To combat the recent overcrowding issues at Los Angeles-run animal shelters, the city council voted Tuesday to place a temporary moratorium on issuing dog breeding permits in Los Angeles. The moratorium will remain in effect until the six city-owned shelters are at 75 percent kennel capacity or less in an attempt to alleviate a severe overcrowding problem.

As of Wednesday at 10:00 a.m., there are 1,567 dogs in Los Angeles shelters despite having just 737 kennels, and city controller Kenneth Mejia has highlighted this problem at shelters since his election in 2022. Mejia released the City Controller office’s first ever Los Angeles Animal Services Audit last March, which found that shelters were severely overcrowded to the point where euthanizing for space has begun to creep up as a possibility.

His office also was notedly outspoken about the recommendation by City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo to cut up to 2,000 vacant positions to combat the city’s financial issues. While the specific positions were not noted in the report from the City Administrative Office, the fact that many animals in L.A. shelters are not receiving necessary enrichment and kennels are not being cleaned due to understaffing issues in part caused by vacant positions was a key finding in the 2023 audit.

“Due to insufficient staffing, certified volunteers, and the overpopulation of dogs in our shelters, dogs may not be walked daily or for weeks,” last year’s audit read.

The Los Angeles Animal Services Department which runs city-owned shelters had 47 vacancies at the end of 2022 and increased to 54 as of the beginning of 2024.

First District Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez — who first presented the motion to introduce the moratorium — said that the overcrowding is a crisis on multiple levels in her remarks before votes on the item at Tuesday’s meeting.

“This is both an inflow and outflow problem,” Hernandez said. “We have too many animals coming into shelters and not enough being adopted or fostered.”

Despite this, Hernandez said that those looking to obtain a dog breeding license have few barriers preventing them from doing so, noting the city issued over 1,100 breeding permits in the first six months of 2023.

“There has been an influx of purebred dogs being dropped off at our shelters,” Hernandez said. “It is unacceptable for the city to continue issuing breeding permits while thousands of animals suffer from overcrowded conditions in our shelters.”

Hernandez also emphasized that this is only a start to the efforts required to solve the shelter overcrowding problem and give the animals that live there the dignity they deserve. She expressed hope that the conversation on shelter conditions would be revisited during budget meetings later in the year.

“This is far from the only action that we need to take…we cannot allow the animals in our care to suffer as a result of poor policy and budgeting decisions,” the councilwoman said.

Third and 11th District Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield and Traci Park also gave comments before the vote in support of the motion, reiterating Hernandez’s urgency regarding the shelter overcrowding problem.

“The impetus for this motion is to encourage people to adopt their pets from the shelters and stop going to the breeders,” Blumenfield said. “Our shelter animals often get a bad rap; there are wonderful mixed and pure breed [dogs] at the shelters that just need a good home.”

“We have to use every tool that we have available to us to bring our shelter population down to manageable levels,” Park said. “We need to take a hard look at all of our policies that may be contributing to these circumstances and ensure that Animal Services has the funding and the resources that it needs to care for the animals in their custody.”

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