California, like many states, has no oversight or accountability by separate agencies (i.e., state) to monitor animal control and public humane societies who perform animal control duties.
Depending upon funding, we hope to be a group who through public records requests and legal methods can make animal control accountable to the constituents who pay their expenses and salaries.
We are dedicated to investigating complaints of neglect, abuse, misconduct, and violations of the Hayden Law and the Vincent Law in California.
Our most common 'tips' come from animal shelter personnel and staff, volunteers as well as citizens.
ShelterWatch.com is a website we started a few years ago to track the progress made in the groundbreaking lawsuit against the County of Kern when we sued them. In late 2006, we won the case a few and the final judgment was signed by the Judge.
Now, we intend on reporting truth about the various shelters in California whether it's good truth or bad truth. Nonetheless, we want the site to have the highest integrity and only truth backed up by facts, impound numbers, written affidavits and declarations, as well as verifiable statistics.
Believe it or not, there are shelters WAY worse than LA City and LA County. They are these little unwatched shelters in central California, small shelters in Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, humane socieites in rural areas, etc. where nobody is watching them. We will be watching.
We (shelterwatch.com) intend on having a rating scale which will be a fair, and measurable method of rating the shelters in California. This is a project that is in the works, as is our website which will be changing to reflect many shelters violating the law as well as shelters who are going above and beyond what they legally have to do to save animals and have limited budgets. We will be profiling both as we emerge into a new era since winning the first ever lawsuit against a government for violation of the Hayden and Vincent Laws.
Because there are no overseers of shelters in California (i.e., no agency watches public shelters and SPCA's with a contract which receive government money) we have decided to come forward to educate the public with the truth; not a distorted and exagerated lie, but the truth.
Our friend at http://ShelterTrak.com is the brainchild of another rescuer -- Brad. Brad tirelessly performs public records acts (which is a California government code section) which allow Brad to receive raw data directly from shelters.
While some shelters fight him and refuse to release information, and some humane societies refuse to give information because they say that they are exempt, Brad methodically plots along gathering data and putting it in useable charts and graphs so we can see the truth.
This is exactly the kind of intelligence we need to get a handle on pet macrodynamics as well as assessing the success or failure of the various municipal shelters.
