LA may soon put a moratorium on breeding permits as shelters flood with purebreds

LOS ANGELES - A Los Angeles City Council committee approved a motion calling for a moratorium on breeding permits on Wednesday, Oct. 4, in a move to address overcrowding at the six city-run animal shelters.

"The point of a moratorium isn't necessarily to stop breeding, that has to happen through enforcement," said the General Manager of the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services Staycee Dains, prior to Wednesday's vote.

"The importance of a moratorium is to signal to the community clearly that our shelters are not in any position to take in one more animal."

As of September, the city had issued about 1,200 breeding permits this year, and is on pace to finish out 2023 with about 1,800 permits, according to Dains.

"It used to be, 20 years ago, when I first started in animal welfare, there weren't a lot of purebred animals in the shelters," she said. "But if you go into shelters, every single husky and German shepherd that's in there, almost every single one of them are purebred."

She said that while the moratorium puts the city in a "precarious position," it nonetheless reflects the reality of the ongoing shelter crisis.

"Organizations that are pro-breeding are not organizations that do anything to help animals in animal shelters," she said. "They're simply creating animals for us to kill later on, and that is not appropriate."

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The committee agreed that the moratorium would be lifted once shelters were at or below 75 percent capacity for three consecutive months, and could be automatically reinstated if shelter capacity rises above 75 percent.

LA's Department of Animal Services avoids euthanizing animals by spaying and neutering animals at the shelters. But Dains admitted that such internal policies can be difficult to enforce due to staffing issues.

In addition to the breeding permit moratorium, Dains told the committee that she would be requesting $3 million to fund 120 new staff members across the six shelters.

Of those 120 new staffers, 90 will be hired as animal care technicians and 30 clerical staff to assist with adoptions, according to Dains.

"We need that desperately," she said.

City News Service contributed to this report.