The Constitution of Animal & Shelter Welfare
The Issue
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Read the Full Constitution below:
Preamble
✦ ✦ ✦
We, the undersigned citizens of the United States of America, recognizing that the welfare of animals in our care is a reflection of our collective character as a nation, do hereby petition the Congress of the United States and the Executive Branch to enact legislation establishing the following as the law of the land. We hold that animals are not inventory. They are living beings with physical, psychological, and social needs that cannot be met within concrete walls and chain-link enclosures alone. We hold that the standard of care in American animal shelters must be elevated. Not as an act of charity, but as an act of justice. And we hold that access to natural land, open space, and the ground beneath their feet is not a luxury for sheltered animals. It is a right.
Article I: Amendment of the Federal Animal Welfare Act
The Federal Animal Welfare Act of 1966 shall be amended to codify the Five Freedoms as a proactive legal duty owed to animals in the care of animal shelters and animal control facilities receiving federal funding, directly or indirectly. The Five Freedoms are: freedom from hunger, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and injury, freedom from distress, and freedom to express normal behavior. For the first time, these protections shall extend to every animal in the custody of such a shelter or facility, as a condition of continued eligibility for federal funds. Nothing in this Article shall be construed to alter existing Animal Welfare Act standards applicable to research institutions, commercial breeders, exhibitors, or other regulated entities outside the shelter and animal control context.
Article II: The Right to Natural Ground
Every animal shelter receiving federal funding, directly or indirectly, shall be sited on or immediately adjacent to natural, unpaved land. No shelter shall be constructed or licensed on a site that consists entirely of paved, concrete, or otherwise impermeable surfaces without access to natural terrain.
Article III: The Right to Natural Space
Section 1. Enclosure Standard. Every primary enclosure in a qualifying shelter shall include a directly attached outdoor extension serving only the animal or animals housed in that enclosure, accessible at will through a self-operable opening, requiring no staff intervention to use. Each such outdoor extension shall consist of natural ground cover, including grass, soil, or equivalent natural substrate, and shall include an unshaded portion sufficient for direct sunlight exposure during daylight hours. Minimum outdoor extension size shall be as follows: dogs under 25 pounds, 24 square feet; dogs 25 to 60 pounds, 48 square feet; dogs over 60 pounds, 72 square feet; cats housed individually or in small groups, 16 square feet, with vertical enrichment structures counted toward the requirement. Outdoor extensions shall be fully enclosed by secure fencing sufficient to prevent escape, and access shall be automatically restricted during weather conditions posing a health hazard, as defined by federal guidelines. Shelters shall conduct and log a physical welfare check of each animal no less than once every two hours during operating hours, independent of the animal's outdoor access.
Section 2. Site Standard. In addition to the enclosures required under Section 1, each qualifying shelter shall maintain shared outdoor green space equal to no less than one quarter acre, or 10,890 square feet, per fifty animals of licensed capacity. This ratio shall be calculated against the shelter's licensed maximum capacity, not its real-time population, so that compliance is fixed at the time of construction or licensing rather than fluctuating with intake.
Section 3. Compliance Pathways. A shelter may satisfy Section 2 through any of the following, individually or in combination:
(a) Standalone acreage: land owned or leased directly by the shelter, meeting the standard on site.
(b) Park-adjacent siting: a permanently fenced, exclusive-use enclosure bordering public parkland, secured under an easement or license from the governing park authority, with self-operable access from bordering enclosures, and not requiring animals to cross public thoroughfares, parking areas, or general-use park space to reach it.
(c) Donated private land: privately owned land donated or granted in perpetual conservation-style easement for shelter use, subject to a title or easement instrument recorded with the county that survives any change of shelter ownership or management, the same fencing, substrate, and self-access standards as Sections 1 and 2, and proximity limits equivalent to the park-adjacent standard, so that donated land functions as an extension of the facility rather than a remote holding pen.
(d) Other government-owned land: land transferred, leased, or licensed from any federal, state, or municipal entity, subject to the same proximity, permanence, and fencing standards as subsection (b), to be used only where subsections (a) through (c) are unavailable.
Section 4. Incentives for Donated Land. Land donated or granted in perpetual easement under Section 3(c) shall qualify as a conservation contribution eligible for federal tax deduction. States shall be encouraged, through conditional eligibility for federal shelter compliance grants under Article VI, to offer property tax abatement on parcels donated or easement-encumbered for shelter use. Shelters that secure land under Section 3(c) shall receive priority access to Article VI compliance funding for site infrastructure, including fencing, drainage, and access construction.
Article IV: The Right to Guaranteed Access
Section 1. Baseline Guarantee. Because the outdoor extensions required under Article III, Section 1 are self-operable, every animal shall have standing access to natural ground and sunlight independent of staffing levels, shelter capacity, or time of day, except during veterinary isolation or quarantine periods mandated by law.
Section 2. Supplemental Exercise. Shelters shall provide additional supervised access to shared green space under Article III, Section 2 for behaviorally cleared animals not subject to legal holding or quarantine, on a rotating basis consistent with available staffing. Shelters shall maintain records of this supplemental access and make them available to federal inspectors upon request.
Article V: New Construction Standards
All new animal shelter construction for which federal approval, funding, or tax-exempt status is sought shall be subject to a mandatory site review confirming compliance with the standards set forth in Articles II, III, and IV of this Constitution before federal approval is granted. No federal funds shall be disbursed for the construction of a shelter that does not meet these standards.
Article VI: Transition and Compliance
Existing animal shelters that do not currently meet the standards set forth herein shall be given a five-year transition period from the date of enactment to achieve full compliance. A Shelter Modernization Fund is hereby established within the United States Department of Agriculture, funded at no less than 500 million dollars annually for the duration of the transition period, to provide grants to qualifying shelters for site retrofit, construction, land acquisition, or relocation necessary to achieve compliance. Grant amounts shall be allocated according to each shelter's licensed capacity and demonstrated financial need, with priority given to municipal and county shelters in jurisdictions with per capita income below the national median. No shelter shall be found out of compliance, nor shall federal funding be withheld under Article V, on the basis of a failure to meet these standards if that shelter has submitted a timely application for Shelter Modernization Fund grants that has not yet been approved or disbursed.
1,312
The Issue
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:
- 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.
- 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.
Read the Full Constitution below:
Preamble
✦ ✦ ✦
We, the undersigned citizens of the United States of America, recognizing that the welfare of animals in our care is a reflection of our collective character as a nation, do hereby petition the Congress of the United States and the Executive Branch to enact legislation establishing the following as the law of the land. We hold that animals are not inventory. They are living beings with physical, psychological, and social needs that cannot be met within concrete walls and chain-link enclosures alone. We hold that the standard of care in American animal shelters must be elevated. Not as an act of charity, but as an act of justice. And we hold that access to natural land, open space, and the ground beneath their feet is not a luxury for sheltered animals. It is a right.
Article I: Amendment of the Federal Animal Welfare Act
The Federal Animal Welfare Act of 1966 shall be amended to codify the Five Freedoms as a proactive legal duty owed to animals in the care of animal shelters and animal control facilities receiving federal funding, directly or indirectly. The Five Freedoms are: freedom from hunger, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and injury, freedom from distress, and freedom to express normal behavior. For the first time, these protections shall extend to every animal in the custody of such a shelter or facility, as a condition of continued eligibility for federal funds. Nothing in this Article shall be construed to alter existing Animal Welfare Act standards applicable to research institutions, commercial breeders, exhibitors, or other regulated entities outside the shelter and animal control context.
Article II: The Right to Natural Ground
Every animal shelter receiving federal funding, directly or indirectly, shall be sited on or immediately adjacent to natural, unpaved land. No shelter shall be constructed or licensed on a site that consists entirely of paved, concrete, or otherwise impermeable surfaces without access to natural terrain.
Article III: The Right to Natural Space
Section 1. Enclosure Standard. Every primary enclosure in a qualifying shelter shall include a directly attached outdoor extension serving only the animal or animals housed in that enclosure, accessible at will through a self-operable opening, requiring no staff intervention to use. Each such outdoor extension shall consist of natural ground cover, including grass, soil, or equivalent natural substrate, and shall include an unshaded portion sufficient for direct sunlight exposure during daylight hours. Minimum outdoor extension size shall be as follows: dogs under 25 pounds, 24 square feet; dogs 25 to 60 pounds, 48 square feet; dogs over 60 pounds, 72 square feet; cats housed individually or in small groups, 16 square feet, with vertical enrichment structures counted toward the requirement. Outdoor extensions shall be fully enclosed by secure fencing sufficient to prevent escape, and access shall be automatically restricted during weather conditions posing a health hazard, as defined by federal guidelines. Shelters shall conduct and log a physical welfare check of each animal no less than once every two hours during operating hours, independent of the animal's outdoor access.
Section 2. Site Standard. In addition to the enclosures required under Section 1, each qualifying shelter shall maintain shared outdoor green space equal to no less than one quarter acre, or 10,890 square feet, per fifty animals of licensed capacity. This ratio shall be calculated against the shelter's licensed maximum capacity, not its real-time population, so that compliance is fixed at the time of construction or licensing rather than fluctuating with intake.
Section 3. Compliance Pathways. A shelter may satisfy Section 2 through any of the following, individually or in combination:
(a) Standalone acreage: land owned or leased directly by the shelter, meeting the standard on site.
(b) Park-adjacent siting: a permanently fenced, exclusive-use enclosure bordering public parkland, secured under an easement or license from the governing park authority, with self-operable access from bordering enclosures, and not requiring animals to cross public thoroughfares, parking areas, or general-use park space to reach it.
(c) Donated private land: privately owned land donated or granted in perpetual conservation-style easement for shelter use, subject to a title or easement instrument recorded with the county that survives any change of shelter ownership or management, the same fencing, substrate, and self-access standards as Sections 1 and 2, and proximity limits equivalent to the park-adjacent standard, so that donated land functions as an extension of the facility rather than a remote holding pen.
(d) Other government-owned land: land transferred, leased, or licensed from any federal, state, or municipal entity, subject to the same proximity, permanence, and fencing standards as subsection (b), to be used only where subsections (a) through (c) are unavailable.
Section 4. Incentives for Donated Land. Land donated or granted in perpetual easement under Section 3(c) shall qualify as a conservation contribution eligible for federal tax deduction. States shall be encouraged, through conditional eligibility for federal shelter compliance grants under Article VI, to offer property tax abatement on parcels donated or easement-encumbered for shelter use. Shelters that secure land under Section 3(c) shall receive priority access to Article VI compliance funding for site infrastructure, including fencing, drainage, and access construction.
Article IV: The Right to Guaranteed Access
Section 1. Baseline Guarantee. Because the outdoor extensions required under Article III, Section 1 are self-operable, every animal shall have standing access to natural ground and sunlight independent of staffing levels, shelter capacity, or time of day, except during veterinary isolation or quarantine periods mandated by law.
Section 2. Supplemental Exercise. Shelters shall provide additional supervised access to shared green space under Article III, Section 2 for behaviorally cleared animals not subject to legal holding or quarantine, on a rotating basis consistent with available staffing. Shelters shall maintain records of this supplemental access and make them available to federal inspectors upon request.
Article V: New Construction Standards
All new animal shelter construction for which federal approval, funding, or tax-exempt status is sought shall be subject to a mandatory site review confirming compliance with the standards set forth in Articles II, III, and IV of this Constitution before federal approval is granted. No federal funds shall be disbursed for the construction of a shelter that does not meet these standards.
Article VI: Transition and Compliance
Existing animal shelters that do not currently meet the standards set forth herein shall be given a five-year transition period from the date of enactment to achieve full compliance. A Shelter Modernization Fund is hereby established within the United States Department of Agriculture, funded at no less than 500 million dollars annually for the duration of the transition period, to provide grants to qualifying shelters for site retrofit, construction, land acquisition, or relocation necessary to achieve compliance. Grant amounts shall be allocated according to each shelter's licensed capacity and demonstrated financial need, with priority given to municipal and county shelters in jurisdictions with per capita income below the national median. No shelter shall be found out of compliance, nor shall federal funding be withheld under Article V, on the basis of a failure to meet these standards if that shelter has submitted a timely application for Shelter Modernization Fund grants that has not yet been approved or disbursed.
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Petition created on October 12, 2025