Problem #1: The Law Doesn't Step In Until It Is Too Late. This year, our Los Angeles community encountered a situation where a small 10-15 pound dog named Hailey was being mistreated in broad daylight. The act was recorded and sent to animal services, and the community was outraged. But to the thousands of viewers' deep dismay, there were no legal repercussions. Why? Under current California animal cruelty laws (California Penal Code § 597), enforcement or proper investigation requires immediate life-endangering acts to pets. Even then, witnesses are not considered without video or photo evidence to accompany their statement. Finally, the courts have not set a fixed standard for “unnecessary suffering”. 

Problem #2: Even The Rescued Aren't Safe. When animals are removed from abusive or neglectful situations, they enter a shelter system that is often operating with limited funding, limited land, limited staffing, and limited capacity. Shelters are expected to provide food, veterinary care, sanitation, behavioral support, exercise, enrichment, and safe housing often while caring for far more animals than their facilities were designed to accommodate. 

And there is another problem that is rarely addressed: 

Where are we building these shelters?

Too many animal shelters are designed primarily around kennels and buildings, with little dedicated natural space for the animals who may spend days, weeks, or even months there. A shelter dog should not have to spend its entire existence surrounded by concrete simply because the shelter was built without enough land.

Shelter design IS a fundamental part of humane animal welfare. 

Federal shelter funding should therefore support not only food, veterinary care, and staffing, but also the acquisition, preservation, and development of appropriate natural land where animals can walk, sniff, exercise, play, and experience the outdoors. We envision a future in which animal shelters are not isolated buildings surrounded by pavement, but humane animal-care campuses with grass, trees, open space, and dedicated outdoor enrichment areas.

America Is Being Cheap: $140 billion nationwide is generated from pet related income (According to the American Pet Products Association (2024)). California alone accounts for 36.8% U.S. pet-industry earnings. That's $16 billion annually that California alone pockets in earnings from pets. However, despite this immense economic value, only $30.35 million a year is budgeted towards animal care/safety in California. That's 0.19% of pet-revenue returned to pet welfare. Moreover, lack of set principles for general animal welfare effectively reduces and wastes that $30 million allocation.   

The Root Cause: The Federal Animal Welfare Act (1966) currently only protects animals in commercial and research contexts. On a state level, laws on animal abuse are minimal, narrowly defined, and messily fragmented between different statutes. The U.S. has no general federal duty of care for private ownership of animals.  The UK, on the other hand, via the Animal welfare Act of 2006, explicitly imposes proactive positive and clear legal duties of all vertebrate ownership: Citizens must take “reasonable steps” to meet an animal’s welfare needs, encourages proactive enforcement before severe harm, and violations of duty are offenses, enforceable by authorities (e.g. criminal or civil sanctions). 

The Ask
We're asking Congress to take two connected actions:

1. Amend the Federal Animal Welfare Act (1966): establish a federal duty of care similar to the UK for privately owned pets. This will extend its protections beyond commercial and research contexts for the first time, and codifying the "Five Freedoms" (freedom from hunger, discomfort, pain, injury, and distress) as a proactive legal duty, not just grounds for punishment after the fact.
2.  Make Natural Land Part of Shelter Welfare: federal shelter funding should specifically support the acquisition, leasing, preservation, and development of appropriate natural land for animal shelters. For new or substantially renovated publicly funded shelters, federal funding should incentivize sites that:

• Provide adequate dedicated land for outdoor exercise, enrichment, and natural behaviors
• Include substantial areas of grass or other appropriate living ground cover
• Be located adjacent to or integrated with appropriate public open space, parks, or preserved natural land where feasible
• Provide dogs with meaningful opportunities to walk, sniff, explore, exercise, and engage in species-appropriate behaviors.

Existing shelters should be eligible for grants to purchase or lease adjacent land, establish natural exercise areas, or create partnerships with parks and public-land agencies. We are not asking for shelters to be placed in environmentally sensitive wildlife habitat. We are asking for a national shift in how we think about shelter design: If we are going to take an animal into government custody, we should provide the land and environment necessary to care for that animal humanely.
 
A shelter is more than a building. Every animal deserves the opportunity to feel grass beneath its paws. Every companion animal deserves basic welfare protections. And every community should have the resources to provide them otherwise local governments have no business claiming responsibility over them. 

Give Them Grass.

Give Them Protection.

Give Them a chance at life.