From San Diego to San José: How the Hayden Act Is Reshaping Accountability in California Animal Shelters

After a court ruling in San Diego, preventable deaths in San José test whether California’s animal shelter laws will finally be enforced.

From San Diego to San José, advocates are using California’s Hayden Act to force reforms in municipal animal shelters, turning a largely ignored statute into a superhero for dogs and cats the system has failed.

California law already answers the question San José is now facing: once a city has notice that its shelter practices place animals at risk, continued inaction is no longer a policy failure; it is unlawful conduct that can cross into criminal neglect.

After San Diego, San José

In December 2024, a San Diego judge ruled that once a California shelter impounds an animal, it has a mandatory duty to provide necessary and prompt veterinary care and to follow Hayden Act minimums; contracts, internal policies, “managed intake” schemes or community‑animal arguments cannot waive that obligation. The court made it clear that when a statute says a public shelter “shall” do something, that duty is ministerial, an act the agency must perform “in a prescribed manner…without regard to [its] own judgment” when the facts exist.

The attorneys now pressing San José to reform its animal shelter are betting that reasoning will travel north. In a January 13, 2026 demand letter, Ryther Law Group attorney Sarah Thompson, who represents Partners in Animal Care & Compassion (PACC), treats San José’s own audit and consultant reports as more than background; she argues they are the proof that the city had actual notice that its operations were dangerous, and that deaths like Rufus’s and Lola’s were not unforeseeable mishaps but the predictable result of problems the city had already been told to fix.​

When warnings become a breach of duty

“Foreseeability” is not a checkbox element of any single cause of action, but it is central to proving breach. The 2024 performance audit documented chronic failures in post‑operative monitoring, missing or outdated medical protocols, and an inability to meet animals’ daily needs, all against the backdrop of the 2022 Maddie’s Fund-commissioned consult that had already flagged those same deficits.

By the time Rufus died after a routine neuter in December 2024 and Lola died five months later after strangling in her kennel while on fluids, the city had been formally told, twice, that its shelter lacked the staffing, training and systems necessary to keep animals safe. “These examples indicate that the City had actual notice of the dangerous conditions under which the shelter operates,” the attorneys write, citing a “documented history of systemic failures…resulting in high risk of injury and even death for animals including Rufus (A1325985) and Lola (A1374248).”

In that light, the question readers keep asking, when do repeated warnings transform mismanagement into negligence, is precisely what the litigation threat is designed to test.

“Shall,” not “should”: what the law already requires

One reason San José’s story has resonated is that many readers assumed the Hayden Act and related provisions were aspirational guidelines, not enforceable duties. The attorneys’ response is blunt: in key areas, the law is mandatory.​

They point first to the Hayden Act’s rescue‑release provisions, where the Court of Appeal in Santa Paula Animal Rescue Center v. County of Los Angeles held that the word “shall” in Food & Agricultural Code section 31108(b)(1) requires shelters to release impounded animals to qualified 501(c)(3) organizations; it is not discretionary.

They then highlight two Civil Code sections that apply to every shelter holding animals in its custody: section 1846(b), which states that a gratuitous depositary of a living animal shall provide “necessary and prompt veterinary care, adequate nutrition and water, and shelter,” and section 1834, which similarly requires depositaries to provide “necessary and prompt veterinary care, nutrition, and shelter” and to treat animals kindly.​

“These code sections state that the shelters (depositories of living animals) ‘shall’ not ‘should’ provide the care,” the lawyers note. “The City cannot simply ignore these obligations or shift the responsibility onto others.” In practical terms, that means a city cannot point to Maddie’s, UC Davis or San Diego Humane Society as expert partners while leaving basic care, record‑keeping and medical oversight undone.​

Expert roadmaps without the promised safeguards

Part 1 of this series traced how San José invited high‑profile consultants into its shelter, received a detailed 40‑page roadmap, and then commissioned a city audit that confirmed many of the same failings. The Ryther Law Group letter builds on that record to argue that what followed was a textbook case of adopting high‑level recommendations without implementing the conditions those same experts said were necessary for safety.

In legal terms, Thompson describes this as a failure to meet ministerial duties. When a city publicly embraces “capacity for care” and managed‑intake frameworks, but never fully staffs its clinic, never installs the population‑management rounds those models require, and never replaces handwritten notes with reliable digital records, it is not exercising discretion at the margins of policy.

It is, the letter contends, ignoring mandated duties to provide prompt veterinary care, adequate housing, and lawful access to rescue in a shelter it already knows is over capacity and under‑resourced.

Judge Bacal’s ruling in the San Diego Humane Society case, the attorneys suggest, should be read as a warning shot: municipal shelters are not immune from California’s anti‑cruelty and abandonment laws, and policies that unlawfully restrict rescue or delay care can now be challenged on Hayden‑Act grounds.​​

Management failure, not just a tight labor market

Some observers, noting Silicon Valley’s housing costs, have wondered whether San José’s staffing crisis is simply the inevitable product of trying to run a labor‑intensive service in one of the country’s most expensive regions. Long‑time Bay Area advocates recall a time when local shelters recruited reliably from upper‑division San José State students and veterans on the G.I. Bill, people who could afford to take shelter jobs and often went on to lead organizations of their own. That pipeline has largely vanished.​

But front‑line workers at SJACS push back on the idea that there are no qualified candidates. One former animal care attendant, who blew the whistle after Lola’s death and later commented publicly, says there was “a lot of…passion for the animals,” including staff with college degrees and people training for veterinary careers, willing to work for low wages because they cared. What drove them out, she says, was not just pay but “management negligence”: poor training, a toxic culture, and retaliation when employees raised concerns.​

Another whistleblower traces the current collapse back to 2021–22, when the city allowed two full‑time veterinarians, a part‑time neonatal specialist, a high‑volume shelter manager and his lead coordinator to leave without any real succession plan, then elevated an animal‑control deputy with no shelter‑management background and cycled through subsequent leadership experiments that never delivered the medical staffing and safeguards consultants had called non‑negotiable.

In his telling, three years of poor hiring decisions and ignored consultant recommendations, followed by a leadership pivot based on a misreading of the Maddie’s audit that coincided with a measurable decline in rescue access, transformed a once-promising high-volume shelter into a place where, as advocates now say, “qualified medical professionals don’t even bother applying.”

Economic headwinds may explain why vacancies are hard to fill. They do not, under Civil Code and Hayden, erase the city’s duty to either provide lawful care or transfer animals to facilities that can.​

When governments grade their own homework

Readers who work in other parts of local government recognized a familiar pattern in San José’s response. In most city departments, a broken traffic light or a dangerous intersection quickly generates constituent calls; potholes and playground equipment are fixed because voters see them and complain. Animal shelters, by contrast, serve beings who cannot vote, and the people most affected, low‑income residents, elderly owners, overextended rescuers, often have the least time and political leverage.​

As one commenter put it, local governments “often just self‑evaluate” shelters; if the city says its service is good, then it is, and citizen advocates who disagree are treated as unwelcome intruders. In San José, advocates say that dynamic has been on display for years: stakeholders who attended meetings and shared data were dismissed as running a “smear campaign,” rescue partners who questioned the narrative of improvement saw contracts lapse, and front‑line staff who documented unsafe conditions received terse letters from the city informing them that their complaints had been ‘reviewed’ and closed, with no corrective action to be taken.

What the San Diego ruling and the San José notice now do is shift that conversation onto statutory ground. Instead of debating whether a shelter is “doing its best in a tough time,” they ask whether it is meeting duties the Legislature and courts have already defined.

What meaningful compliance would actually look like

The Ryther Law Group letter seeks remedies short of immediate litigation. Asked to describe “meaningful compliance” in plain terms, the attorneys gave a checklist that looks far more concrete than most press releases.​

First, they say, the city must overhaul its Animal Care Standards, policies and manuals to bring them into line with current veterinary and sheltering standards, then prove it has done so by sharing written policies, documenting staff training sessions, and establishing a schedule for onboarding new employees and revisiting those policies over time.

Second, it must fill its veterinary and RVT vacancies, and produce records showing that daily medical and welfare needs, such as food, water, observation, and enrichment, are reliably met for every animal in its care.

Third, it has to maintain housing areas, crates and kennels so animals are not left in filthy, unsafe conditions of the kind documented in the 2024 audit.

Equally important, Thompson says, is ensuring compliance with Hayden’s rescue‑release provisions and installing a “reasonable process to anonymously raise concerns” so that staff and volunteers can report problems without fear of retaliation. In effect, they are asking San José to do what its own consultants and auditors already urged: write and enforce real standard operating procedures, staff to meet them, and create channels where bad news can travel up without ending someone’s career.​

How the public will know if the city is serious

Concerned residents and rescue partners have asked what they should watch for next. The attorneys’ answer is deceptively simple.​

First, they say, there must be a substantive written response from the city that grapples with, rather than dismisses, the letter’s detailed allegations.

Second, there must be follow‑through on the audit and consult recommendations that goes beyond officials saying an item is “addressed”; they want to see copies of new policies, evidence of staff training, and a schedule for updating both.​

For advocates who have spent years filing complaints, attending council meetings and writing open letters only to be told that “progress is being made,” those are modest asks.

They are also, in light of the San Diego ruling, a warning: if cities continue to self‑grade their shelters while ignoring statutory duties, the next evaluation may come not from a consultant or an auditor, but from a court.

Ed Boks is the former executive director of animal care and control agencies in New York City, Los Angeles, and Maricopa County, and a past board member of the National Animal Control Association. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Newsweek, Real Clear Policy, Sentient Media, and now on Animal Politics, a lively community spanning 48 states and 61 countries.

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