LA Animal Services GM outlines plans to improve city shelters

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass appointed her as the new general manager of L.A. Animal Services and she joins us here in the studio to fill us in on her plans and the goals to improve animal services here in Los Angeles. Gabrielle, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Glenn. I'm happy to be here. Okay, so before the appointment, you served as the director of the Wallace-Annenberg Pet Space. You did that for four years. In that same time frame, L.A. Animal Services taken a lot of heat for overcrowding, inhumane treatment. What are you going to do to try to change all that? You know, pet overpopulation is a serious problem and this has been going on for quite some time, obviously. Post-pandemic, what we really saw was an explosion in animals across our city, really across our nation. And what we think may have happened is that a lack of spay-neuter services during that time and then pretty rampant backyard breeding because there was a demand for pets and people tuned into that has kind of put us where we are now. I was at South L.A. shelter just a couple weeks ago and the day that I was there, we took it and that's just one of our six shelters in the system. The day that I was there, 37 dogs and 17 cats came into that shelter and only three left. So it's pretty unsustainable. So the answer moving forward, among other things, is of course spay-neuter. We have to have spay-neuter at all corners, low-cost spay-neuter, accessible spay-neuter. It's one of a few really important things that we need to prioritize. L.A. Animal Services this past year provided 65,000 spay-neuter surgeries to our community through our voucher programs and other programs and I'm proud that we're able to do that, but even that is not enough. So that has to be prioritized. I was going to ask you about the euthanasia rates, but if you spay and neuter and get that program going, that actually alleviates that problem, right? The euthanasia rate? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, euthanasia is really in response to overpopulation. Our shelter, believe it or not, our shelter system, we take in nearly 50,000 animals a year. And despite that, we have a live release rate for dogs that hovers around between 90 and 91 percent, which is pretty incredible. And for cats, it's between 80 and 95 percent, depending on the shelter, depending on the time of year. And it's hard to think of any animal being euthanized. But in our case, when we are euthanizing, and it is a fairly small number, while it's heartbreaking, it's usually because of overpopulation, you know, our kennels are crowded and we need help moving those animals out, or because of animals declining in care, which means their behavior, you know, becomes difficult to manage. And so those are the reasons that we typically euthanize. I think some of the perceptions around our euthanasia rates are that because we are transparent and we do go to our community for help and we do talk about the fact that we have, we're overpopulated, our kennels are full, we need help, or our kennels are full and our animals are declining in care and they need to leave our facility, sometimes there's a confusing message and people think that it's happening hand over fist. But we have an incredible team, volunteers and staff, that are caring for our animals in our shelter and really working hard to make sure that we can keep our euthanasia rates as low as possible. We all know the homeless problem here in greater Los Angeles. It has exploded. Unfortunately, dogs and cats paying the price for this. Yeah, I mean, Skid Row is complicated. Skid Row itself is complicated. And, you know, on Skid Row, there are pet owners who care deeply for their pets and are able to provide them the care that they need. There are pet owners who care for their pets but don't have the resources that they need. And there are pet owners, just like any community, who are neglectful and treat their pets poorly. And the mayor kicked off an initiative in November of 2025 that is a collaboration between LA Animal Services and LAPD and we're focusing our resources and attention to Skid Row right now, which means increased LAPD presence, increased LA Animal Services animal control officers. We have one dedicated officer there now. We're trying to increase that in the coming months and also to find a streamlined communication for people to report abuse and neglect. But really, it's also about providing services, making sure that spay and neuter and access to care is happening in that area. We have incredible partners that are on the ground there doing that work. I'm so grateful to them. But this collaboration is something that is really needed and we're going to work in the coming weeks to find better streamlined communication for people to be able to reach us and report some of the things that they're seeing and need help with. Okay, last month reports came out the city's considering handing over some of these animal shelters to outside sources. What would that involve and you think it's a good idea? It's interesting. I mean, I think the city is doing its due diligence. City leaders who voted on a motion to pursue an RFI or to do exploratory exploration and information about what that could look like, I think really care about our city and care about animals and want to find solutions to some of the challenges that we're faced with. So in our department, we have an administrative team that's pretty kind of secret and brilliant and they're going to be undertaking this RFI and I'm proud that we're going to be doing it. We're going to do our due diligence. We're going to figure out how to improve our situation, see if a public-private partnership of some kind to run one or more of our shelters is feasible and it would work for our city and work for our animals. But while we're doing that, we're going to stick really true to meeting our goals in our shelter system and making sure that we are doing all the work that we need to do to care for our animals. And also, we had recently had a grant that was awarded to us by the ASPCA and Best Friends for $14 million, which is going to give us 23 new positions. So we're going to be focusing on getting those positions in our shelter and especially focusing on adoption outcomes. All right. All right. Gabrielle Amster, again, if you haven't met her or heard about her, she is the new general manager, fairly new of the LA Animal Services. Again, thanks for coming in. Thanks for having me. And the best of luck. You've got a tough job ahead of you. Thank you, sir. All right. Stay with us. We're going to be right back.