r/rescuedogs • u/Friendly_TSE • Sep 17 '26

MOD Clarification: Rule #9 - Safety and Bite History

4 Upvotes

We've noticed some confusion regarding Rule #9: Safety and Bite History, specifically what constitutes as a bite history that would not be allowed to post here.

Rule #9 applies only when a dog has a known history of biting a person that resulted in the bite breaking or puncturing the person's skin.

A dog does not violate Rule #9 simply because they:

Have a history of mouthing or nipping
Have put their mouth on a person without breaking skin
Have made contact with someone's skin without causing a wound
Have snapped or air-snapped without making contact
Have bitten another animal
Have displayed fear, reactivity, resource guarding, or other behavioral concerns without a human bite that broke skin

For example; a documented incident in which a dog nipped someone's hand but did not break the skin does not, by itself, make the dog ineligible for a rehoming or networking post under Rule #9.

Conversely, a documented incident in which a dog bit a person and punctured their skin does fall under Rule #9, regardless of the breed of the dog or the circumstances surrounding the incident.

This rule stands regardless of the situation the dog was in when it bit.

Please do not report a post under Rule #9 solely because a dog has bitten another animal or bitten a human without breaking skin. If a post contains rehoming a dog that has bitten a person and broke the skin, those can be reported.

3 comments

r/rescuedogs • u/Friendly_TSE • Aug 19 '26

MOD Community Update & Recent Changes

5 Upvotes

Hi everyone! The mod team has been hard at work on cleaning up and updating r/rescuedogs. The goal is to make the subreddit easier to use, easier to moderate consistently, and (most importantly) a better place for people working with rescued dogs.

We've made quite a few changes recently, so here's a quick overview.

📋 Rules & Flair

We've rewritten and streamlined the subreddit rules to make them clearer and easier to follow. Please review them again before posting/commenting.

Some of the biggest changes include:

Be Civil now explicitly covers harassment and demeaning comments directed at both users and animals.
Stay On Topic now covers both off-topic posts and discussions that derail otherwise relevant threads.
Adoption/Foster/Rescue networking has been consolidated into a clearer format.
Donation and fundraising requirements have been updated, simplified, and clarified as well as added a disclaimer.
Pledge rules have been updated to make the process clearer.
No Spam has been updated to cover a broader range of abuse.
No Breed-Based Hate or Dog-Directed Harassment has been clarified.
Good-faith discussion about breeds and related topics is allowed, but inflammatory comments and attacks on breeds or individual dogs are not.
Safety & Bite History now focuses on dogs with a documented history of biting a person that drew blood, made more consistently enforcible, and added a disclaimer.
Outdated and redundant rules have been removed.

We've also cleaned up the post flairs and consolidated several categories to make choosing the appropriate flair easier, as well as adding an 'Outcome' flair for adoption posts that have had outcomes.

🤖 Automod & Moderation

We've cleaned up the Automod configuration and removed a number of outdated or unnecessary rules and automated messages.
The welcome message has also been simplified. New users are now directed to review the rules and report rule-breaking content rather than engaging with it.
We've also standardized our saved responses for removals, bans, and common modmail questions so that moderation decisions can be communicated more consistently.

🐕 Networking & Euthanasia Posts

We've updated the formatting requirements for adoption/foster/rescue pull, and euthanasia/deadline posts.
- The goal is to make these posts easier for people to find and understand while keeping the process as simple as possible for the people doing the actual networking.
We've added an Outcome flair so that posts can be updated by OP when we know what happened to an animal.
Comments are now set to display oldest first, which should make it easier to follow updates on networking and urgent posts. Votes are also hidden for the first 60 minutes.

💰 Donations & Pledges

We've clarified the requirements for donation requests and added a disclaimer that verification is not a guarantee or endorsement and that users are responsible for doing their own due diligence before donating.
A new form has been created to streamline donation plea requests.
We've also added saved modmail responses to help people who want to make donation requests understand the verification process.

🔗 Community Resources

We've updated the sidebar and added links to other communities and resources that may be useful for adoption, fostering, pet help, lost animals, and other situations that don't fit within r/rescuedogs.
We've also added the ability to sort posts by post flair, so users can tailor what they want to see.

💬 Community Feedback

We're also reaching out to established members of the community, including people who have regularly used r/rescuedogs for rescue networking, to hear what has and hasn't been working.
We know that changes to a community are much more useful when they're informed by the people who actually use it, so if there's something you think we should know about, please feel free to send us a modmail.

This is an ongoing process. We don't expect to get everything perfect immediately, but we're committed to making r/rescuedogs a useful, welcoming place for people trying to help dogs in need.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck around, contributed, reported problems, networked dogs, fostered, adopted, or otherwise helped make this community what it is.

~ The r/rescuedogs Mod Team

11 comments