Jennifer Raymond’s voice breaks as she describes the scene.
“Lifting those dead dogs’ bodies out of the hole and looking at their little faces…” She trails off.
Raymond saw this coming. I didn’t.
As a member of the Friends of the Berkeley Animal Care Services (FoBACS) board, I helped authorize dog transfers to Miranda’s Rescue, a purported “no-kill” animal sanctuary (founded in 1998) in Fortuna, a remote Humboldt County town. Charmaine, one of the dogs Raymond pulled from the ditch, was one of them. She’d come to Berkeley Animal Care Services as a stray on December 11, 2025. On a late-January outing along Albany’s Solano Avenue, the affectionate, loyal, and eager-to-please German shepherd and pit bull terrier mix ate dog biscuits at a café and played fetch. A few months later, the FoBACS board received the request for funds to transfer her to Miranda’s, along with three other dogs that were later saved from the sanctuary.
Since January 2026, hundreds of dogs made similar journeys from animal shelters statewide, including Oakland Animal Services, Napa County Animal Shelter and Adoption Center, and the City of Stockton Animal Services Center. There were dogs that arrived at Miranda’s all the way from the Maui Humane Society in Hawaii. Founder Shannon Miranda charged upwards of $500 to take them into his care.
This article was featured in Alta’s weekly newsletter
SUBSCRIBE
“I’ve been working on trying to shut Miranda’s down for over 20 years,” says Raymond, who founded the Humboldt Spay/Neuter Network. “I couldn’t get traction until I bought this house next door and watched really closely. I knew animals were suffering and being killed.”
She purchased the large Victorian with a view last year. One evening in April, Raymond and fellow rescuer Jenna Moore trespassed on Miranda’s property to collect evidence of abuse. They found eight dog carcasses, all actively bleeding from bullet wounds, that were still warm to the touch. Two still had their puppy teeth.
Nobody Would Listen
Raymond and Moore turned the dogs’ remains over to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office on April 22. In a press release, the office announced that it had received “credible information” supporting allegations of felony animal abuse, animal cruelty, fraud, and conspiracy associated with Miranda’s Rescue.
“My staff, volunteers, and I love the animals we serve,” Miranda wrote in a June 18 statement posted on the sanctuary’s website. “We work tirelessly to rehabilitate them and find safe, appropriate homes whenever possible.… Whenever euthanasia has been necessary, I have notified local authorities in advance.”
On May 1, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Major Crimes Division conducted the first search on the sanctuary grounds, where it found the remains of a horse and a small animal suspected to be a dog. In a second search conducted over a month later, officials excavated open fields that revealed two mass graves containing 117 intact dog bodies. In addition, 21 canine skulls, hundreds of bones, and six loose microchips were located in another nearby dig site.
The remains of 70 dogs were examined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and forensic veterinarians, who determined that the cause of death of many was gunshot wounds. Officials suspect that the animals were killed inside a barn, where, subsequently, bullet casings, blood spatters, and 661 dog collars were found.
“Nobody in a Podunk little county could find homes for the numbers of dogs [Miranda] was taking in,” Raymond says. “There have been rumors all around this county about him shooting dogs, his brother shooting dogs, throwing dead dogs into the river when the water was high. It took my doing something illegal to actually get law enforcement to do something.”
As of this writing, no charges have been filed and Miranda’s Rescue remains open. Miranda has admitted to shooting dogs that he claimed had advanced behavioral or medical challenges and could not be rehabilitated. In a June 23 press conference, Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal said that since Miranda’s is essentially an unregulated animal sanctuary, there are no laws under which it could be shut down.
“He’s allowed to operate his business at this time,” Honsal said. “He has not been criminally charged.”
Dogs, cats, and birds remain on the site to this day; animal control officers check the property three times a week.
The Case for Spay-Neuter Programs
According to Raymond, the horrors of Miranda’s Rescue are a symptom of a bigger problem. “There are simply too many animals being born,” she says. The math is simple: The animal birth rate outpaces the human birth rate, resulting in more animals than adopters. To resolve this, and prevent the possibility of another Miranda’s, pet owners need to spay and neuter their animals.
But recent statewide efforts have been more directed toward campaigns aligned with the no-kill movement. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom enacted the Animal Shelter Assistance Act, allocating $50 million for alternative resources to reduce the use of euthanasia on healthy and treatable animals in California animal shelters.
According to California for All Animals—a group that provides support and resources to animal shelters—spay-and-neuter initiatives received initial funding of $10 million from the 2021 act, plus another $3 million in renewals and an additional $3 million to support Fresno-area shelters recover from pandemic-era stoppages.
Raymond says that’s simply not enough.
“[Officials] ignored the source of the problem,” she says. “In California, we’ve been building animal shelters for 160 years, and we haven’t ever solved the problem. My feeling is, let’s try something different.”
A Call for Accountability
As a longtime animal advocate, I know that rescuing animals runs on trust. But as the discoveries at Miranda’s Rescue have shown, trust is not always enough. The California Animal Welfare Association—also known as CalAnimals—wants to codify regulations for shelters, breeders, and brokers. As a sanctuary, Miranda’s falls squarely under this umbrella.
In a June 30 article published on its website, CalAnimals CEO Jill Tucker wrote that the state’s rescue framework is broken. “One thing has become increasingly clear: California’s current system leaves significant gaps in oversight that can allow problems to go undetected until animals have already suffered.”
The nonprofit group is developing a proposal for a bill that would mandate the licensing of animal handlers, formalize protocol for shelter inspections, and enforce documentation of animal histories.
Some dog owners want even more assurance. San Francisco–based attorney and husky rescuer Bethany Lobo believes questions need to be asked of every taxpayer-funded municipal facility and nonprofit rescue that transfers animals. She believes that documenting transfers promotes transparency, leading to better outcomes.
“If we treat every transferring entity as a victim before we ask these questions, there will be another Miranda’s,” Lobo wrote in a lengthy Facebook post. “There have been many premature declarations of victimhood. Many [shelters] sent multiple (often dozens and in some cases hundreds) of dogs to their likely deaths over many years. Public scrutiny of their decisions at this juncture is essential.”
One Happy Ending
Miranda’s Rescue survivor Cody is savoring his new life.
Heather Shumaker and her family adopted Cody from Napa County Animal Shelter and Adoption Center on June 30. Formerly named Buddy, the young Staffordshire and pit bull mix was originally surrendered to Napa County Animal Shelter and Adoption Center before transferring to Miranda’s. After the allegations, Napa brought him and a few other dogs back in late May—a move echoed by many other shelters, including Berkeley Animal Care Services, Oakland Animal Services, and San Jose Animal Care Center.
“We feel very lucky to have him (and I think he feels really grateful to be out of the shelter environment),” Shumaker wrote in a Facebook message to me. “Honestly, he is very easygoing and has a pretty calm demeanor. He isn’t really showing signs of anxiety or trauma.”
Cody is still adjusting, but Shumaker is encouraged.
“We picked him because my son was drawn to him from the get-go. It just got better from there.”•
Allison Landa is the author of Bearded Lady, a memoir. She writes, teaches, and coaches from her home in Berkeley, CA.
