CAPS continues production on documentary about California’s municipal animal shelters
On September 24, CAPS spent more than two hours shooting footage inside San Jose Animal Care & Services for our upcoming documentary The Crisis at California’s Municipal Shelters. Despite adequate funding, the shelter is poorly managed, resulting in animal suffering: dirty living conditions, overcrowding, disease, insufficient spaying and neutering and much more.
Prior to going to the shelter, CAPS President Deborah Howard interviewed Rebekkah Davis Matthews, a former shelter employee, for the documentary. Ms. Davis Matthews founded Sustain Our Shelters to address the serious problems at the San Jose shelter. Sustain Our Shelters has now organized two rallies in front of San Jose City Hall that took place after city council meetings. The group encourages animal activists to speak on behalf of the shelter animals during the council meetings.
CAPS has featured the Sustain Our Shelter rallies on our social media. Lauren Martinez, a reporter with ABC7 (KGO-TV) in the San Francisco Bay Area, saw our Instagram post about the December 3 rally and asked for permission to use footage from the second trailer for The Crisis at California’s Municipal Shelters. This trailer features video from San Jose Animal Care. ABC7 used the footage in their story and provided a link to the trailer in the online write-up.
In October 2023, the San Jose City Council directed an audit of the municipal shelter because of community concerns about shelter operations and the high number of animals in the shelter. The San Jose City Auditor released a report on November 7, 2024 outlining problems at the shelter and recommendations on how to address them.
Key issues identified by the auditor include:
1. The animal shelter is over capacity, exacerbated by the lack of systematized structure or organization, creating bottlenecks to positive live outcomes for animals.
2. Animal intake has decreased while the average length of stay has increased.
3. The shelter has been unable to properly prevent the spread of disease
4. The shelter needs to develop a strategy to address the demand for space within the shelter through infrastructural modifications and additions.
5. Shelter management needs to expand adoption opportunities, improve relationships with rescues, and create educational and informative initiatives to empower the community.
6. The shelter needs to expand spay and neuter services for the public and proactively contract with outside providers.
7. The volunteer program needs to be improved with better engagement and allocation of tasks. There are about 300 volunteers in the backlog waiting to be added.
8. Many pertinent and useful Maddie’s Fund recommendations from a 2022 consultation still remain unfulfilled.
9. Service for contract jurisdictions – Milpitas, Cupertino, and Saratoga – exceeds service provided to San Jose.
10. A Community Action Committee should be formed. The committee should meet monthly in order to evaluate progress toward the goals set by the audit and to offer additional suggestions that will reduce costs and further streamline the process.
The rally organized by Sustain our Shelters received extensive media coverage. In addition to ABC, CBS (KPIX-TV), NBC (KRON-TV), CBS Radio and San Spotlight came out to cover the rally. FOX (KTVU-TV) did a story about the audit.
CAPS President Deborah Howard will be returning to Northern California early next year to visit more shelters with a videographer and to conduct additional interviews with shelter and rescue organization volunteers. We are still looking for current and former California municipal shelter employees, volunteers, fosters, rescue organizations who pull from shelters, and adopters of shelter animals to fill out CAPS’ California municipal shelter complaint form. You can also agree to be interviewed for the documentary.
Learn more and donate today to help us fund the extensive work required to make The Crisis at California’s Municipal Shelters. CAPS will be using this documentary in support of legislation requiring state oversight and funding of California’s municipal animal shelters.
