Los Angeles streets have never been this dangerous for animals
Los Angeles is on track to hit its fifth consecutive record year of dead animals on city streets. At the same time, city shelters are dealing with an increase in dog and cat intakes.
The twin increases paint a grim picture for animal welfare in the city. In the first six months of 2026, Los Angeles recorded 13,614 dead animal removal requests — 301 more than during the same period last year. Los Angeles Animal Services reports that city shelters had taken in 16,463 animals as of May, 4% more than during the same time last year, and are currently operating at about 17% above capacity.
There are several drivers behind the increase, such as rising veterinary costs and housing instability, which can force owners to abandon their pets. However, the biggest factor appears to stem from lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which upended animal care in numerous ways.
Pandemic setback
Madeline Bernstein, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Los Angeles, a nonprofit that operates adoption centers in Southern California, said the pandemic reversed what had been a years-long national decline in the number of animals entering shelters. Shelter populations fell sharply in 2020 as adoption rates surged during the pandemic. But intake has steadily climbed in the years since, while adoptions have diminished. Los Angeles is now on track for its sixth consecutive year of increasing shelter intake.
“I hope it doesn’t continue as a national trend,” Bernstein said. “However, it did reverse a really positive national trend, which was that intake was much, much lower.”
According to Bernstein, one lasting effect of the pandemic was reduced access to veterinary care. As clinics across the country reduced or suspended many non-essential services, including spay and neuter procedures, more animals went without sterilization and continued reproducing.
“What do you expect a few years later?” Bernstein said. “What do you have? You have a puppy boom.”
A University of Florida study found that the country’s spay and neuter backlog has continued to worsen after the pandemic. Researchers had estimated that clinics nationwide were about 2.7 million surgeries behind by the end of 2021, but a follow-up analysis pushed the estimate to 3.7 million surgeries by mid-2023.
Jen Naitaki, managing director of the Michelson Found Animals Foundation, said the effects have been especially pronounced among cats.
“The kitten and cat intake is definitely rising higher or more quickly than the dog intake,” she said. “And when you see cats and kittens in the shelters, you can almost always attribute that to a lack of spay and neuter.”
Naitaki said the same decline of spay and neuter services during the pandemic may also help explain why Los Angeles continues to see record numbers of dead animals on city streets.
Shelters stretched thin
“There’s not one single reason why animals end up in shelters, but if you’re seeing more dead animal pickups, it’s a really good indication that there’s not enough spay and neuter because unsterilized animals tend to roam farther away from where they’re actually from,” Naitaki said. “As a result of that, it’s more likely that they’re going to get hit by a car.”
The vast majority of dead animal removal calls the city receives are for roadkill. Cats make up the largest category of animals struck by vehicles, followed by dogs, opossums and racoons.
Naitaki worries that Animal Services may not be able to handle much more. The city department’s budget was $29 million in the most recent fiscal year. “[It’s] absolutely not sufficient for the kind of operation that they have,” she said.
However, Los Angeles was able to increase one item in the budget: In the fiscal year that began July 1, the city increased funding for its spay and neuter program by about $1.7 million to a total of $9 million.
This money funds a spay and neuter voucher program, where income-qualifying foster families and adopters can request vouchers online to cover the cost of their animal’s sterilization surgeries. Still, Naitaki said reimbursement rates have struggled to keep pace with veterinarians’ rising costs, leading some clinics to stop accepting the vouchers altogether.
The city has also begun investing in additional prevention efforts, including expanding mobile spay and neuter clinics.
“Most people, when offered spay and neuter, will say yes to spay and neuter,” Naitaki said. “People are not sterilizing the animals because they don’t want to. It’s because they don’t have access.”
How we did it: We examined multiple years of calls for dead animal pickup in Los Angeles, as well as past records on intakes and adoptions from the Los Angeles Animal Services Department.
Have questions? Or want to know more about our data? Write us at askus@xtown.la
