This is Girl Person. I have been involved in animal rescue for fifteen years. I have walked into shelters across the United States and met dogs behind kennel doors who were terrified, excited, shut down, hopeful, loud, quiet and everything in between. I thought I knew what it felt like to arrive at an animal shelter. And then we went to one in Como, Italy.
The first thing I noticed wasn’t the buildings or the kennels or even how many dogs were there. It was the dogs coming back from their walks. We had just arrived at Parco Canile Valbasca, operated by the Como section of ENPA, Italy’s national animal-protection organization, and volunteers were outside walking shelter dogs. As the dogs came back, I noticed something that stopped me. They wanted to go back in. There wasn’t the hesitation I expected. They weren’t planting four paws into the ground and begging for another five minutes outside. They knew where they were going, and they walked back toward the shelter willingly. Back to their kennels, back to the people they knew and back to a place that, although it wasn’t their home, had become somewhere they felt safe.
That stayed with me for the entire visit because I want to be very clear about something: these dogs need homes. A shelter, even a very good shelter, cannot replace having your own person, your own couch, your own kitchen to supervise and your own place in a family. Adoption is the goal. But there is a huge difference between needing a home and being unsafe while you wait for one, and what we saw at Valbasca were dogs who still needed families but seemed to understand that, for right now, they were safe.
We watched their bodies when workers and volunteers approached. We watched tails wag. We watched dogs recognize people and people recognize dogs. There were relationships there, and I think you can learn a lot about an animal shelter by watching the dogs when nobody is asking them to perform for a camera. The dogs seemed to be telling us, I know these people. I know this place. I’m okay here. Maybe that is one of the greatest things a shelter can give an animal while that animal waits for something better: the knowledge that today, at least, they are safe.
What We Saw In Como
Parco Canile Valbasca has been operating in its current facility since 2009 and says it can accommodate approximately 100 dogs. It takes in abandoned dogs from numerous municipalities in the Province of Como and provides housing, veterinary care and other services while trying to find families for them. What struck me wasn’t simply the physical shelter, though. It was how the space was being used and how the dogs interacted with it.
The dogs had protected areas as well as access to outside areas, and there were spaces for exercise. I started researching this after our visit because I wanted to understand whether what we saw was simply how this particular shelter operated or whether there were actual standards behind it. The answer was interesting. Animal-welfare regulation in Italy involves national law as well as regional rules, so it would not be accurate to say every shelter everywhere in Italy is legally required to look exactly the same. Como, however, is in Lombardy, and Lombardy’s regulations for refuge kennels require dog housing to include a closed portion and an uncovered portion. The regulations also address things such as ventilation, lighting, temperature and exercise.
Think about that from a dog’s perspective. Somewhere to retreat, somewhere to rest, somewhere to be outside and somewhere to move gives an animal some degree of choice. Choice might sound like a small thing until you remember that a shelter dog has already lost so many choices. They didn’t choose to lose their family. They didn’t choose to be abandoned. They didn’t choose the kennel or the circumstances that brought them there. Giving them choices about where they rest, where they stand and whether they want a little separation from what is happening around them can matter. Suddenly those regulations weren’t just words written on a government page anymore. We had watched dogs come back from their walks and willingly go inside.
What Italy And America Can Learn From Each Other
I don’t want this to turn into “Italy does animal rescue right and America does it wrong,” because that isn’t true and it isn’t fair. There are extraordinary shelters and rescue organizations throughout the United States, staffed by people doing nearly impossible jobs with too few people, too little money and too many animals coming through the doors. There are shelters struggling with overcrowding, outdated facilities and enormous community needs. Italy has its own problems too. There are homeless animals here. There are abandoned animals here. There are dogs sitting in kennels waiting for families here. The fact that we were standing in an Italian shelter filled with dogs needing homes proves that no country has solved animal rescue.
But the systems are different, and that’s exactly why we should look at each other instead of automatically assuming that the way we have always done something is the only way to do it. In the United States, shelter requirements can vary considerably by state and locality. Modern American shelter-welfare recommendations increasingly emphasize many of the same things we noticed in Como: adequate space, enrichment, behavioral health, exercise and housing that gives animals greater choice and complexity.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t be which country does animal rescue better? Maybe the better question is what can we learn from each other? What is happening at a shelter in Como that someone running a shelter in Florida, North Carolina, California or anywhere else could use? What is an American rescue doing brilliantly that could help someone in Italy? What happens if we stop defending “our way” long enough to look at another way? Dogs don’t know countries. They don’t know they’re Italian dogs or American dogs. They know whether they’re hungry, whether they’re frightened, whether someone is kind to them, whether they have room to move, and they absolutely know who makes them feel safe.
The Tails Told Us Something
One of the things I couldn’t stop noticing was the tails. When volunteers and workers approached the dogs, tails wagged. That might seem like a tiny observation, but I don’t think it is. Buildings can be beautiful, websites can be impressive and policies can look wonderful on paper, but the animals live the reality of an organization every single day. Watching how an animal responds to the people who routinely care for them tells you something that a brochure never could.
We saw familiarity and relationships. We saw dogs who absolutely deserved families of their own, but I didn’t feel as though their entire existence was suspended until somebody adopted them. They were living while they waited. That distinction matters to me because animal rescue shouldn’t only be about getting a dog out of a shelter. It should also be about making that dog’s life worth living today, tomorrow and every day until the right person finally walks through the door.
For fifteen years, our mission with 2 Traveling Dogs has been to Make Rescues The Breed Of Choice. The longer I do this, the more I realize rescue isn’t only about taking dogs out of shelters. It’s about asking harder questions. How do we make their lives better while they’re there? How do we help the people caring for them? How do we tell their individual stories instead of allowing them to become kennel numbers? How do we take something that works in Como and show it to someone in America, and how do we bring great ideas from America somewhere else? Animal rescue shouldn’t have borders, and neither should good ideas.
Now We Have To Ask What Is Real
There is another reason I believe going to shelters ourselves and showing you what we actually see has become more important than ever. Artificial intelligence is changing animal rescue on social media, and not always for the better. AI-generated animals, altered photographs and completely fabricated “rescue” videos are now mixed into the same feeds where legitimate shelters and rescue organizations are desperately trying to tell the stories of real animals. Scammers have even used stolen or AI-generated animal imagery when soliciting money.
That creates a much bigger problem than one fake picture or one fake video. Eventually, people stop knowing what to believe. They see a dog supposedly pulled from a river or rescued from some impossible situation and wonder whether it actually happened. They see an emotional fundraising post and wonder whether the animal even exists. Compassion starts being manipulated for clicks, and when people become suspicious of everything they see, legitimate rescue organizations and real dogs can pay the price.
That’s why I believe what we do matters even more now. We went there. We walked through this shelter. We talked to the people doing the work. We met the dogs. We watched them with the volunteers and filmed what we saw. We watched their tails, watched them leave for walks and watched them return. We don’t need to manufacture a sadder dog with AI because sadness gets more clicks. I want to show you the real dog standing in the real kennel and tell you who that dog actually is.
Out of everything we saw that day in Como, the image I carried away with me was incredibly simple: a shelter dog wanting to go back inside. Not because a shelter is better than a home. It isn’t. Not because that dog shouldn’t be adopted. That dog absolutely should be. But because somebody had managed to make a place that wasn’t home feel safe until home comes. There is a difference, and every shelter dog deserves that difference.
Help Us Keep Showing You What Is Real
This kind of work costs money. Every single day, working to share and help rescues on socials media, traveling to shelters, meeting the people doing the work, documenting what we actually see, producing videos and articles and finding better ways to tell individual rescue dogs’ stories takes time and resources. No. We aren’t paid to do this. As we prepare for our next chapter back in the United States, we want to take everything fifteen years of 2 Traveling Dogs has taught us, everything we learned from this visit in Como and everything we continue to learn and turn it into something bigger.
But we cannot do that without the 2 Traveling Dogs family. Support is down at exactly the time we’re trying to expand this work. If you believe there is still value in showing up in person, looking a rescue dog in the eyes, talking to the people who care for that dog and showing you what is actually real, please help us continue.
Join us on Patreon for $5 a month: www.patreon.com/2travelingdogsrescue
Help with necessities: www.tinyurl.com/2tdnecessities
Venmo: travelingdogs2
Zelle: rachael@2travelingdogs.com
Most importantly, keep watching, sharing the real dogs and supporting legitimate shelters and rescues doing the work when nobody is filming. Maybe the future of animal rescue isn’t another heartbreaking viral post. Maybe sometimes it starts with paying attention to something much quieter: a dog coming back from a walk, seeing the shelter door ahead of him and willingly walking back inside.
Because home is still the goal. But until home comes, safe matters too.
Make Rescues The Breed Of Choice.
