Amid Miranda’s Rescue Probe, Lawmakers Push Animal Shelter Oversight

The investigation into rescue owner Shannon Miranda began after two local animal advocates, Jennifer Raymond and Jenna Moore, went onto the 50-acre property at night and dug up the bodies of eight dogs.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office served an initial search warrant on the property in May before teaming up with the FBI, the USDA and the California Attorney General to execute a second warrant on June 23. During that second search, investigators discovered many more animal carcasses.

Moore and Raymond’s nighttime mission did not come out of nowhere. Raymond and Sabrina Woods, a volunteer at the Solano County Animal Shelter, had filed dozens of public records requests with cities and counties across the state that found nearly 2,000 dogs had been transferred to Miranda’s Rescue since 2023.

The sanctuary was zoned to house about 60 dogs, according to permitting paperwork filed with the county. The numbers simply did not add up.

Currently, there is no state agency responsible for regulating or overseeing animal shelters and rescues. Animal welfare and animal control fall under a patchwork of local jurisdictions, obscuring the full picture.

“ We don’t have a strong centralized framework of data collection,” Lee said.

He introduced AB 631 last year, which would have required rescues like Miranda’s to keep and publicly share information about what happened to the animals they take in.

The bill, which received no opposing votes in the Legislature, did not make it out of the Senate Appropriations Committee for “nebulous reasons,” Lee said. Some rescue groups argued the reporting requirements shouldn’t apply to them because of “logistical constraints.” Lee hopes the public attention on the issue will provide renewed momentum for lawmakers to pass the law.

“This is what was missing,” Raymond said.

Beyond data collection, Lee said there is a mismatch between how people think about their pets and how the law treats them.

“If someone was like, ‘I’m gonna kidnap your cat or dog,’ you’d probably get really mad and, you know, try to throw hands, right?” Lee said. As it currently stands, the law treats pets as “moderately valued personal property,” he said, rather than how many people see them “as extensions of your family.”

Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal said Monday it is not illegal in California to shoot a dog in the head. “ You just can’t do it in a malicious manner.” Investigators will have to determine “whether or not someone tortured, wounded or killed a living animal,” he said, to prove animal cruelty laws were broken.

So far, Miranda has given investigators shifting accounts of how and why he euthanized dogs on his property, according to the search warrant, obtained by KQED. Initially, he said “his preference is to shoot the dogs in the back of the head but was confronted with some of the eight dogs found, which had apparent bullet holes in the eye socket,” according to the warrant.

Miranda told detectives that he sometimes sedated the animals before shooting them, but when asked if the eight dogs would have traces of sedatives in their system, “he backtracked and said he did not always do it and only had it on hand when it was donated to him,” according to the warrant.

Miranda’s attorney, Allison Jackson, declined to comment beyond directing KQED to an online statement sent to a local blogger.

The rescue remains open and operational. Honsal urged patience as investigators go through the painstaking process of identifying the deceased dogs’ remains and tracing them to shelters.

“It shouldn’t have to take your own independent sleuthing… digging up eight buried dead bodies,” to get transparency, Lee said.

Zoë Ferrigno contributed to this story.