About this directory

A free, non-commercial directory of animal help in New York City. No ads, no tracking, no accounts. It exists because the information people need in a crisis is scattered across dozens of sites, and half of it is out of date.

What is in it

287 organizations: rescues, shelters, TNR groups, 24-hour emergency vets, low-cost clinics, wildlife rehabilitators, trap banks, hotlines and owner-support programmes, across all five boroughs. It covers cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, reptiles, small mammals, farm animals and wildlife.

What the confidence levels mean

High (109 entries)

The contact details were confirmed on the organization's own website on the date shown.

Medium (149 entries)

Confirmed through an authoritative listing — the city shelter's partner roster, a state licence register, a well-maintained referral directory — or the entry carries a caveat, such as being based outside the city.

Low (29 entries)

A real group, but reachable mainly through a social media account or a third-party directory. These are worth knowing about, and worth checking before you rely on them.

Confidence is about evidence, not quality. A small, excellent, one-person rescue that only uses Instagram is Low confidence; that is a statement about how firmly we could verify its contact details, not about the rescue.

Whether a group is still operating

That is tracked separately from confidence, because they are different problems. A well-verified group that has since shut down is more dangerous to a person in a hurry than a thinly-verified group that is thriving. 12 entries are currently flagged as closed, paused, moved out of the city, or needing confirmation, and each says so on its card.

Why entries say "confirm before relying on this"

Rescue contact details go stale fast. Volunteers move on, small groups fold quietly, and phone numbers get reassigned. Any entry that is Low confidence, flagged as not currently active, or that has not been verified in the last 90 days carries that reminder. It is not a warning about the organization — it is a reminder that this directory is a starting point, not a guarantee.

Privacy

Some of the research behind this site contained private individuals' phone numbers — a volunteer's mobile, a home line for a rehabilitator working out of their house. Those are withheld by default until the person confirms they want to be listed publicly. Where that leaves an entry without a direct contact, the entry says so.

The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and asks for nothing about you.

How it is kept current

An automated check will run every week against each organization's own website, looking for changed phone numbers and emails, dead domains, and language like "we have closed" or "not currently accepting intakes". It is deliberately cautious:

• A contact detail is only changed automatically when the new value appears on the organization's own site and the old one no longer does.
• Nothing is ever deleted automatically. Entries that fail repeatedly are flagged for a person to look at.
• Anything ambiguous is flagged rather than quietly overwritten.
• If a single run would change more than a small fraction of the directory, it changes nothing — that pattern means the checker broke, not that half of New York's rescues moved.

Every change is recorded, and shown below.

Recent changes

No automated changes yet — the weekly check has not run. Everything currently in the directory came from the initial research, verified in August 2026.

Report a problem

If an entry is wrong, out of date, or should not be here, say so. Every organization page has a "report it" link that opens a pre-filled issue with the entry already identified. You can also open one directly.

Reports go to a public issue tracker at btaylor62000-spec/nyc-animal-rescue, which means a report is visible to anyone, and needs a free GitHub account to file. That is the trade-off for running this with no server, no database and no cost: there is nowhere private to put a message, and adding one would mean either a bill or an inbox nobody reads. Please do not include anything you would not want public.

What it runs on

Static pages on Cloudflare's free tier, a small language model with a free daily allowance, and scheduled checks on GitHub. Nothing here can bill anyone: when an allowance runs out, the feature using it stops working rather than starting to charge. If the assistant is unavailable, the directory is unaffected — it is the part that matters, and it is just files.

Corrections and takedowns

If you run one of these organizations and want your entry changed or removed, open an issue and it will be done. Nothing here is scraped from anywhere that asked not to be.