The History of the Los Angeles Animal Services Department

The Los Angeles Animal Services department is the main agency responsible for the health, welfare and management of domestic and wild animals within the city of Los Angeles. 

This historical archive chronicles some of the activities of this agency, primarily from as early as the 1910s thru 2010.  During this time Los Angeles itself changed drastically, increasing in population at a rapid clip, transitioning from a mixed urban and rural space to a dense urban city, introducing its famous freeways, suffering riots and racial unrest, and emerging as the city people associate today with palm trees, movie stars, and beaches, all of which include a story about the animals that live among them.

The Animal Services department primarily deals with dogs and cats, but this is only the beginning.  Over their history they have dealt with moving animals during wildfires, defining the nature of aggression, managing coyotes in the city, anxiously addressing the problems of overpopulation and euthanasia, and inventing the modern structure of pet keeping that we all know today: licensing, leashes, vaccines, adoption, and, of course, dog-catching on the streets of LA.

The material hosted on this site was collected by Dr. Steven Feldman, who served as a veterinarian for LAAS for twenty years.  The material has been catalogued and digitized by the Labyrinth Project at UCLA. It is made available here through the generosity of the Department and the City of Los Angels.  The physical materials reside in the LA City Archives. 

Explore stories from the archive below: