In the heart of Skid Row on a hot summer afternoon, Amber Willard pushed a skinny brown and white pit bull named Athena on a rolling office chair.
Victoriah Bech Parker, founder of the Starts With One Today animal rescue group, offered the dog a bowl of wet food.
“You don’t look too good,” Bech Parker cooed as she bent down to pet Athena with a gloved hand. The dog’s ribs poked out, her skin was irritated and red, and patches of fur were missing — a possible sign of mange.
Willard, an unhoused woman originally from Alaska, said she hadn’t been on Skid Row long: Her landlord had suddenly kicked her out. She wanted a dog for companionship and protection, she said, and got Athena for free from a man on a corner a few days before. She said she had tried to bathe Athena, but declined Bech Parker’s offer of a free vet appointment.
As Willard wheeled Athena away, fussing with an umbrella to offer the dog shade, Bech Parker shook her head in frustration.
“That dog really needs some proper care,” Bech Parker said.
Athena is just one of the dogs Bech Parker and other activists hope to save as they warn that a full-blown animal crisis is unfolding on Skid Row.
On social media and in legal filings, animal advocates complain that the 50-block zone in downtown Los Angeles that’s home to thousands of unhoused people is an epicenter of animal neglect and cruelty. City officials, they say, are failing to enforce animal welfare laws. Many dogs, like Athena, are malnourished and have untreated health issues. Others, they say, are illegally bred or left without water, food or shade.
Some dogs are severely abused. A recent legal complaint filed against the city by the nonprofit Stand up for Pits Foundation documented, with graphic photos, multiple cases of alleged animal abuse on Skid Row: a chihuahua with her eyes glued shut; a deaf white pit bull chained up with burn marks on her body; a dead dog hanging from a shopping cart with its internal organs spilling out.
The plight of Skid Row animals became a hot-button issue in this year’s primary election for L.A. mayor, with conservative candidate Spencer Pratt posting a lengthy video alleging that dogs were used to test drugs and bred for drug money. Steve Hilton, the GOP candidate for California governor, weighed in recently, calling the situation on Skid Row “a scandal.”
Mayor Karen Bass’ office accuses animal rights activists of “grandstanding.” The problems playing out just a few blocks from City Hall are not new or easy to solve, said Jacqueline Hamilton, deputy mayor of neighborhood services, in a statement to The Times. But Bass’ administration, she said, is taking “concrete action.”
Last November, Bass announced a pilot task force, which became permanent this summer, to investigate allegations of animal cruelty on Skid Row and train police officers to handle those situations as well as offer basic resources to pet owners.
While city officials and activists agree that some Skid Row animals need help, there is little consensus on a key question: at what point does a person living on the streets, struggling to feed or provide for a dog, cross the line from needing help to neglecting or abusing their animal?
The city adopts a cautious approach to seizing dogs from homeless people.
“It is neither humane nor legal to remove animals from their human companions without appropriate cause,” Hamilton said, citing studies from abroad finding that pets owned by the unhoused are “generally in good health” and that the relationship can improve the emotional wellbeing of both humans and their pets.
Bech Parker, who offers food and services every Sunday on Skid Row to hundreds of people and animals, said she helps owners, even if she thinks they’re falling short. But ultimately, she’d like to remove all dogs from Skid Row.
“A dog is not safe on Skid Row,” said Bech Parker, who founded Starts with One Today in 2020 after moving to L.A. from Denmark to pursue an entertainment career. “No matter how nice a person who has the dog at the moment is, it’s an unsafe environment.”
No official count exists for how many animals live on Skid Row. But dogs are everywhere — running loose, tied up, peering out of tents that line the sidewalk.
In 2020, researchers at USC estimated that 9% to 12% of unsheltered homeless adults in L.A. County owned a pet. With more than 2,000 unsheltered people living on Skid Row, that could mean about 250 dogs on the streets.
Pet ownership presents particular challenges for the unhoused, many activists say. Not only do unhoused people lack funds for food or veterinary care, but a significant proportion abuse drugs or have mental health issues. Multiple studies have found that more than half of people living on L.A. County streets, and Skid Row, have either a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder.
A few hours after Bech Parker met Athena, she got a text from a volunteer about a severely injured Labrador-type dog at San Pedro and East 5th streets. Photos showed his paws mangled and covered with open red sores.
The owner, a woman staying at the Midnight Mission, told the volunteer that she had left her dog, Trevor, with someone while she went out of state. When she returned, Trevor could not walk.
Bech Parker paid for an Uber to transport Trevor to a vet, who told her Trevor’s legs were broken and badly infected. He was likely hit about a month before, the vet said, with a blunt object such as a sledgehammer.
After multiple vets agreed that his injuries were too advanced to operate on, Bech Parker agreed to euthanize Trevor.
“It’s unfair that the lack of city enforcement,” she said, “is now forcing us to have to make those decisions.”
Officials cannot legally seize a dog, which is classified as personal property under state law, just because its owner lives on the street.
However, abusing an animal or failing to provide it with “proper food, drink, or shelter, or protection from the weather” is a crime in California. “Cruelty does not require malicious intent; neglect alone can rise to the level of a criminal offense,” L.A. County Animal Care and Control notes.
“The reality is there are good laws in place … to protect the animals,” said Rebecca Corry, founder of Stand up for Pits. “What is happening is they are purposely refusing to enforce laws.”
Stand up for Pits alleges in its complaint that the city and its agencies have “continuously and negligently ignored known dangerous conditions” on Skid Row and are guilty of “systemic violations of California law” governing “enforcement of animal cruelty statutes.”
Corry’s group calls on the city to conduct sweeps of Skid Row to remove all dogs who do not have adequate food, water or shelter, or who are not microchipped and spayed or neutered.
The city, however, maintains that failing to microchip or spay or neuter a dog violates city ordinances but falls short of abuse.
“The public often assumes that we can seize an animal any time that something looks wrong,” said L.A. Animal Services General Manager Gabrielle Amster.
Homeless owners who express a willingness to care for their animals, Amster said, are often given a chance. Helping them provide for their pets, she said, is sometimes the best option — particularly because dogs that are seized will end up in the severely overcrowded city shelter system.
“This in no way deters our will to assist an animal who’s been harmed,” Amster said. “We are very, very stern about animal abuse … We’re not going to say, ‘Well, that animal looks slightly abused, and our shelter’s full.’ ”
Since the city set up its new task force, a full-time Animal Control officer has been stationed in Skid Row to assess animal safety, respond to concerns about animal welfare and issue citations. The officer also offers pet owners food and supplies and works to forge relationships in the hope they will comply with spay-neuter laws and accept veterinary care.
Amster rejected activists’ claims that Animal Services is failing Skid Row, but she also said her department did not have enough staff.
“I wish we had more officers that could be there more frequently,” she said.
The showdown between animal activists and the city is striking because less than two decades ago, L.A. was celebrated by national animal advocates as a model for its enforcement of animal cruelty laws.
In 2005, the L.A. City Council set up an LAPD animal cruelty task force. By 2009, the task force was investigating nearly 300 reports of animal abuse and neglect a year. But in 2021, it was disbanded as the city made budget cuts during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, L.A. County ramped up “harm reduction” policies that did not require abstinence from drugs as a precondition for receiving services.
Some activists say that local officials have applied that philosophy to both drugs and pets in a way that prolongs suffering for humans and animals. Proponents say the approach saves lives, but critics say it normalizes drug use and enables addiction.
Owners who abuse drugs frequently forget where they are or lose their pets, Bech Parker said, and even responsible owners can have their pets stolen.
“The people on Skid Row are not capable of caring properly for an animal,” she said. “Like, just because you say, ‘Oh, I love my dog,’ … you’re not able to provide for your dog.”
However, not all animal activists agree. Lori Weise, a pioneering activist who founded Downtown Dog Rescue in the 1990s and became known for helping the unhoused stay united with their pets, said activists can’t demand that animals be taken away from everybody they deem “unfit.”
Just because a dog lives outside doesn’t mean it’s abused, she said.
Officials are better positioned than activists to enforce animal cruelty and spay-neuter laws, Weise said, but they are severely underfunded and understaffed. Weise believes that animals can give homeless people companionship, but that idea can be “one of the biggest traps” if it keeps animals from being taken away when necessary.
Since Bass launched the new Skid Row initiative, Hamilton said, the city has trained 100 LAPD officers to identify animal cruelty.
Hamilton said the task force impounded 58 animals and issued 16 citations from November through June, also making 10 arrests related to illegal puppy sales. A man running a puppy mill out of an RV was sentenced to 14 months in prison for animal cruelty, she said, and another man pleaded no contest to felony charges for beating a dog and breaking its leg.
In June alone, Hamilton said, Animal Services removed 15 Skid Row animals from “problematic situations” such as “poor body condition, inadequate access to food or water, and lack of necessary veterinary care.” The city has also set up mobile clinics on Skid Row, she said, to perform spay-neuter surgeries.
A few days after Bech Parker met Willard, she spotted her again. Athena, the malnourished pit bull with a skin condition, was not with her.
Bech Parker said that when she inquired about Athena, Willard seemed disoriented.
“I asked her, ‘Where’s your dog?’ ” Bech Parker said. “She was like, ‘I don’t know. I think she might be with my friend, but I don’t know. I’m going to go get her, but I don’t know where she is.’ ”
The post Some activists want dogs taken away from Skid Row homeless. The city says it’s complicated appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
