Rescue Me Review

Wednesday, July 16th

2025 Pet Adoption Site Reviews

Rescue Me

• Offers a wide range of animals for adoption, including dogs, cats, horses, and more
• Search results are presented by state, providing a broad overview of available pets
• Offers the ability to sign up for Rescue Alert notifications for new pet listings
• Prioritizes urgent situations, highlighting pets in high-kill shelters

Rescue Me is an animal welfare network with an interesting backstory. It was created by Jeff Gold, who also founded an early entertainment and chatroom website that was later acquired by Disney. On Rescue Me, you'll find a range of animals listed, including dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, farm animals, small mammals, reptiles, pet birds, wildlife, and wild birds. Just note that some of these categories might not have many animals listed.

Connects you with shelters and rescues

Rescue Me has a poor rating on the Better Business Bureau for not responding to a few customer complaints, but you don't need to worry about this. All of the complaints are from users who did not understand that Rescue Me acts as a referral service, and isn't liable for bad experiences users have with animals or the people who list them. As long as you do your research and communicate with the shelter or rescue, you'll be fine.

Results by state, not zip code

To get started, click on "View Animals for Adoption” and select the kind of animal you're looking for. If you're looking to adopt a dog, you can choose a specific breed, "just mutts”, or view all dogs. Then you'll see a map of the US showing how many animals matching your search are in that state. This may not be the most effective way to see which pets are near you. After all, maybe you live on the border of one or more other states, and you want to see animals within a 50 mile radius. Where other sites let you do this by having you enter your zip code and filter by radius, with Rescue Me, you'd have to wade through results for each state separately.

Sign up for Rescue Alert notifications

If there aren't any animals listed in your area, especially if you're looking for one of a specific breed, you can register to get Rescue Alert notifications when new listings are posted. If you're looking for a Pet Adoption Site to list your own pet, this feature will work wonderfully in your favor, too. On Rescue Me's "Success Stories” page, you can read testimonials from happy customers who, within hours of listing their dogs, had several applications come in, including difficult situations like 3 bonded Yorkies and an elderly dog with a broken hip. These testimonials are several years old, though, so it may be a good idea to post your listing on a few other sites as well.

Rescue Me prioritizes urgent situations

There aren't as many options to filter your search on Rescue Me. If you're looking at dogs, you can only sort them to see female, male, or urgent situations first - which means they're in a high kill shelter and may be euthanized if not adopted soon. We're glad to see that Rescue Me pushes these dogs to the top of the results. There were some really lovely dogs there who deserve a second chance. However, we wished that Rescue Me offered the filters that other websites include, like age, temperament, how well they do with other animal family members, and whether they're up to date on their vaccinations.

Limited filtering capabilities = lower rating

Rescue Me is the only pet adoption website in our review that makes it easy to tell which dogs are most in need of your help, and we commend them for that. They're also one of few that includes listings of other kinds of pets than cats and dogs. However, they're missing some key filtering and sorting capabilities that we think are necessary for finding the right companion for your family. While this information can be found on individual pet profiles, it's not very efficient to have to click on each one to find it. We'd recommend you try one of our higher rated websites first if you have specific criteria for a new pet.