In animal sheltering and protection, One Welfare initiatives include supporting people who have difficulty providing for their animals because of limitations in their physical or mental health, income or housing. However, little research has focused on the actual work that such initiatives involve for animal shelter staff and animal protection officers. We used institutional ethnography to explore how such work activities occur in frontline practices and to better understand how this work is coordinated. Methods included ethnographic observation of animal protection officers and animal shelter staff, document analysis, plus focus groups and interviews with staff, officers and managers. In cases where an animal’s care was deficient but did not meet the standard for legal intervention, officers provided people with supplies for their animals, referred them to low-cost or free veterinary care, and provided emergency animal boarding. This work was time-consuming and was sometimes done repeatedly without lasting effect. It was often constrained by animal owners’ limited housing, cognitive decline, mental health and other factors. Hence, improving the animal’s welfare in these ways was often difficult and uncertain. Although officers and animal shelter staff are increasingly expected to provide and record supports given to vulnerable owners, standard procedures and criteria for intervention have not yet evolved; hence the work is largely left to the judgement and ingenuity of personnel. In addition, the necessary collaboration between animal welfare workers and human social services staff (eg social workers, supportive-housing staff) is made difficult by the different expectations and different institutional processes governing such activities. Further work is needed to assess how meeting the needs of both animals and people could be strengthened in challenging situations. This might include sharing best practices among officers and further ethnographic analysis of animal protection services, how they interact with other services, and how One Welfare initiatives actually affect animal care. Institutional ethnography provides a way to study the organisational processes that shape and constrain care for animals, and its explicit focus on actual work processes provides insights that may be missed by other approaches.