Seattle Animal Shelter Data: Complaints Received, 2025
- Apr 8
- 2 min read
Each year, the Seattle Animal Shelter (SAS) receives complaints from the public on a wide range of issues related to city enforcement of animal welfare laws. In this post, we summarize the complaints received in 2025 and compare them to complaints received in prior years.
In general, the data shows that the majority of field officer work is spent in city parks as the majority of 2025 complaints are related to park patrol incidents, consistent with trends from 2018 to 2024. Noise complaints are a distant second while at large animals, strays and animal bites round out the top five, although their positions vary slightly in 2025 as compared to cumulative totals.
The Year in Review, 2025
SAS received 6,966 total complaints in 2025. Over 74 percent of these complaints were reported incidents while the remainder resulted in investigations.
Incidents and investigations can be further broken down as shown below. The majority of incidents occurred as the result of park patrols, followed by enforcement, stray animal pickups, transporting animals, and wildlife pickups. Investigations are the results of complaints about animal cruelty/neglect, dangerous animals, and the sales of exotic animals.
Responding to complaints is a responsibility of the SAS field officers. Based on the data below, field officers spent most of their time dealing with incidents in the parks, with noise infractions as a far distant second. Animal bites, at large animals, and confined strays follow.
Complaint Trends
We are fortunate to have complaints data dating back to 2018 totaling 45,204 individual records. This enables us to identify trends for almost the last 10 years.
The following are consistent with 2025 findings:
Incidents outweigh investigations by 73.5 percent to 26.5 percent or 3 to 1.
Complaints related to park enforcement amount to almost one quarter or 25 percent of complaints.
Complaints related to noise ranked second.
At-large animals, stray animals, and animal bites round out the top five complaints, although they vary in position from 2025.
The following diverge from 2025 numbers.
Abandoned and abused animals were in the top eight complaints of 2025 but do not appear in the top eight for the cumulative 2018 to 2025 complaints list.
2022 was an anomaly because total complaints dropped from 5,596 in 2021 to 4,373 in 2022. This was primarily due to a decrease in parks complaints from 1,878 to 662. Complaints began to climb again in 2023 as the result of increased media coverage of park altercations. In 2025, these complaints reached their highest levels thus far.
Animal Cruelty/Neglect Complaints
It is also important to note the percentages of cruelty complaints even though this category does not appear in the top 5 of each year. While its percentage share varies, the actual number of complaints have risen each year since 2020.
Cruelty and Neglect Complaints | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
Raw Numbers | 678 | 788 | 830 | 952 | 1,008 | 1,040 |
% of Total Complaints | 14% | 14% | 19% | 20% | 18% | 15% |
If you are interested in exploring this (and other) data in more depth, check out our data hub and interactive dashboard.
