San Francisco’s Animal Care and Control (SF ACC) is refusing to accept LOST, ABANDONED, and STRAY FRIENDLY CATS and KITTENS! According to Director Virginia Donohue, they no longer take in “healthy cats who are living outside.”
All over the city, people are calling in to SF ACC asking for help and are being told to put cats BACK ON THE STREETS, violating SF ACC’s own Mission Statement, the San Francisco Municipal Code, and state laws.
On Valentines Day this year, I was driving down Bayshore Blvd. when I heard a panicked orange cat screaming as it dodged traffic in an intersection. When I pulled over and called to him, he literally ran to me, shaking with relief. A gorgeous burnt orange tabby, dirty but incredibly friendly and a good weight, I was able to examine him easily and could feel a microchip in his neck, and knew he was a lost owned cat.
I brought him home temporarily, keeping him separate from my many foster kittens, and called SF ACC to reunite him with his owners. However, the moment SF ACC heard that he was found on the street I was told to “put him back where I found him.” They didn’t even let me finish explaining before they insisted he should be returned to the intersection where I found him running for his life, claiming it wasn’t their responsibility to help reunite him with his owners.
They refused to even scan him for a chip, and told me I should post on NextDoor, instead of asking ACC for help. They said he would find his own way home, and when I explained that he was found in extreme danger they said that “cats cross roads all the time” and if they got hit that was at their owner’s risk.
They insisted that he was now my responsibility, while also demanding that I should put him back at the intersection. Finally, after I insisted, they agreed to scan him for a chip, but simultaneously said that if I couldn’t keep him with me because of my kitten fosters, that I put him back where I found him once he’d been scanned.
When I questioned how practical it would be to scan him and contact his owners after he was returned to the street (What would I tell the owners when they were contacted if I didn’t have the cat?), they told me they no longer had time for me and hung up.
At the time, there were only about 20 cats in shelter, a majority in foster, and 1 cat up for adoption, more than enough space to care for one lost ginger cat while he was reunited with his desperately worried owners. - Alena Ja
This has happened to countless others:
A woman who tried to bring a clearly stray, still lactating, friendly mother cat to ACC after her kittens (born in her yard) had been weaned and adopted out was told immediately, without even looking at the cat or letting her explain the cat was unfixed and clearly unowned, that the cat was probably a lost cat and to put it back outside where she found her, to undoubtedly get pregnant again.
A good Samaritan who found a dazed friendly cat wandering her street was told to put the cat back without even examining the cat for injury.
A woman who rescued two friendly cats (a mother cat who brought her kittens to the door and a tom cat she rescued from the side of a freeway), was told by SF ACC to keep the cats and look for owners for a month. When she was unsuccessful advertising through social media and flyers, she was then told a month later by SF ACC that she had kept the cats for too long and was now considered their owner and would have to pay SF ACC to surrender them. The mother cat was reimpregnated by the tom cat shortly after.
San Francisco deserves better than this. We deserve our only open door public municipal shelter to value animal life, and look for ways to help, not actively neglect our city’s cats.
For decades SF ACC has been a model shelter, helping to rescue hundreds of thousands of cats, diverting them from life on the streets and preventing them from adding to stray and feral overpopulation. They did the work, reuniting lost cats with owners, adopting out friendly cats to new homes, saving injured and sick cats’ lives.
Suddenly, just when they’ve moved into a new $76.4 million brand new facility, they want to abandon the cats that need them most and put responsibility on the untrained and unfunded public to take in, care for, and find homes for animals they find, instead of SF ACC, which specifically hires, trains, and gets funding (our tax payer dollars) for caring for animals.
Please help us protest this inhumane change by signing our petition at