Tiny Dog Rescue
Our mission
To rescue, heal, and responsibly place vulnerable small dogs while strengthening the communities that care for them.
About Tiny Dog Rescue
A national promise: no small dog left behind.
Tiny Dog Rescue is a U.S.-based nonprofit advancing safety, health, and lasting homes for small dogs who need them most. We pair local compassion with national infrastructure so care can move quickly, responsibly, and where it is most needed.
Tiny Dog Rescue
Our vision
A country where every small dog is safe, seen, and supported — and every family has access to trustworthy humane care.
Tiny Dog Rescue
Our values
Dignity for animals, evidence-informed care, local partnership, responsible stewardship, and compassion that lasts.
How we began
It started with a spreadsheet and eleven dogs.
In 2011 a commercial breeding facility in central Missouri closed with sixty-three dogs still inside. Four volunteers with three minivans took eleven of them; the rest were split between shelters that had no room and said yes anyway. Two of those shelters stopped taking intake for a month afterward.
What became obvious that week was not that people lacked compassion. It was that compassion had no infrastructure behind it — no shared transport, no surge veterinary capacity, no way to move a dog from a county with none of those things to a county with all of them.
Tiny Dog Rescue was built to be that infrastructure. Fifteen years on, we operate in 42 communities, fund clinical care that local budgets cannot absorb, and hold a standing commitment to take a dog back for the length of its life.
What guides the work
Five commitments we hold ourselves to.
These are the standards our partners can hold us to, and the ones we ask of the organizations we fund.
01
A dog is never a statistic
Every intake carries a named record: history, medical findings, behavior notes, and the reason a placement decision was made.
02
Treatment decisions are clinical
Veterinary judgment, not budget or optics, determines the course of care. Cost is our problem to solve, not the animal’s.
03
Local partners lead
We supply capacity and funding. The people who know a community make the calls inside it.
04
Placement is for life
Any dog we place can come back to us at any age, for any reason, without cost or judgment.
05
Prevention counts as rescue
A spay surgery or a retention grant that keeps a dog out of intake is a full success, not a lesser one.
How we are governed
Accountable to the dogs, and to everyone who funds them.
We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit directed by an eleven-member volunteer board with standing committees for finance, program quality, and animal welfare. No member of the board draws compensation from the organization.
Program outcomes are reviewed quarterly against published targets, and our financial statements are audited each year by an independent firm. Where we miss a target, we say so in the same report where we would have claimed it.
Read our accountability report →