"No Home for You!": Stats show Long Beach Shelter puts most animals in other shelters, not in homes

Most people think that shelter adopt out most of the animals in their care. However, that's not the case at Long Beach Animal Care Services.  Most animals at Long Beach Animal Care Services (nearly half) are transferred out to another shelter environment, which is stressful and dangerous for animals because they stay in a shelter environment where they can easily get sick and then are then euthanized. Only 26% go into homes (14% returned to their owner and an extremely small 12% adopted into homes - this number is incredibly small, compared to Sacramento, which adopts 45% of their animals into homes in addition to all of the other positive placements they do.) These numbers are extremely disappointing and when you look at the adoption numbers, LBACS is among the poorest performing shelters in California. 

Since Mayor Garcia was elected, the number of animals placed into shelters or rescue (the stressful situation) has increased 13% points. Adoptions, while the percentages appear to have increased, when you look at the actual number of animals who have been placed in homes, that number is so small as to be tragic. Only 682 animals were adopted into homes last year.

In another article in this paper, Mayor Garcia was quoted as saying that increasing live releases was his commitment. That's not accurate, either. In 2014, at a Town Hall Meeting, he told a over 200 people in the animal welfare community that he would increase adoptions and had hired a new adoption coordinator. That adoption coordinator has now been trained to do euthanasia. 

When publications make comments like this, it does a huge disservice to the shelter animals. Responsible journalism requires accuracy and investigation. We encourage the people of Long Beach to learn as much as they can about their animal shelter by researching data-based resources and then making up their own minds about the kind of shelter they want: One that is transparent and works hard to be No Kill, or one that hides behind politicians' rhetoric and cherry-picked statistics.