Animal Rescuers For Change

Another tragic dog attack in California. Communities see more and more of these.

This was just posted in a local group, "caller sees man being attacked by a dog, male is bleeding, and yelling for help... Deputy on scene requesting additional units'.. "Possible fatality' ..

This incident was shared in a local community group, but many attacks involving people, pets, and packs of roaming dogs are never widely reported. They often remain local incidents, making it difficult to understand the true scope of the problem across our state.

California needs to wake up. Our companion animal crisis is worsening, and these incidents should not be viewed in isolation.

For years, Californians have been asking for common-sense solutions:

✔️ More affordable and accessible spay/neuter services to prevent unwanted litters.

✔️ Stronger enforcement against illegal and irresponsible breeding.

✔️ Statewide animal welfare data and transparency, so policymakers and the public can understand what's actually happening.

✔️ Better oversight and accountability across California's companion animal system.

Without comprehensive statewide data, we cannot accurately identify trends, measure unmet community needs, or direct resources where they are needed most. We often react after tragedies occur instead of preventing them.

Our thoughts are with the victim, their family, and everyone affected by this incident. We also hope it serves as another reminder that California needs to invest in prevention, transparency, and long-term systemic solutions—not just emergency responses after another heartbreaking event.

🚨 2016: The Data Went Dark. The Crisis Didn't.

🚨Until 2016, California knew how to count.

Every year, local animal shelters submitted data to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). Those annual reports included statewide and shelter-level information on:

dog and cat intake;
stray animals;
owner surrenders;
adoptions;
returns to owner;
transfers;
euthanasia;
animals that died in care;
and annual statistics for individual shelters.

🚨 California demonstrated that it could collect statewide shelter data.

Then, after the 2016 reporting year, the statewide shelter statistics disappeared.

The annual Rabies Surveillance Reports continued.

❌ The statewide shelter data did not.

California Is Flying Blind

❌ Today, California has no mandatory statewide shelter reporting system that provides legislators, researchers, or the public with a complete picture of what is happening across the state's publicly funded shelter system.

Instead, statewide discussions increasingly rely on voluntary datasets compiled by organizations such as Shelter Animals Count, Best Friends Animal Society, and UC Davis.

⚠️ Participation is voluntary.

❌ At best, these datasets represent only a portion of California's municipal shelters—often around 40–50% depending on the reporting year—and only a small fraction of California's more than 3,600 registered animal rescue nonprofit rescue organizations.

Ironically, California cannot even say with certainty how many municipal and publicly contracted shelters operate statewide because no official statewide registry exists.

That means legislators are often making statewide policy decisions without a complete statewide dataset.

➡️ What We Cannot See

👉 Without comprehensive statewide reporting, California cannot fully understand:

👉 where animals are moving after leaving public shelters;
👉 how many animals are transferred to each rescue organization;
👉 cumulative transfer patterns across multiple jurisdictions;
the long-term outcomes of transferred animals;
👉 how many animals rescues accept directly from the public because shelters cannot;
👉 how many California shelter animals are transported out of state each year—and what ultimately happens to them.

But without standardized reporting and animal traceability, California cannot answer basic questions such as:

⚠️ How many animals leave California each year?
⚠️ Which shelters are sending them?
⚠️ Which organizations receive them?
⚠️ What are the long-term outcomes?
⚠️ Are there emerging patterns that warrant attention?

Those questions should not be impossible to answer.

The Miranda Case

The Miranda Rescue investigation illustrates why this matters.

For years, multiple municipal shelters transferred animals to one rescue organization.

Community complaints were raised for years as well, and reportedly received no attention.

Yet there was no integrated statewide reporting system capable of identifying cumulative transfer patterns across jurisdictions.

The public remained largely unaware and continued sending animals.

The problem was not that records didn't exist.

Municipal shelters already maintained Animal IDs, intake records, and transfer records, as well as Rescue groups must adhere to Agricultural code.
👉🚨Food and Agricultural Code (FAC) Section 32003 mandates that public and private animal shelters keep accurate records on each animal impounded, including intake sources and outcomes.

The records existed.

👉🚨The system connecting them did not.

California Once Counted. California Can Count Again.

California has already demonstrated that statewide shelter reporting is possible.

Now it needs to rebuild that system—and modernize it.

A modern statewide transparency system should include:

standardized reporting from every municipal shelter;
integrated rescue outcome reporting;
animal-level traceability through existing Animal IDs;
managed-intake reporting;
community intakes by rescues diverting shelter intakes
standardized transfer reporting, including interstate transfers;
and one complete statewide database available to legislators and the public.

❌ 2016: The Data Went Dark. ❌

The crisis didn't.

It's time for California to start counting again.

🚨 What Creates Another Miranda?

The public conversation following the Miranda Rescue investigation has largely focused on one question:

How do we better regulate rescues?

But perhaps we should first ask another question:

What allowed Miranda to continue operating for years without the system recognizing what was happening?

The answer is not simply "a rescue failed."

The answer is California failed to build a transparent animal welfare system.

For years, multiple public shelters reportedly transferred hundreds of animals to Miranda Rescue. Is No-kill status benchmark more important, than knowing what actually happens after 'live-release' to thousands of animals?

Community members reportedly raised concerns to authorities for years, with no follow up actions.
Yet there was no statewide system allowing the public, legislators, or even other shelters to see the cumulative picture.

The public kept bringing and sending animals because the public had no way of knowing.

Data is already there. Shelters record transfers information, animal ID's but do not transparently publish statistics & where animal go. Food and Agricultural Code (FAC) Section 32003 mandates that public and private animal shelters keep accurate records on each animal impounded, including intake sources and outcomes.

California publishes no integrated statewide reports showing:

how many animals each municipal shelter transfers;
which rescue organizations receive those animals;
cumulative transfers across multiple shelters;
long-term outcomes after transfer.
how many animals rescues pick up from streets and rejected by shelters

Instead, each shelter sees only its own records.Many do not publish any operational statistics.

Each shelter, rescue maintains its own records.

No one sees the entire system.

That is not transparency. That is fragmentation.

🚨 Ironically, responsible rescue organizations have been asking the Legislature for years to solve exactly this problem.

Rescues are not asking to avoid accountability.

They are asking for meaningful accountability.

Last year's AB 631 required rescue organizations to publish aggregate numbers on their own websites.

During those discussions, rescue organizations coalition ARFC repeatedly raised these same concerns:

Rather than creating more than 3,600 separate reporting systems, we proposed allowing rescue organizations to submit standardized outcome data directly back to the originating municipal shelters, who have software, data management systems.

Shelters already maintain the official Animal IDs, intake records, and transfer records.

They are the only entities capable of connecting the entire life cycle of an animal after it enters the public shelter system.

One simple reporting portal. One statewide database.
One transparent system.

Instead, the proposal focused on website publication rather than integrated animal traceability.

Would Miranda have been identified simply because a rescue website reported:

Intake: 600
Adopted: 600

Of course not.

Those numbers reveal nothing about:

where those animals originated;
how many public shelters transferred them;
whether transfer patterns were unusual;
whether complaints were accumulating;
or what ultimately happened to individual animals.

Meanwhile, California's discussion has increasingly focused on regulating rescues.

Responsible rescues are not the agencies with statutory authority.

They do not investigate animal cruelty.

They do not license facilities.

They do not approve rescue partnerships.

They do not authorize transfers from municipal shelters.

They do not enforce state law.

Those responsibilities belong to public agencies.

When community complaints reportedly remain unresolved for years, when hundreds of animals continue moving through the system, and when the public remains unaware because no integrated reporting exists, that raises broader questions about system oversight, not simply rescue regulation.

Responsible rescues witness these problems every day.

We see increasing animal abandonment.
We see unethical operators.
We see community animals that shelters cannot accept because of managed-intake policies.

We see animals disappearing into reporting gaps.

That is precisely why rescue organizations continue asking for something remarkably simple:

Give 3600 California rescues a standardized reporting channel.

Allow shelters to reconcile those data through existing Animal IDs.

Generate one statewide transparency system.

Let legislators, communities, researchers, and the public finally see the complete picture.

Is that really too much to ask?

California's animals deserve a system where problems are identified before they become another Miranda—not years afterward, when volunteers are digging for answers that a transparent public system should have provided all along.

Transparency failures hid scale of transfers to Miranda’s Rescue “It is time that the state begin looking at prevention, as opposed to just building more and more and bigger and bigger shelters,” advocate Jennifer Raymond said. “We’ve got to turn off the tap.”

Is California's Shelter System Fragmented by Design?

Perhaps not intentionally.

But it has certainly been allowed to remain fragmented.

California's animal welfare system consists of more than 58 counties, hundreds of cities, municipal shelters, county shelters, contracted humane societies, nonprofit-operated municipal contracts, and joint-powers agencies. Yet California does not maintain a single comprehensive statewide registry identifying all publicly funded sheltering entities.

By comparison, IRS records identify more than 3,600 registered nonprofit animal rescue organizations operating in California.

Ironically, California can more easily identify its nonprofit rescues than it can identify every public shelter entrusted with taxpayer-funded animal control responsibilities.

Current estimates suggest California has roughly 200–300 municipal and contracted sheltering entities, but no official statewide roster exists. Even this basic question—"How many public shelters does California operate?"—cannot be answered with certainty.

Instead, each shelter has gradually developed its own:

rescue partnership criteria;
transfer policies;
reporting requirements;
data systems;
intake policies;
euthanasia protocols;
rescue applications;
foster programs;
operational practices.

There is no single statewide framework requiring these systems to work together, or use same basic standards.

As a result, California does not operate one coordinated animal shelter system.

It operates hundreds of independent systems.

Local flexibility certainly has value. Communities differ, and local governments should retain discretion over many operational decisions.

However, when it comes to statewide policymaking, disease surveillance, animal movement, rescue transfers, shelter capacity, or evaluating whether California's animal welfare system is improving or deteriorating, fragmentation becomes a significant weakness.

To compensate for the absence of a statewide reporting system, California often relies on voluntary third-party data aggregators. These organizations provide valuable public resources, but participation is optional. Their datasets represent only portions of California's sheltering system and at best include less than half of municipal shelters, with some of the state's largest, highest-intake public shelter systems not participating at all.

As a result:

legislators cannot see the complete statewide picture;
the public cannot accurately assess statewide trends;
researchers work from incomplete datasets;
rescue capacity cannot be fully evaluated;
managed-intake practices remain largely invisible;
statewide animal movement cannot be comprehensively tracked.

The Miranda case illustrates exactly why this matters.

Each shelter could see only its own transfers. Public had no idea of hundreds of animals transported by municipal systems to small rural group, with no capacity for care, or safe adoption options. Public kept taking their animals to same destination, having no clue, that it's over capacity. Multiple alerts/ complaints to look into the rescue - were reportedly not addresses for years.

No one could easily identify cumulative transfer patterns across multiple jurisdictions.

The same is true for:

managed intake;
rescue partnerships;
shelter capacity;
statewide animal movement;
disease surveillance;
and overall animal outcomes.

California has effectively created hundreds of independent decision-making systems without building the statewide infrastructure necessary to understand how those decisions affect the state as a whole.

The issue is therefore not whether local control should disappear.

The issue is that California has never built the statewide coordination layer above local control.

That is the missing piece.

If California can standardize reporting for hospitals, schools, public health, law enforcement, emergency management, and countless other publicly funded systems, why does one of the state's largest publicly funded animal welfare systems continue to operate without comparable statewide coordination?

California's animals—and the taxpayers who fund their care—deserve a system built on complete information rather than fragmented datasets.

California Doesn't Even Know Its Own Animal Shelter System

California has more than 3,600 registered nonprofit animal rescue organizations, according to IRS records.

Yet California does not maintain a comprehensive statewide roster of its own municipal animal shelters.

There is also no statewide public registry identifying private organizations operating taxpayer-funded municipal shelter contracts.

Think about that.

We can identify thousands of nonprofit rescues through public records.

But we cannot easily identify every publicly funded shelter operating in California.

Now ask yourself:

How many municipal shelters are there?
How many privately operated shelters receive taxpayer funding?
How many animals enter California's shelter system each year?
How many are denied intake through managed-intake policies?
How many are transferred to rescue organizations?
Which rescues receive those animals?
What ultimately happens to them?

California cannot answer these questions comprehensively today.

Instead, legislators and the public often rely on reports produced by voluntary third-party organizations.

Those reports represent only about 30–50% of California's municipal shelters, depending on the reporting organization and year and only a fraction of rescues. Many high-intake shelter systems do not participate at all.

That means policymakers are making decisions using only part of the picture.

Imagine trying to evaluate California's education system if only 40% of public schools voluntarily reported their data.

Or measuring public health if only some hospitals submitted statistics.

No one would accept that. Why should animal welfare be different?

Meanwhile, every municipal shelter creates its own partnership agreements, approval criteria, paperwork, reporting requirements, and rescue policies.

One rescue may spend months becoming an approved partner.

Another may be told, "You're not a partner," and be unable to save a euthanasia-listed animal.

Another organization may receive hundreds of animals year after year, with no follow up on animals wellbeing and whether they are even alive..

There is no uniform statewide framework.

No consistent standards.
No centralized registry.
No comprehensive transparency.

A statewide registry and licensing system—similar to those already used in states such as Georgia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and North Carolina—would not reduce accountability.

It would strengthen it. It would create:

✅ One transparent statewide registry.

✅ Clear, publicly available qualification standards.

✅ Consistent oversight.

✅ Reduced administrative duplication for shelters.

✅ Better protection for responsible rescue organizations.

✅ Greater confidence for the public.

Most importantly, it would allow California to see the entire system—not just fragments of it.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure.

You cannot improve what you cannot see.

California doesn't need more fragmented bureaucracy.

California needs one transparent, accountable animal welfare system.

California already licenses hospitals, child-care facilities, veterinary premises, contractors, and many other professions through statewide systems. Why shouldn't organizations entrusted with thousands of vulnerable animals each year operate under a similarly transparent statewide framework?