Admittedly, I’ve straddled the world of animal welfare/rescue in several different ways since high school. I’ve served as a volunteer for two separate dog and cat animal shelters in Miami, interacted with and cared for rats, fish, turtles, geckos, birds, and capuchin monkeys as an animal enrichment volunteer at my undergraduate’s underground vivarium, volunteered with an animal welfare NGO and local wildlife rehabilitation center in Ecuador, worked at a PetSmart for half a year (which, as you can imagine, is the opposite of what I would call animal welfare/rescue except with the occasional local shelter adoption days), and inconsistently experimented with pescetarianism, vegetarianism, and even veganism to different extents for the sake of animals. Yet, I’ve also encountered problems and paradoxes in this realm of animal welfare/rescue and have been both dissatisfied by some of the methods used in such initiatives as well as my own experiences with people and narratives that “care more about the suffering of animals than about humans”, especially towards marginalized communities (Abrell 2021: 9). Thus, in reading Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care (2021), I could relate to Abrell’s positionality and discourse on sanctuaries. In the Introduction he states: “Exploring how the U.S. animal sanctuary movement functions as a microcosm of human efforts to care for others in the contemporary United States, this book interrogates two separate but inextricably linked meanings of sanctuary: sanctuary as a specific bounded place or state of being and sanctuary as an ideological/ethical mode of being” (Abrell 2021: 5). Throughout the Introduction and Chapter 1 “Coming to Sanctuary”, he explores this idea of sanctuary as well as other such as homo sacer/bestia sacer and ties it to historical and contemporary social issues affecting humans as well, such as the idea of Jews as homo sacer under Nazism and ‘sanctuary cities’ for undocumented immigrants in North America (see pages 41–42). Thus, I ask, what are the social consequences of admitting animals to the “political sphere” (Abrell 2021: 45)? How do we even begin to conceptualize a democratic systems where animals are afforded the same rights as citizens? Are these comparisons between animal welfare issues and human social issues effective and fair?