Legal
Terms of use
The rules of using this guide: quoting, liability, and what the pages are not.
Using the guide
The pages of this site are free to read, with no account and no payment, and they may be used by anyone: a volunteer, a shelter, a teacher, a reader deciding what to do with a Saturday. Print them, hand them out at an induction, read them aloud in a briefing. Nothing here needs our permission to be useful.
Use them as a starting point and not as an instruction that overrides the people in front of you. Every shelter has rules that come from its own building, its own insurance and its own incidents, and where this guide and a shelter disagree about how something is done there, the shelter is right.
Quoting and linking
Quote what you need, and link to the page you took it from so a reader can see the context and the date. That is the only thing we ask, and it is asked for the reader's sake rather than ours: advice about handling animals ages, and a quotation with no source cannot be checked when it does.
Do not republish whole pages as if they were your own, and do not reproduce them with the meaning altered. Reusing a checklist inside your own volunteer handbook is fine and welcome; presenting an edited version under another name is not, particularly where the edit removes a safety point.
The photographs on this site are made for it and are not offered for reuse. If you want to illustrate your own material, write to the desk and say what you need rather than lifting the file.
What the pages are not
They are not veterinary advice. Anything about a dog's health, medication, diet or pain belongs to a vet who has examined the animal, and no page can substitute for that.
They are not behavioural advice for your own dog. The guides here describe working inside a shelter's programme, under its staff and its method, which is a different thing from training an animal in your home.
They are not legal advice, and they are deliberately careful about this. Rules on strays, found animals, holding periods, transport and identification differ by country and sometimes by town, so the pages describe the shape of the obligation and send you to the authority that actually holds it.
Finally, they are written with care and they can still be wrong. We correct errors rather than quietly editing them away, as described in the editorial policy, and the fastest way to make that happen is the contact page.