowerment and choice, and cultural and historical sensitivity.

I have never seen those principles applied in one of those Facebook posts.

Trauma-informed practice, applied to animal welfare work in Indigenous communities, would mean asking entirely different questions before getting in the truck. It would mean asking: What does this community say it needs? What has already been tried? What specific barriers, geographic isolation, no local vet, no spay-neuter access, no funding, are driving this situation? What would it look like for this community to lead the solution?

It would mean recognizing that a community whose children were taken by outside authorities, whose land was taken by outside governments, and whose animals are now being taken by outside organizations may have reasons for distrust that have nothing to do with not caring about animals, and everything to do with a very reasonable and historically grounded wariness of outsiders who arrive certain they know best.

It would mean showing up without a trailer. Listening before acting. Understanding that care, for animals, for people, exists inside relationships, and that those relationships cannot be extracted from their context.

In practice, culturally safe animal welfare work looks like investing in long-term relationships with communities rather than one-time interventions. It looks like training volunteers in Indigenous history and trauma-informed approaches before they interact with community members, not as a box-ticking exercise, but as a genuine prerequisite. It looks like following the community’s lead on timing, methods, and messaging at every stage.

What I Know from Both Sides

I have seen what genuine animal welfare partnership looks like. I have seen volunteers give their weekends not to dramatic rescues but to the slow, unglamorous work of providing services where they are needed: mobile vet clinics, spay and neuter programs built in collaboration with community members, not imposed on them. I have seen what it looks like when the goal is to leave a community more resourced than you found it, rather than to leave with animals and a story.

That work does not generate the same Facebook engagement. There are no grim photographs, no villains, no dramatic rescues. There is just a community with better access to veterinary care than it had before, and animals whose suffering was prevented rather than documented.

And I have seen, in my social work training and practice, what it costs communities to have their suffering treated as content. To be reduced, repeatedly, to the worst photograph someone could take on the worst day. To be held collectively responsible for conditions that were designed and imposed from outside. To have outsiders arrive with certainty and leave with whatever they came for, while the structures that produced the crisis remain untouched.

These are not separate problems. They are the same problem. And they will not be solved by more dramatic rescues.

What White Rescue Organizations Can Actually Do

Criticism without direction is easy. So let me be direct about what better looks like, because I do not think most people in animal welfare are beyond it, I think they have just never been asked to think this way before.

The first and most important step is community consultation, before any plan is made, before any trip is organized, before any social media post is drafted. This means contacting the band council or designated community representatives and asking, plainly: what do you need, and how can we support it? It means accepting that the community’s answer may not look like a dramatic rescue, and being willing to fund and facilitate what is asked for rather than what feels most satisfying from the outside.

The second is investing in preventative infrastructure rather than reactive removal. The single most effective intervention for animal welfare on reserves is accessible, affordable spay and neuter services. Mobile veterinary clinics that travel to communities on a regular schedule, not in response to a crisis, but as a sustained commitment, address the root cause of overpopulation before it becomes the photograph. These programs cost money and require long-term organizational commitment. They are less photogenic than a rescue. They work.

The third is using whatever organizational platform and political access rescue organizations have to advocate for jurisdictional reform. There is no good reason why a consistent federal animal welfare framework has not been developed for reserve lands. There is every reason for well-resourced organizations with donor bases and media connections to push for one, loudly, persistently, and in explicit solidarity with Indigenous communities rather than over their heads.

The fourth is the hardest: honest self-examination of how your organization talks about Indigenous communities online. What language does your social media use? Who is centred in the story, the rescuers or the community? Are photographs of suffering animals on reserves published with community consent? Is the caption framing the community as the problem, or is it naming the systemic conditions that produced the crisis? These are not rhetorical questions. They have answers, and those answers matter.

None of this requires abandoning care for animals. It requires redirecting it, away from performance and toward partnership, away from extraction and toward investment, away from the story that feels good and toward the one that is true.

The Question the Post Never Asks

The next time you see one of those photographs, the dead animal, the reserve named in the caption, the language blaming the people who live there, I want to invite you to pause before you share it.

Ask who benefits from the story being told this way.

Not the community, whose reputation is damaged and whose agency is once again erased. Not the animals, whose suffering is used as fundraising content rather than addressed through systemic change. Not the truth, which is far more complicated than any photograph can hold.

The suffering is real. It demands a response. But a real response means funding Indigenous-led animal welfare initiatives. It means advocating for the jurisdictional reforms that would bring accountability to outside organizations operating on reserve land. It means directing resources toward spay and neuter access, mobile veterinary clinics, and community-designed programs, not toward organizations whose primary product is outrage.

It means being honest about what those posts are really doing: making the person who shares them feel like they care, while leaving every single condition that produced the suffering completely intact.

Caring about animals and understanding colonialism are not separate commitments. In this country, you cannot do one well without the other.

Editor’s Note: Save Rez Dogs

If this article moved you to act, the most important thing you can do right now is follow and support Save Rez Dogs.

Founded in 2016 by Leah Arcand, a nehiyaw iskwew from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Save Rez Dogs is exactly the kind of Indigenous-led movement this article is calling for. It began while Leah was teaching a land-based program on Thunderchild First Nation, what started as a hashtag became a decolonial call to action. Since 2019, the organization has raised over $90,000, helped more than 500 dogs and families through emergency aid, spay/neuter support, and supplies, and built a grassroots community across Turtle Island.

Critically, Save Rez Dogs is not a frontline rescue, and they are clear about that distinction. They are a movement. They advocate, educate, and work to shift the systems that produce the conditions we see in those Facebook posts. Their framing says it plainly: rez dogs are relatives, not problems. The goal is prevention before intervention, and sovereign solutions over colonial responses.

They offer presentations, workshops, and consultations on rez dog advocacy in cultural and historical context, community dog management planning, and how to decolonize animal welfare practice. If your organization works in this space, or wants to, booking a presentation with Save Rez Dogs is one of the most concrete steps you can take toward doing this work better.

You can find them at saverezdogs.com, follow them on Instagram and Facebook at @SaveRezDogs, or reach them directly at saverezdogs@gmail.com. Their merch line also directly funds the movement.

References

Bombay, A., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2014). The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 320–338. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461513503380

Forbes, R. (2013). Creating legal space for animal-Indigenous relationships. UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies, 17, 27–33. https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/37680

Indigenous Foundations. (n.d.). Reserves. University of British Columbia. https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/reserves/

Jefferess, D. (2023). Humanitarianism and white saviors. In J. Ravulo, K. Olcoń, T. Dune, A. Workman, & P. Liamputtong (Eds.), Handbook of critical whiteness. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1612-0_61-1

Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2021). Saving the souls of white folk: Humanitarianism as white supremacy. Security Dialogue, 52(3), 257–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024419

Royal Canadian Academy of Sciences [RCAANC]. (n.d.). First Nations in Canada. Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1307460755710/1536862806124

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA]. (2014). SAMHSA’s concept of trauma and guidance for a trauma-informed approach (HHS Publication No. SMA 14-4884). U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.samhsa.gov/mental-health/trauma-violence/trauma-informed-approaches-programs

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC]. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2015/trc/IR4-7-2015-eng.pd