The dog on the event T-shirt is named Bootsie. He came to Pasadena Humane as a stray after the January 2025 Eaton Fire, and was later adopted by an Altadena family.
This morning at Brookside Park at the Rose Bowl, 360 N. Arroyo Blvd., from 8 a.m. to noon, the 28th annual Wiggle Waggle Walk & Run — one of Pasadena Humane’s largest annual fundraisers — gets underway. The proceeds go to the animal ICU, foster care, the kitten nursery, wildlife rehabilitation, the pet food pantry and the Helping Paws pet owner assistance program. Pasadena Now reported that the 2025 edition of the walk raised more than $350,000.
What the pantry and Helping Paws pay for is the reason Bootsie’s story is rarer than it should be.
The German shepherd in the kennel can sit, stay and shake. It is housebroken. It has, in Chris Ramon’s description, “wonderful dispositions and temperaments” and “so much love to give.” It will wait, by his estimate, three times longer for a home than a 15-pound dog with personality quirks in the next run over.
The reason, the president and CEO of Pasadena Humane said, is not the dog. It is the lease.
Ramon traces a rise in owner surrenders to pressures he says were pushing people toward relinquishment long before the Eaton Fire: financial insecurity, housing insecurity, a rise in landlord clauses barring dogs over 40 pounds, and the price of access to care at general-practice clinics. National data tracks the same trajectory. Shelter Animals Count, a shelter-data nonprofit, estimated in its 2025 Annual Data Report that owner relinquishments were 30% of U.S. community intakes in 2025, up from 29% in 2024. Michelson Found Animals’ Pet-Inclusive Housing Initiative, in a January 2025 report, found that only about 8% of U.S. rental properties are free of restrictive pet policies. The American Veterinary Medical Association reported in February 2026 that 81% of veterinarians surveyed said clients were more cost-sensitive in 2025 than the year before, up from 72%.
“It’s a little bit heartbreaking,” Ramon said, “to walk by that German Shepherd who will sit and lay down and who is just incredibly intelligent and has so much love to give because of the size and breed that they are.”
Adopters, Ramon said, are defaulting to cats, kittens, and smaller or medium-sized dogs — the animals that fit under weight caps. The demand side of the pattern is visible in the national housing data: Michelson Found Animals’ August 2025 Pets & Housing Data report found 72% of U.S. renters said they had difficulty finding pet-friendly housing.
Ramon’s operating premise follows from the diagnosis. “If you want to help animals,” he said, “you have to help people.” The shelter’s garage now functions as a seven-day-a-week pantry handing out wet and dry food, blankets, carriers, crates and flea medication, all free, with the goal, Ramon said, of “keeping animals in the loving homes that they already have.”
The pantry sits inside a broader program called Helping Paws, which offers subsidized vaccines and spay-and-neuter, free microchips, and a medical voucher program drawing on existing relationships with area veterinary clinics. Enrollment, Ramon said, had reached “more than 400% of the community that we serve” even before the heat and fire. A December 2024 Pasadena Humane program summary reported that the pet food pantry served more than 4,100 pets in 2024, up 66% from the prior year. The shelter told Spectrum News 1 in October 2025 that services delivered through Helping Paws — a throughput measure distinct from the enrollment figure Ramon cited — were running about 165% above the prior year.
“Nobody should have to choose between feeding themselves and feeding their pets,” Ramon said.
The industry representing landlords has publicly favored what it calls a balanced approach. In a 2024 statement relayed by the pet-care publication Kinship during California’s debate over state pet-restriction legislation, Debra Carlton, executive vice president of the California Apartment Association, said the association favored “a more balanced approach” that could include higher pet deposits. The trade publication Multifamily Executive, summarizing the Pet-Inclusive Housing Initiative’s January 2025 Outlook, reported that pet-inclusive policies were associated with residents staying up to 21% longer.
The composition of the shelter’s dog population has shifted over the course of Ramon’s career, he said. When he entered the field professionally, pit bull mixes and chihuahuas were the main population in any shelter. Now, he said, there is no single primary group being surrendered — but a primary group is adopted “very, very quickly.”
The Eaton Fire compressed the dynamic. During the fire, Ramon said, Pasadena Humane “stripped back a lot of our operations,” and what staff primarily told people was: “If you need help, we are here to help.” Ramon himself was among the evacuated. In a January 8, 2025 program update, the shelter reported it had taken in more than 300 animals by the evening of that day. A January 2026 LAist retrospective reported that Pasadena Humane had helped more than 1,500 pets and wildlife during the fire and its aftermath. Pasadena Now’s January 30, 2025 reporting put the shelter’s fire-related pet reunifications at more than 1,000, including more than 800 through its field Strike Team.
Many owners who evacuated, Ramon said, did not anticipate that evacuation would end in surrender — did not account for the home remediation and disinfecting their return would require. Financial insecurity and the lack of pet-friendly housing, he said, were the through-line between displacement and relinquishment. “The commonality that is shared between those two different situations,” Ramon said, “is financial insecurity and lack of pet-friendly housing can lead to people being forced to make these very heartbreaking decisions, which is pet surrender.”
Since the pandemic, Pasadena Humane has brought back its public training program, led by certified professional dog trainers. Classes run from “puppy play school” to what Ramon called “one of our most popular dog training classes” — reactive rovers. The shelter offers several-week courses and one-on-one coaching, and some adopted dogs leave with a subsidized training package bundled in, an approach the shelter pairs with what Ramon described as a holistic practice combining “traditional shelter medicine” with “newer behavior medicine.”
Ramon connects the programs to a four-word set of core values the organization abbreviates LIC — “learning, integrity, collaboration, and kindness” — which, he said, are “not just something that lives on a poster board in our break rooms.”
“I think the days of, I work with animals because I don’t like people, those days are behind us,” Ramon said. “You have to care about people just as much as you care about animals.”
There is a saying in animal welfare, Ramon said: “I would live in my car with my animal before ever giving them up.”
Kitten season, meanwhile, has arrived. “Just yesterday we took in more than 20 underage kittens,” Ramon said. Pasadena Humane, he said, is one of very few shelters in Los Angeles County with a foster program robust enough to take one-day-old kittens, raised by volunteers until they are old enough to be adopted.
This morning’s walk funds what Ramon called “the gold standard in care” for animals at the shelter and in foster homes. The walkers’ T-shirts carry a picture of Bootsie, who came through the fire and out the other side into an Altadena home.
“It can often feel like it’s raining kittens,” Ramon said.
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