10/14/2026
We love you Casey Shonis
📣 A PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM OUR RESCUE PETS SERVING VETS FAMILY — PLEASE READ & SHARE ❤️🐾
For the past five years, Casey has been battling ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Throughout those five years, despite the challenges of this devastating and progressive disease, Casey has continued to run her rescue, save lives, coordinate adoptions, and fight for dogs who have no one else to fight for them.
Her compassion has reached far beyond Pennsylvania. Over the years, she has helped save dogs from overcrowded shelters and high-euthanasia areas in Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and beyond, working alongside rescue organizations, volunteers, and dedicated animal advocates across state lines.
Now, during one of the most difficult chapters of her life, we are hoping that same incredible rescue community will come together to help her.
Remarkably, even today, Casey is STILL running her rescue and continuing to help dogs in desperate need. ❤️🐾
Many of you have communicated with Casey over the years, whether you adopted a dog, fostered, volunteered, donated, or simply reached out about an animal in need. What many of you may not have known is just how much she has been fighting behind the scenes.
Casey lost her ability to speak years ago because of ALS. Despite that enormous challenge, she adapted and continued communicating through texting, answering messages, coordinating rescue efforts, and creating posts to help dogs find homes.
Now, as ALS progresses, she is experiencing increasing difficulty using her hands. The very tools that have allowed her to continue her rescue work and communicate with the world are becoming harder for her to use.
Casey wants everyone to know that she has also recently been enrolled in hospice care.
But even now, with everything she is facing, her heart remains with the dogs.
Her thoughts are not just about herself. They are about the animals still waiting—the dogs who need foster homes, the dogs who need rescue placement, and the dogs who deserve families of their own.
And Casey has one very special request.
🙏 PLEASE HELP HER FIND HOMES FOR THESE DOGS. 🙏
We are asking everyone who has ever adopted from her rescue, fostered, volunteered, donated, worked alongside her, or followed her journey to help spread this message.
🐾 SHARE THIS POST — Help us reach as many people, rescue organizations, and potential adopters as possible.
🐾 TAG PREVIOUS ADOPTERS — We would love for you to reconnect with the rescue, see the wonderful dogs currently waiting, and help spread the word.
🐾 CONSIDER FOSTERING — Even a temporary home can make an enormous difference and open the door for another life to be saved.
🐾 CONSIDER ADOPTING — There are wonderful dogs still waiting for someone to choose them and give them the loving homes they deserve.
🐾 HELP NETWORK THESE DOGS — One share, one tag, one phone call, or one conversation could change a dog’s life forever.
🐾 VOLUNTEER YOUR TIME — We urgently need additional hands to assist with networking, transportation, adoption outreach, events, administrative responsibilities, and other rescue needs.
We would especially love to welcome retired veterans who may be willing to share their time, skills, and experience. Whether you can help regularly or occasionally, your support could make a tremendous difference.
❤️ A SPECIAL APPEAL TO OUR FELLOW RESCUES AND ANIMAL WELFARE PARTNERS ❤️
To the rescue organizations, shelter partners, transporters, foster networks, and animal advocates who have worked alongside Casey over the years, we are asking you to come together for her now.
Casey has spent years answering pleas for help from Texas, Georgia, South Carolina, and other states where overcrowding and euthanasia remain heartbreaking realities.
She has stepped forward time and again to help dogs she had never met, often hundreds of miles away, simply because they needed someone to say yes.
Now we are asking those same rescue communities, and anyone else willing to help, to return that kindness.
If your organization can accept dogs into your rescue program, assist with foster placement, coordinate transfers, help with transportation, or connect us with qualified adopters, we would be deeply grateful.
We understand that rescues everywhere are overwhelmed, resources are stretched thin, and there are more animals in need than available homes.
But if every rescue that can help takes even one dog, or helps find placement for one dog, imagine what we could accomplish together.
This is a time for rescues to stand beside one another, share resources, and remember that we are all working toward the same goal—saving lives.
❤️ OUR TEXAS RESCUE FAMILY IS STEPPING UP HELPING US, TOO ❤️
Our sister rescue, Rescue Pets Serving Vets San Antonio, will continue too carry the torch for Casey. They are deeply involved in animal rescue and community outreach throughout the San Antonio area - we taught them how to “rescue”.
The rescue’s director was an editor initially with the FB page Saving San Antonio Dogs and served as an administrator during COVID for about 4 years - this is the avenue in which Casey met Jan; Casey would tag every dog Jan would post and that’s how it started - because of this union, Casey has saved over 2K dogs from Texas - mostly from the San Antonio Euthanasia room.
The Texas rescue is deeply interested and involved in rescue-related education for families and the animal-welfare community. They educate their community about the importance of vaccines, heartworms and distemper. They promote responsible pet ownership, responding to pleas from overwhelmed owners and other rescues in need. They providing free vaccinations when available and coordinate boarding and transportation when able. They have been successful bringing volunteers together to help people become better, as well as more informed dog owners.
Their volunteers also help build and repair fences, provide doghouses and straw, and improve backyard conditions to help prevent dogs from escaping by digging or jumping fences. They promote keeping dogs indoors and treating them as family members. With donated materials and labor, they have completely rebuilt fences for families in need.
Because rescue isn’t always about taking a dog away from a family. Sometimes it’s about giving that family the knowledge, resources, and support they need to keep their dog.
That is the heart of rescue, too.
Rescue Pets Serving Vets San Antonio is committed to helping carry Casey’s mission forward. They can also help connect individuals, volunteers, adopters, and rescue organizations interested in assisting Casey’s rescue in the Benton, Pennsylvania, area; reach out to Jan and her team in San Antonio for assistance.
Together, we want to build a network of people willing to step forward, share the responsibility, and make sure these dogs are not forgotten.
❤️ OUR COMMITMENT TO CASEY AND HER DOGS ❤️
Our goal is to see every one of these dogs safely placed into a loving foster home, reputable rescue program, or permanent family.
We understand that accomplishing this may take time. This is not something that will happen overnight, and we are not pretending otherwise.
But we are committed to seeing it through, for however long it takes.
Casey has a small group of dedicated people helping her, and her husband, a veterinarian, has always gone above and beyond for the rescue and the animals entrusted to their care.
But they cannot do this alone.
They need more hands, more foster homes, more rescue partners, more adopters, and more people willing to say, “How can I help?”
Every dog placed into a safe and loving home is one less dog Casey has to worry about.
And right now, that peace of mind would mean more to her than words could ever express.
Casey has devoted so much of her life to saving animals. Even as her physical abilities become increasingly limited, her determination, compassion, and commitment to these dogs have never wavered.
One of her greatest wishes is to see as many of these dogs as possible safely placed into loving foster and forever homes while she is still here to know they are safe.
We cannot change what ALS has taken from her.
We cannot give her back the ability to speak or make the simplest tasks easy again.
But together, we CAN help lift some of the weight she has carried for so many years.
We can help give her something that means the world to her:
The peace of knowing that the dogs she has fought so hard to save will continue to be protected, loved, and cared for.
Please don’t just scroll past this post.
SHARE IT. TAG SOMEONE. VOLUNTEER. FOSTER. ADOPT. REACH OUT TO ANOTHER RESCUE.
If Casey has ever helped you, your rescue, or a dog you loved, this is an opportunity to help her in return.
And even if you have never met Casey, you can still be part of making her wish a reality.
To everyone who has been part of this rescue family over the years, thank you. Your kindness, compassion, and support mean more now than ever.
❤️ For Casey. For the dogs. For the rescue community that refuses to give up. And for every life still waiting to be saved. 🐾
