Nathan Winograd
This Week in Animal Protection
Rescue is what happens when you are busy making other plans
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Rescue is what happens when you are busy making other plans

In this podcast, Jennifer and I have a conversation about rescuing animals in need of help and how we always seem to come across them when we are running late, on vacation, or simply take a wrong turn.

Often, it starts with seeing something on the side of the road and one of us asking, “what was that?” before turning the car around to do what we call the “double check.”

We also talk about how rescuers can feel isolated in a world that seems indifferent to the suffering of our fellow earthlings, like when an animal clearly needs help but others don’t stop to offer it. Thankfully, our numbers are growing and that is increasingly becoming rare.

The conversation is fun and upbeat. Please join us.

After seeing this on the side of the road and doing a ‘double check,’ it turned out to be nothing more than a piece of bark a dog had peed on. But sometimes the double check turns out to be an animal in need of help and that usually happens when you are running late, on vacation, or simply take a wrong turn.

My sister was once driving with her then boyfriend when she thought she saw a squirrel in the road. She asked him to turn around and go back to make sure the squirrel was ok. He said he didn’t want to. She later told me she knew right then that he wasn’t the guy for her.

In our family, we call it the “double check.”

It happens to Jennifer and I, a lot — seeing phantom injured animals along the road side that require a closer look. "What was that?" one of us will ask. And we always go back and check. Most of the time, the phantom turns out to be nothing — a shoe, or a crumpled bit of paper or a piece of garbage — and we can go back about our business, grateful and relieved to know there is nothing more to worry about. Sometimes, however, it is an animal — an injured pigeon, a lost dog, a sick cat.

If you ever wonder, “How do you know when you have met the one?” Our answer is pretty simple and straightforward: “Are they always willing to do the double check?”

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Nathan Winograd
This Week in Animal Protection
For full episodes, visit nathanwinograd.substack.com/podcast. The 90% nationwide decline in shelter killing has been called “the single greatest success of the modern animal protection movement.” Join attorney, journalist, No Kill pioneer, and award-winning writer Nathan Winograd, who was at the center of that success — including creating the first No Kill community in the United States — on “This Week in Animal Protection.” Nathan and Jennifer, his wife and co-author, discuss animal sheltering, veganism, wildlife protection, companion animals issues, and more. Informative, engaging, and untethered from corporate “animal welfare” interests, they cover crucial issues in animal rights that no one else is talking about in ways that no one else is talking about them.