Collection
Kind things to do for animals
Most kindness toward animals fails on knowledge rather than willingness. People would happily bang the hood of the car on a cold morning if anybody had ever told them why, and would leave the corner of the garden unmown if they knew that tidiness is the expensive part.
So these are weighted toward the things that are cheap, effective and obscure, rather than the things that feel like caring.
8 things you can do
In roughly the order they tend to be needed.
Ten seconds, and the reason to do it is known to vets and almost nobody else.
Check under the car before you drive off in winter
Cats sleep against warm engines and inside wheel arches. Ten seconds and a bang on the hood.
5 minutesFreeAn animal
Works within hours. Birds find it the same day.
Put water out in a heatwave
A shallow dish at ground level, refilled daily. In a dry week it is the difference between a bird surviving the afternoon and not.
5 minutesFreeAn animal
Kindness by omission: stop mowing and stop tidying.
Let one corner of it go wild
Stop mowing a square yard. Leave the log where it fell. Neatness is the expensive part, for everything that is not you.
5 minutesFreeAn animal
The road you know best is the one you drive least carefully.
Slow down at dusk, where the road meets the fields
Most animals are hit in the half hour either side of dark, on roads people know well enough to stop concentrating on.
5 minutesFreeAn animal
Help for two, and unusually easy for a proud person to accept.
Walk the dog of somebody who cannot
After surgery, during a bad stretch, or in the weeks after a bereavement. The dog is often the thing they are most worried about.
Half an hourFreeAn animal
Knowing when not to act. The commonest well-meant harm done to birds.
Leave the fledgling where it is
A feathered bird hopping on the ground is not abandoned. Picking it up is usually the thing that kills it.
5 minutesFreeAn animal
A few weeks in late spring, when young birds are briefly defenseless.
Keep the cat in at dawn during nesting season
Fledglings leave the nest unable to fly properly for about a fortnight. Dawn is when both cats and birds are busiest.
5 minutesUnder $10An animal
Rehoming turns on the photograph. A good one is worth weeks of waiting.
Take decent photographs for an animal rescue
Shelter animals are rehomed on the strength of a phone snap in a concrete run. A good photograph is worth weeks.
An afternoonFreeAn animal