Miranda Wrongs: Horror, Grief, and a Message for the Future

This is Wynter, a deaf pup who is one of the missing OAS dogs. The left photo was taken while she was in foster care; the right image shows her at Miranda's before she disappeared.  photo: Wynter’s foster mom  

The wheels of the No-Kill bus fell off last month after news of buried secrets at Humboldt County-based Miranda’s Rescue hit the mainstream media. If the allegations are proven true, this case stands to become one of the most stunning betrayals in animal welfare history, with nearly 20 shelters, dozens of rescue groups, and hundreds of volunteers and families now desperate for information about what could be thousands of dogs who have gone missing since they were transferred in to Miranda’s Rescue starting in 2013 or earlier.

Every public shelter in California and beyond has been struggling with overcrowded kennels as our country’s wealth gap continues to widen, with too many pets losing their homes every day. But by all appearances, things looked hopeful in Oakland last June when the city shelter proudly announced that they'd cracked the code and achieved a 93% Live Release Rate (LRR), meaning the percentage of animals who leave the shelter alive. That figure represented a stunning achievement especially for a city bursting with bigger dogs like Shepherds, Huskies, Pit Bulls, and related mixes.

But there was a catch. The transfer partner that promised relief for a large number of Oakland’s dogs was Miranda’s Rescue, the shelter that now stands accused of shooting dogs and burying them in a mass grave on its property.

The Oakland Animal Shelter (OAS) alone has transferred 827 dogs to Miranda’s since 2020. And it seems likely that with numerous other transfer partners and space limits of its own (Miranda has just 60 kennels vs. the OAS’s 80), Miranda’s would’ve wrestled with the same math problem all shelters do: too many dogs and not enough places to hold them during what may be a long wait for adopters (my own rescue organization, BADRAP, typically takes one to five months to match each of its adult large breed dogs to new families, a common wait time for California adoption programs).

With so much shared challenge and a finite pool of ready homes, there is reason to believe that many - perhaps even most - of the missing dogs may have met the same fate as those who were unearthed from the shallow grave on Miranda’s property. It’s possible we may never know the true number. 

The Optics of Saving Lives

How can this even happen? For one, it’s easy for public shelters to develop a blind spot when key decisions are driven by the pressure of showing high Live Release Rates. This  metric measures a shelter's lifesaving success and is the standard benchmark for reaching “No-Kill” status, with 90% LRR or higher being the holy grail (the industry-supported model accepts that 10% of animals will be euthanized for behavior or medical extremes). 

Being able to boast No Kill status is great for optics, signalling to a demanding public and discerning donors that, yes, this shelter’s adoptable/treatable animals are surviving the odds, an enviable victory. You’d think someone might have questioned the math at some point, but humans are fallible and we generally want to believe the best of each other.  Still, learning that adoptable/treatable pets may have been sent to a shooting death reveals this as a deeply callous shell game, heartbreaking for those who unknowingly sent dogs to this fate and unforgivably cruel for the animals themselves.

Photos of dogs shared by the various surrendering parties show warm, trusting faces. Many are bright-eyed and smiling, while others look confused or fearful. It’s an understatement to say that the people who loved them are reeling, whether they were the shelter staff and volunteers who cared for these dogs before their transfers or the families who reluctantly surrendered a dog they could no longer care for.  

If that describes you, we have a message for you and we hope you’ll find your way here to read it. 

Dear friends, 

We know many of you and share your outrage. Grieve deeply for those dogs. They deserve all the tears. But please don’t disappear! The bubble has burst and our entire animal welfare eco-system has been turned upside down. Rebuilding it into something that prioritizes humane solutions and full transparency is going to take a lot of hard talk and even some painful compromise. 

We already know we can do hard things. Our collective pain is like rocket fuel. While investigations continue, we urge you to practice healthy boundaries and to find ways to process and heal. But do come back when you’re ready and help us solve this problem. Once we move on to the repair and rebuild stage, your passion will be needed, perhaps more than ever before. 

Until then, please hold a thought for the innocent dogs lost. They deserved better than the humans who failed them. Let’s work together to ensure this never happens again. 

– Donna Reynolds, BADRAP