Inside Austin’s Animal Crisis

On a blustery evening in late October 2021, Sasha Aghili’s son noticed that their front door had blown wide open. As the child began to frantically search the Pflugerville home for the family’s six dogs, he couldn’t locate their 17-year-old chihuahua and alerted his mother. Aghili sprinted out the door barefoot into the gusting wind, desperate to find Jack-Jack, who had been showing early signs of dementia. In the ensuing days, she posted the canine’s information on Austin Lost and Found Pets and stood outside schools to hand out flyers.

The effort continued for months. Aghili scoured alleyways, crawled under bushes, and ventured into wooded areas, fueled by the hope of reuniting with her beloved senior dog, whom she’d rescued from Williamson County Animal Shelter in 2013. She knocked on more than 3,000 doors. While Aghili followed every lead of reported chihuahuas in the greater Austin area, she never found Jack-Jack. But through that ordeal, the bereaved owner did discover an endless stream of distressed canines: Some had hookworm, others were injured, many were emaciated—but all were without homes.

Recognizing the demand for help, Aghili learned how to trap animals and started her own nonprofit, Jack Jack’s Pack, at the end of that year. Since then, the group has rescued over 2,600 street dogs and amassed a volunteer network of more than 200 fosters. But as her altruistic reputation began to precede her, the requests spiraled. Now, a daily barrage of pleas erupt not only for displaced animals, but for canines on death row: dogs mere hours away from euthanasia at overcrowded regional shelters.     

“I miss messages from my own father because I get 400 text messages a day, sometimes 25 at a time where I’ve got blue dots bumped all the way down and I’m trying to catch up,” Aghili notes. Over the years, Jack Jack’s Pack has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for its volunteer efforts through community donations (and, at times, on their own dime). This July alone, the rescue coughed up $55,000 in vet bills.

“Right now, it feels like we’re the only option for so many people. And when you have that kind of pressure, especially when you care and you want to help, it’s awful,” Aghili says.

Caitlin Chapman knows the feeling all too well. In 2019 Chapman co-founded TRAPRS as a lost pet recovery nonprofit in Central Texas that could also rescue street dogs. “If we weren’t [finding] lost pets, we had a wonderful no-kill shelter here with open intake at the time,” she remembers. “But COVID happened two months after we started. So, all of a sudden, we went from this amazing idea of having an open-intake shelter and a place to take the dogs we rescued—to 1762863148, we have nowhere.”

Since 2011, Austin has boasted the title of the country’s largest no-kill city, a beacon of animal welfare to be admired and emulated. But peer a little closer, and the situation has taken a dire turn. Maxed out beyond capacity, the city’s municipal shelter, Austin Animal Services, has often scaled back to limited or even emergency-only intake in recent years. Animals sit in the shelter, sometimes doubled up in kennels or even confined to crates. With nowhere to take found or unwanted dogs and cats, locals are dumping them on the streets, where they face a daily fight for survival and continue to breed. Nonprofits and volunteers have begun to donate their time, homes, and even credit lines, but the demand is unrelenting. 

In its noble quest to save animals, Austin has quite literally gone to the dogs. So, how did we get here—and what the hell do we do now?

Pet Project

An animal lover her entire life, Dr. Ellen Jefferson graduated from vet school in 1997 and moved to Austin the following year to pursue her passion. In addition to working her job at an emergency hospital, she also began to volunteer at AAS, then called Town Lake Animal Center. At the time, the city was taking in 35,000 animals a year with only a 15% live-release rate (meaning nearly 30,000 did not make it out of the shelter alive). 

Dr. Jefferson helped where she could, performing spays and neuters or aiding injured animals with broken bones. But during a remodel at the center, they temporarily combined the surgery and euthanasia rooms into one shared space.  “For every spay I did, there would be 10 euthanasia,” she says. “I remember very specifically a mom dog came in, and they euthanized her first, and then they euthanized all of her puppies so that she wouldn’t see them [die] in front of her. It was just horrific.” 

She decided to start Emancipet, a preventative clinic in Austin that performs low-cost spays and neuters. After nearly a decade, the municipal shelter’s rate improved to 45% live release, but it wasn’t enough. Austin Pets Alive! had debuted as an advocacy group in 1997, and the concept of “no-kill” was becoming a global discussion. (By definition, a no-kill shelter saves at least 90% of animals in its care.) Dr. Jefferson chose to pivot once again and became APA’s executive director in 2008, which was a volunteer position at the time.

The city and shelter played ball with APA, giving them their planned euthanasia list nightly before it was too late. Volunteers would look at the list and say, Let’s get that dog on Craigslist or Facebook. Let’s see if anybody in the community will come forward to foster. 

Slowly, the nonprofit began to move the needle and got the local government on board. The city created the Austin No-Kill Priority List in 2010, and Mayor Lee Leffingwell and the council voted for the shelter to have a 90% live-release rate. Austin earned the title as the largest no-kill city in the country by 2011, and APA worked out an agreement to move into the Town Lake Animal Center the following year. By 2018, the live-release rate was steadfastly 98%—and the shelter still had intake open to the public. 

It was a golden era in animal welfare. Until it wasn’t. 

In the past seven years, live-release percentages have regularly fallen to or even dipped below the city’s agreed-upon rate of 95%, despite the number of animals in the shelter decreasing since 2019 and the budget steadily increasing. (The shelter’s 2025-2026 fiscal budget was recently approved at a whopping $25 million.) Precautions during the pandemic initially caused AAS to restrict intake starting in 2020, but it has consistently been limited or closed to emergency-only intakes since 2023. 

The shelter’s plight is understandable: With no kennels available and overflow dogs being crammed within small pop-up crates in a makeshift space, where exactly are the animals supposed to go? But with limited intake, owners or finders are now being asked to hang on to pets for at least several weeks if not months before they can be processed into the system. Which might work if it’s an owner’s surrender, but isn’t realistic for those who, say, find a litter of stray puppies on the side of the road.

“Let’s talk about the finders that can’t keep an animal, because this is where it gets disturbing,” says Jean Hubrath, a volunteer at AAS since 2012 and the founder of its Classic Canines program. “They will be turned away at the door. The security guard will pretty much chase them off the property. Some people have abandoned those animals on the premises because they legitimately can’t take ’em wherever they’re going.”

Dog Fight

While the city, nonprofits, and rescue groups all agree that there’s a burgeoning problem to solve, the $25-million-dollar question is “What—or who—is to blame?” Some people highlight the spiraling cost of living and return-to-office ordinances in Central Texas as the culprit, since they’ve compromised the resources and time that owners had to take care of their animals. Others list hefty pet deposit fees and increased breed restrictions within Austin-area housing that discriminate against larger dogs like pitbulls.

Because Austin is a no-kill city, unlike most Texas towns, some critics point the finger at big-hearted organizations like APA, who are saving at-risk animals from across the state by bringing them here—essentially making them Austin’s problem. “It always goes by urgency,” Hubrath says. “So, if you say you’re going to kill an animal, people will act here in Austin. If everyone thinks they’re safe, they become a lower priority.” 

But many rescues put the onus on Don Bland, who took over as chief animal services officer in 2019. According to the Austin Monitor, Bland received a vote of no-confidence from the Austin Advisory Commission in 2022 due to “his failure to provide accurate data, mismanagement of the stray-hold ordinance, misleading reports, and strained relations with partner organizations.” 

Fed up with Bland and the shelter’s all-but-closed intake, members of TRAPRS and other local animal welfare advocates and volunteers banded together in May 2024 for a peaceful protest against the city official, who they said was not committed to Austin’s no-kill mandate. While the protest did not lead to his removal, Bland was placed on paid administrative leave for an undisclosed reason in March 2025 and ultimately retired this May. 

Dr. Jefferson says that there are two fundamentally different schools of thought on animal welfare, leading to the schism in Austin. “People either believe wholeheartedly in prevention, or they believe wholeheartedly in no-kill,” she explains. 

The APA president and CEO puts the city in the first camp: believing there simply aren’t enough places for animals to go. “[They think] your job is to prevent them from being alive or decrease the population humanely, or insert mandatory elements like microchips or spay/neuter,” she says. “The underlying belief is the public is irresponsible, and that this is a necessary evil to have to euthanize all these animals.” 

APA and other local no-kill advocates suggest that while there is an overcrowding problem, that does not mean there are too many animals here to find homes.

“Based on data of how many homes there are, market research of people who have animals or are looking for animals, and how many dogs are actually in shelters, there is an overcrowding problem at shelters, but not necessarily an overpopulation,” says Julie Oliver, a former politician and current nonprofit leader who volunteers with AAS. 

But research is one thing, and public perception is another. When Dr. Jefferson said that “overpopulation was a myth” on an Instagram video in August, the public outcry was so strong that APA apologized and clarified their comments two days later. “The way I communicated was damaging and poorly executed…” she said in a written statement posted on their account. “I failed to lead with the data and context for our position, and I failed to center the lived experiences of those working every day in overcrowded shelters.” 

Other semantics are also up for debate, as the city and nonprofits argue whether a 95% live-release rate is the actual mandate or simply the goal. Previously called Austin Animal Center, AAS has recently changed its name and tune, now vocalizing that its mandate is to save 90% of animals in its care. They cite a signed resolution from 2019 in which the City of Austin avows “supporting an Austin Animal Center goal of a 95% or greater live-release rate.” But according to Austin Pets Alive!, the resolution was widely interpreted as a mandate for 95%. And they have a point: Up until this October, AAS wrote on its own website: “The City of Austin has mandated a 95% live release rate, and Austin Animal Center consistently exceeds that level.”

Pack Mentality

A daily scroll through the Nextdoor app has become an occasionally hopeful but mostly heartbreaking ritual for many Austinites, who pore through pleas of help as citizens find strays roaming the city (or worse, stumble upon their lifeless bodies). Virtual bulletin posts regarding found animals dominate the feed on a regular basis.

“My friends and I found four very starving ridgeback/boxer puppies yesterday in Austin, Texas.”

“Walking my two dogs south on the east side of shoal creek this morning around 11 am and were surrounded by 5 medium sized loose dogs who rushed at us growling and barking.”

“TWO DOGS FOUND – Springdale Rd. near Little Walnut Creek Trailhead… I can’t keep them long as I have a dog too.”   

“Rainbow alert: Deceased dog seen north bound Mopac.”

****

Rolando Fernandez, Jr., knew the enormous shoes he had to fill when he took over as interim chief of animal services this April. After 19 years of public service with the City of Austin, the Air Force veteran has worked in multiple civic departments, from the City Manager’s Office and the Financial Services Department to the Austin Convention Center. But animal welfare was a first for him. While he has received scrutiny for his lack of subject matter expertise, he says that the decision was in part by design. 

“I think that why I was brought here is because I don’t have the animal experience,” Fernandez says of his temporary appointment. “They were looking for somebody that had everything else, but to kind of provide some structure, leadership, management of fiscal responsibilities, procedure, [and] process.”

His task is unenviable, as a litany of complaints are frequently lodged at animal services. Hubrath says the shelter doesn’t update the Petfinder feature enough, making it hard for owners to find lost pets or adopters to match with new ones. Oliver notes that not all dogs get a daily walk, and volunteers have to go through a drawn-out orientation process just to attempt to help. And if you find a canine on the street, Chapman says, “311 still tells people to put the dog back where you found it.” 

While the interim chief is sympathetic to the hard decisions made daily at the shelter, he notes that ultimately, AAS has a responsibility to ensure public safety for humans. 

“What I’m seeing now is we have a lot of animals that are coming in that are just not adoptable,” he says. “They have a lot of concerns. Behavior issues. For example, they’re going to be mouthy, they’re going to be in your face, [they] want to chew on you. They have barrier reactions, meaning that they are overprotective of you. They don’t get along with kids. We see some that just don’t get along with men or women.”

APA vehemently disagrees. In the past, the nonprofit has been granted a 10-day evaluation period with dogs that were deemed a behavior issue to see how the canine was around people, other pups, on leash, etc. “I think there were three times in the last year that we declined on keeping a dog and working with it,” says Suzie Chase, APA’s community affairs officer. “But we’ve taken the majority of dogs on the behavior list.”

However, this fall, the city announced that it is creating a new Rescue Placement List of dogs where organizations like APA will have five days to take the animals once the list is posted on the fifth business day of every month. “If we don’t take them, then they’ll be on a euthanasia list for 48 hours, and they’ll be killed,” Chase says.

While the City of Austin and APA are regularly locked in stalemates, they do have moments of compromise. In August, the city council voted that AAS could now spay pregnant animals without contacting a rescue organization first. Dr. Jefferson called the measure “inhumane,” imploring the city to reconsider. During the Sept. 25 council meeting, an amended resolution proposed by Mayor Kirk Watson added a requirement that the city manager must notify APA when animals are lactating, giving the group three hours to pick them up before spaying occurs.

“Where there’s opportunities to work with others, we want to do that. We have to do that,” Fernandez says. “This problem is too big for one of us to solve on our own.”

Pregnant animals aside, everyone seems to agree that spaying and neutering are crucial components to combat the overcrowding. Every animal adopted from AAS is fixed before going to its new home. The city also works with the Austin Humane Society to fund its Community Cats program, in which they trap stray felines, spay or neuter them, and return them to the wild. In addition to budgeting over $1 million per year for free spay and neuter days with Emancipet Mobile, AAS has begun partnering with Greater Goods Charities to host free high-volume spay and neuter clinics for owned dogs and cats in the community. Since 2024, these five clinics have led to the spaying and neutering of more than 5,000 animals, and two more are planned for this November and early 2026.

To combat economic insecurity, APA recently hosted its first joint food distribution in Travis County with the Central Texas Food Bank on Sept. 26, and they plan to start hosting them quarterly. “The event was scheduled to start at 9, and it was amazing because there were already a hundred cars lined up,” Chase says. “By the end of it, we had 265 families that came through in vehicles to get food either for people or people and their pets. So, we know that the need is high, as it is in many, many communities right now.” 

Fernandez’s interim role ends in December, and the city is beginning a formal competitive process to bring a permanent director on board. This March, the city council adopted a five-year strategic plan that focuses on initiatives like more enrichment for the shelter animals (think daily walks and Kong balls), better public trust via data transparency, and enhanced support and mental health services for staff and volunteers to reduce burnout. 

They have their work cut out for them. In a post-pandemic world grappling with inflation, increased workloads, lack of affordable housing, and general uncertainty, the costs and commitment of owning an animal make the 95% live-release rate that much more elusive. And the pressure on shelters and nonprofits has burgeoned everywhere: Shelter Animals Count estimates that 5.8 million cats and dogs entered shelters and rescues across America in 2024, and the ASPCA reports that approximately 607,000 were euthanized. 

While Austin still has better numbers than any other city in the country, the success of its animal welfare is not guaranteed—it can only be maintained with the diligence of public officials, nonprofits, and, perhaps most importantly, local citizens. 

“Our city was the safest place for pets in America not too long ago,” Dr. Jefferson says. “And our city put money and resources behind that. That’s a really, really powerful thing. I don’t want to lose that.”