Animal shelters are widely seen as places where adorable, huggable cats and dogs sit waiting for potential owners to adopt them and families to bring them into their homes, making them members. A new documentary, however, says shelters have quietly assumed the power to determine who deserves to love and who does not, and race weighs heavily in that determination.
“Brown and Bonded: Against the Odds” points out the ways shelters have adopted the U.S.’s deep-seated race and class attitudes and used them to determine who gets to bring home and love an animal and who is rejected.
The documentary shows viewers the regular stories about the desperate need for pet ownership and the responsibilities and joys that come with rescuing a pet, adopting it, and taking it out of overcrowded shelters, where animals are at risk.
James Evans, founder and CEO of Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity (CARE), directed the feature documentary, which shows the differences between the heartwarming, empowering world of rescued animals and the harsh realities of animals locked behind steel doors in cramped shelter cages.
He told the AmNews he is looking to challenge what he sees as one of the most persistent contradictions in animal welfare: Shelters say they are desperate to place animals in loving homes, yet many still require Black and Brown families to prove they are worthy of pet companionship, something other people are automatically assumed to deserve.
“Being anything other than white within the United States adds an unnecessary burden to life. Even seeking pet companionship doesn’t prevent Black and Brown people from experiencing this hardship, as many assume it would,” Evans said.
“Brown and Bonded” follows people of color in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Minnesota and documents the many ways they have been rejected during the animal adoption process. Evans said these are not isolated incidents but part of an established national pattern.
Data from Shelter Animals Count, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)-affiliated organization that collects data about animal shelters in the United States and Canada, estimated that 5.8 million dogs and cats were in U.S. shelters and rescues in 2025, and 597,000 were euthanized. The ASPCA’s national shelter statistics also show that animals — especially large dogs — are staying longer in shelters than they did five years ago, making the space crisis in shelters worse every day.
Evans said that while people of color are harmed by discriminatory adoption practices, the animals also suffer when organizations insist on enforcing narrow definitions of the “perfect” adopter.
“Animals really should not be in the shelter,” Evans said. “Think about what the animals are facing and their current condition: They could be in a 4×6 container, but the executive director will say it’s okay for this animal to live in this 4×6 container, even when they’re only walking 15 minutes a day. But if you happen to be of the wrong nature or born into the wrong class and you’re coming there, … and you’re in a 1,200-square-foot apartment, it could be considered small, but it’s much, much bigger than where the dog is currently living.”
Animal welfare’s gatekeeping roots
The ASPCA was founded in New York City in 1866 by Henry Bergh, primarily to protect working horses that had to pull carts and livestock that faced abuse. Nine days after the organization received its charter, New York state passed one of the first strong anti-cruelty laws in the U.S., which let the ASPCA investigate abuse and make arrests. This law became a model for humane societies across the country.
However, Evans points out that the animal welfare movement developed within specific class and race structures.
“Animal welfare started in the 1800s, and it predates women’s rights; it predates emancipation,” he said. Formed during the 19th century, the animal welfare issue emerged as a field largely shaped by white wealth and social standing — and those roots continue to influence who serves as directors in shelters, who sits on executive boards, and who is left doing the hard manual labor. “This was always a field that was predominantly occupied by wealthy white women who were connected to industrialists, and so these women got together and informed the first animal welfare laws,” Evans said.
Stills from “Brown and Bonded” documentary
Animal welfare tends to be viewed as inherently compassionate: a space where kind people only want to rescue and care for animals. “Brown and Bonded” asks those in the animal welfare field to look inward because Evans said the same forces that shape this nation’s problems with housing, employment, policing, healthcare, and education also shape the minds of people who work and volunteer at shelters.
In the film, Maryland-based former police officer Leslie Miller and Philadelphia entrepreneur Felicia Williams explain that they were rejected for pet adoption a combined 20 times. Williams, founder of Ginger Tea and CEO of HiTouch Enterprises, recalled being denied when she tried to adopt a cat, even though she had a stable home and a young child, and had recently purchased property.
“I felt like I was in a position to take in an animal, and I wanted to adopt. And I was rejected,” Williams said in the film, noting she was turned away by two separate shelters. “Basically, the lady at the center was saying they didn’t think that I could provide a stable home for the animal.”
Evans said that the rules for qualifying to become a pet owner often hide underlying biases. “You fill out the forms, and what happens to many people of color is that they don’t get callbacks at all,” Evans told the AmNews. “For me, I was asked to show my criminal record, presuming that I had one.”
Systemic bias and neighborhood profiling
The documentary shows how geographical profiling influences adoptions. Evans said shelters often characterize entire ZIPcodes as bad areas for animals, especially when local animal control agencies focus on those neighborhoods for enforcement. “Many shelters are connected to animal control,” Evans said, “so once an animal control officer perceives a certain community as being dangerous, or criminalized, many shelters will not adopt to that ZIPcode.”
Two former shelter workers featured in the film also talked about observing colleagues actively blacklisting applicants of color without cause.“If you come in a certain way,” the former kennel workers state in the film, “nine times out of 10, Black woman or Black men, especially a Mexican man, they would just put you on a ‘Do not adopt’ off the bat. No questions asked, don’t check no history. They just automatically, when you walked in, something about you they didn’t like, you went on a ‘Do not adopt.’”
Indigenous and rural communities also tend to be excluded from pet ownership. Awanookwe Kingbird-Bratvold, an Ojibwe educator and founder of the Minnesota-based rescue Awesiinyag (Animals) Are Loved, talked about how she had rescued and nursed back to health an injured dog she named Bubba on the Red Lake Nation. When she was quoted high veterinary costs to completely heal him, she was forced to surrender him to an outside agency.
“I had to surrender him, and I never ever found out if he had medical care after that. I never knew where he went,” Kingbird-Bratvold said. “And even when I still talk about him today, I feel very emotional about it because I’ll never forget him.”
Stills from “Brown and Bonded” documentary
Evans said another major issue in the movement is that when people of color are hired to work in the animal advocacy space, they are often assigned to manual tasks. “Most of the tasks, as you can imagine, … on the East Coast, … you’re going to see Black and Brown people working in the kennel area, cleaning, euthanizing animals. On the West Coast, it’s more of a Latinx experience,” Evans said. “Where we exist in the field, it is literally in the field: doing manual things, doing things that are really, really hard and emotional things.” The premise of “Brown and Bonded” is not asking shelters to lower basic standards of animal care, but rather a call for the industry to evaluate which policies genuinely protect animals and which merely enforce class markers that frequently separate pets from the families who care for them. Expanding adoption access, the film asserts, is both an issue of racial equity and a mathematical necessity for clearing overcrowded shelters.
The film shows that a lack of diverse leadership reinforces paternalistic attitudes about low-income communities. It includes archival footage from a project called “Dog Borrower,” which shows an animal advocate sneaking into Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood in the middle of the night to steal pets from a home because she thinks she’s actually rescuing them.
“We’re going to go ‘borrow’ a dog that isn’t healthy to make it better,” the advocate says in the clip, “and then we’re going to find a home for that dog. Only because stealing someone’s property is illegal, so we don’t steal anything. We just sort of borrow and vet and make sure that everything is okay, and then find good homes for it.”
“There’s a scene in the doc where an animal rights advocate decides she is going to steal someone’s pet, and a lot of people don’t realize that this goes on literally all over the country, day in and day out,” Evans said. “People decide that they see something they don’t like, and they’ll take other people’s pets, put them up for adoption, and they often sell their puppies. It is one of those fields that has this unbelievably humane veneer, but in reality, it is a really, really dark field that needs to improve.”
The film suggests that reform is possible; “Brown and Bonded” points to leaders like Jo-Ann Zoll, CEO of the Providence Animal Center in Media, Pennsylvania, who openly addresses how bias restricts adoptions.
“People make assumptions that if someone doesn’t have significant means, they can’t be an effective pet parent, and I completely disagree,” Zoll says in the film. “I actually think that’s why we have important programs, right? We can provide support around food, support around medical care, but without a good person taking an animal in, we can’t find a home for that animal.”
CARE is planning a free private screening of “Brown and Bonded” in a Brooklyn theater for late August. If interested in attending the show, email equity@careawo.org.
