California Animal Shelter Statistics Dashboard

Now is the time to save the lives of homeless pets in California. Learn how your community is doing, and then help us make your community no-kill this year.

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California: Here’s how you can help homeless pets

Now that you know how your shelter is doing, you can take action — and every action you take for homeless pets helps to save their lives and gets the country closer to no-kill.

Join

We believe every pet deserves a home, whether it’s a house with a fenced yard, a cozy apartment, or a safe outdoor space for community cats. Do you agree?

I Agree

Take action

Find a local 2025 Action Team near you and learn how you can help create big change for the pets and people in your community today.

Protect Animals

Adopt

When you adopt a pet from a rescue group or animal shelter instead of buying from a breeder or puppy mill, you’re providing a lifesaving second chance.

Adopt a Pet

Help your local animal shelter or rescue group

At Best Friends, our goal is to get more dogs and cats out of shelters and into homes and make every shelter in America no-kill. Each and every one of these shelters needs caring people like you to adopt, foster, donate, volunteer, and advocate to help save the lives of pets in your community.

Find an animal shelter or rescue group near you today:

Volunteer to save homeless pets

With millions of animals in shelters around the country hoping for families of their very own, one of the most valuable gifts you can give is the gift of your time.

Passionate, caring people like you can volunteer and help in so many ways to save the lives of homeless pets. For homeless animals, your kindness makes all the difference.

bestfriends.org/volunteer

Join your local grassroots action team

Find a local 2025 Action Team near you and learn how you can help create big change for the pets and people in your community today.

Happily-ever-afters in California

Feel all the feels with these stories of hope and healing — made possible by people like you.

Smiling person sitting with a dog outside on some steps

You can help animals in shelters today

Every action you take for homeless pets helps to save their lives and gets the country closer to no-kill; we’ll show you how.

How You Can Help

Understanding the data

Whether you have questions about the data collection process or how to use the tool, we’ve got you covered.

To determine where shelters need the most help, we’re using data to inform our decisions and looking for new ways to implement effective strategies. Each year, we collect the data and share this national dataset publicly.

In collecting the data for the 2024 national dataset, Best Friends conducted extensive research to explore and determine which shelter and community characteristics impact a shelter’s intake and number of lives saved. All data and analysis prepared for the 2024 national dataset were done by Best Friends Animal Society.

Data was collected via an online data-sharing platform, Shelter Pet Data Alliance, as well as directly from shelter websites, other information provided by shelters, files provided by state governing bodies, and through Freedom of Information Act requests.

This information is used to track the effectiveness of our direct lifesaving efforts, such as foster and community cat programs, and it helps us plan future strategies.

While we were able to capture a robust and representative sample of shelters for 2024, some of the nearly 4,000 shelters in the U.S. had not yet provided data. For those, we used advanced statistical methods that took community and shelter factors into account to estimate the data, including historical collected intake/outcome data from any shelter that has provided it. This model has been externally validated and has been determined to be highly accurate and reliable for the purpose of predicting the no-kill status of shelters.

The data for individual shelters around the country can be found on the pet lifesaving dashboard and is updated monthly when possible.

About the Data

About Best Friends Animal Society

Best Friends is working to end the killing of dogs and cats in U.S. shelters in part by getting more pets out of shelters and into loving homes.

We’ve come a long way since the first known city reached no-kill in 1994, and now we’re closer than ever to making the entire country no-kill. Today, roughly 2,500 shelters are no-kill throughout the U.S. — and 700 more are just 100 pets or fewer away from reaching that milestone.

Best Friends is committed to working with passionate people like you to save homeless pets through adoption, volunteering, fostering, and advocacy. In addition to our lifesaving centers around the U.S, we also founded and run the nation's largest no-kill sanctuary for companion animals.

Working together, we can save homeless pets in our communities and secure a better future for our best friends. Together, we will bring the whole country to no-kill.

Help homeless pets in California