For Faith Easdale, it’s the running that breaks her heart the most.
After dogs are abandoned in the middle of nowhere, they will chase after the owners who dumped them. “Even if they’ve been abused, they run after the vehicle,” says Easdale, director of the foster-based Dream Fetchers Project Rescue. “They run their little legs off.”
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She knows this because, sometimes, perpetrators are caught on grainy security camera videos, forcing dogs out of their cars in empty parking lots, in the desert adjacent to remote housing tracts, or by lonely highways. In one instance, a man in a hooded sweatshirt picked up a pit bull terrier and hurled the dog over a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
These abandonments happen on scorching hot days, with coyotes circling, with no food or water for miles.
After 10 years rescuing abandoned dogs, it’s hard not to lose faith in humanity, Easdale says. “I wish I didn’t even know about all this stuff, so I could have a normal life,” she says. “You can’t unsee that stuff.”
The number of unwanted dogs, especially in the inland regions of Southern California, has become a major crisis for animal rescue groups.
“Honestly, we’ve been past the breaking point for about a year and a bit,” says Mike Ryan, an independent rescuer based in Apple Valley who takes in abandoned dogs.
In that timeframe, donations have plummeted more than 75%, Ryan says. A call for donations used to earn him a porch full of dog food; now, he’s lucky if he gets a few boxes. Adoptions are down as well, he says.
“I have personally not been able to find a home for a dog for over two years,” Ryan says. “Before, I could find them like crazy.”
In May 2025, Riverside County Animal Services announced its shelters were 220% over their limit, and in September, San Bernardino County Animal Care announced its shelters were “at full capacity” and offered free adoptions.
“We have more animals in our shelters than I’ve ever seen,” agreed Lesley Huennekens, a field commander with the Riverside Department of Animal Services. “It is definitely worse than it used to be.”
The cause of the crisis
The problem is the result of both intentional breeding and a lack of spaying and neutering, Huennekens said. In the county’s four shelters, all of which are at or over capacity, Riverside Department of Animal Services employees see both accidental litters and purebred dogs, including Belgian Malinois, huskies, French bulldogs — breeds popularized in movies or that are “trending online,” Huennekens said.
There’s “no one reason” for this uptick, she said. Instead, she points to a nationwide shortage of veterinarians, a culture that views animals as “disposable,” and a lack of access to spay and neuter services, especially during COVID, when some veterinarians were forced to temporarily halt those services.
Spay and neuter services are harder to access in more remote areas, said Melissa Durston, director of community outreach for the Spayce Project, a nonprofit that hosts spay and neuter clinics and offers other veterinary services in underserved areas. Many pet owners are coming from the high desert, which Durston says includes communities along the route to Las Vegas, such as Adelanto, Apple Valley, Victorville, Hesperia, Lucerne Valley, Barstow, Daggett and Newberry Springs.
“People are coming to our clinics, walking three miles with their dog, using a shoelace as a collar or a leash, or plastic bags tied in knots as a leash,” Durston says. “They’re trying to do the right thing.”
In the high desert, Durston said she sees people living off the grid, and many don’t have the money or transportation to get their dogs fixed. “If you are struggling to put gas in your car, or feed your children, or whatever, and someone hits you with a $600 spay or neuter bill, it’s not going to happen,” she said.
Spay and neuter clinics
The Spayce Project hosts clinics in shelters, grooming facilities, community centers and even thrift stores. At a clinic in the Lucerne Valley in early September, the Spayce team fixed 52 dogs in one day. The nonprofit, primarily funded through grants and private donations, doesn’t charge pet owners for their services.
“We never want to take someone’s last $5,” Durston said. But many pet owners will donate — anywhere from $100 to a handful of change.
Durston hopes these clinics help address the root of the problem, and that, soon, “we’ll see less dumping, we’ll see less suffering, we’ll see less unwanted litters, and we’ll start to see a reduction in the shelters that are busting at the seams.”
But for now, some shelters are so full, they’re unable to take in more animals, advocates say. Plus, some owners might want to avoid the questions a shelter might ask — like why they’re giving the dog up and what its history is, advocates say. Shelters may have owners fill out paperwork when they surrender an animal.
The fate of these unwanted dogs is often grim. Some dogs wind up dumped on the street. Easdale estimates that she gets “at least” 10 people reaching out to her per day about abandoned dogs, most of which are found in the Inland Empire.
“It’s out of control,” she says. “We can’t keep up.”
The calls keep coming
Faith Easdale knows she doesn’t have a normal life, but she can’t turn her back on the nonstop pleas for help.
When people see an abandoned dog, they call or text her, or when someone sees a video on social media of a dog wandering, they tag her. She gets calls from the San Bernardino Airport security guards and the California Highway Patrol.
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When she gets a call, she drops everything, driving for hours in her Jeep with two transport crates packed in the trunk. Then, when she spots the dogs, she sets up the crates wired with a trip pan, baiting the dogs with food or water, and she waits — sometimes for days.
About half of the abandoned dogs she picks up are left in desert regions, she said — areas such as Thermal, Coachella, Hinkley, and near the Salton Sea. “These monsters will go where they think no one sees them,” she said.
In the desert, nature takes its course. It’s “a horrible death,” said rescuer Mike Ryan. “I wouldn’t wish that upon my worst enemy.”
Huennekens said Riverside Animal Services has not heard increased reports of dumped dogs in the desert. “If that’s happening, it’s not being reported to us,” she said.
‘No place for them to go’
Abandoning an animal is illegal under California law, and San Bernardino County Animal Care “conducts public education and outreach, including in desert communities, to educate residents about responsible pet ownership and available resources and alternatives to abandonment,” said Francis Delapaz, a communications officer for the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.
Rescue work has taken over every corner of Easdale’s life, it seems. Speaking by phone, she wonders midconversation if she’s gotten messages about dogs in need. Easdale works part-time as a medical esthetician in a dermatologist’s office, but her clients understand — the dogs come first. “I tell my clients that, ‘Hey, I can’t come in today. I’m sorry, I have to go save lives.’ And they all put up with me.”
But lately, her rescue has hit its limit. “We’ve killed ourselves rescuing these dogs, but there’s no place for them to go,” Easdale said. “Everybody’s full.”
Boarding alone costs $3,000 per week, she said, and there can be thousands of dollars of veterinary bills on top of that. “If something miraculous doesn’t happen, we’re just going to get to the point where we’re like, OK, we can’t do it,” she said.
Sometimes, when she’s tagged in a video or receives messages about a dumped dog, she knows she doesn’t have the resources to take it in. “It just kills me when I’m like, ‘What am I going to do with that dog?’ ”
Mike Ryan, a retired English teacher, has taken in more than 70 foster dogs, including six litters of puppies, since he started doing this work in December 2020. Rescuing dogs is “not inexpensive,” he said — there’s the expense of food and medicine, but also the hidden costs of keeping the lights on and the air conditioning running so the litter of puppies in his garage stays cool.
It’s eaten up his retirement savings — about $190,000, he estimates. Now, he raises money on GoFundMe and takes substitute teaching shifts to afford the costs of rescuing.
“I was planning on traveling and vacationing,” he says goodnaturedly. “Here I sit, rescuing dogs.”
The problem has gotten so severe that dogs that survive abandonment will find each other, breed, and form feral packs, Easdale said. Reports of feral dogs attacking livestock have emerged from remote regions of Riverside County. Humans also have been attacked — in 2018, three loose dogs mauled a woman in Anza, and, last year, a pack of stray dogs killed a woman in Perris Hill Park in San Bernardino.
Easdale blames the spike on the COVID pet adoption boom. Now that many people have returned to working from an office, the dogs they adopted during the pandemic are “inconvenient,” she said. Ryan also cites the economy and inflation as contributing factors.
People who abandon their pets fall into a handful of categories, in his experience, Ryan said: There’s backyard breeders who can’t sell their puppies. Then, there are those who adopted high-maintenance breeds, like a husky, and didn’t know what they were getting into, or people who adopted a dog with behavioral issues but didn’t take the time to train them. There also are owners who fall ill or die without a plan for what to do with their pet. The last group is the “cruel SOBs,” Ryan said.
Huennekens encouraged anyone who sees a person dumping a pet to report it to Animal Services. Willful abandonment is a misdemeanor, but the charge can be elevated to a felony depending on where the animal is dumped, Huennekens said — for example, in the hot desert with no access to shade or water. “We do take those crimes very seriously,” she said. “We need to know about these things.”
Keeping the faith
Animal rescue has made Easdale encounter dogs in horrific conditions — pregnant, left in ice chests or dog food bags, bitten by coyotes, in temperatures over 100 degrees.
“You meet a lot of great people through this, but you also see the ultimate worst in people that dump these dogs,” Ryan said.
But Easdale remembers one dog that took her months to track down — a Westie running along the side of the highway between Victorville and Apple Valley. Finally, down a dirt road, she found the dog huddled in a sliver of shade under a cactus. Easdale took him to the emergency vet to tend to his injuries.
One of the vet techs adopted him and named him Ghost. To this day, his owner sends Easdale photos of Ghost — sprawled in the backseat of a car, stretched out belly-up on the couch, perched on the front of a kayak. “That dog is dearly, dearly loved,” Easdale said.
Getting updates like these “is what keeps me going,” Easdale said. “I look at the ones that I’ve saved and I’m like, yeah, well, this got put in front of me for a reason.”
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