Last Updated on May 31, 2026 by admin
The intake list at the Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care and Control begins with one cat. Her name is Hibiscus. She is a five-year-old tortoiseshell calico with a pink nose, a notch in her left ear, and a circular bald patch on her right hip where a tag must have been removed. She was the first cat carried out of the Lake Hughes property on the morning of March 20, 2026.
Two hundred and ninety-nine more came after her.
The Largest Animal Case in Los Angeles County History
When officers first arrived at the property, authorities believed there were as many as 700 dogs and cats inside. The final number — revised over three days of intake — was just over 300. Either way, the numbers are extraordinary. Department of Animal Care and Control officials confirmed it is the largest dog and cat case in the county’s history and likely among the largest hoarding cases in the United States.
Officers wore respirators. Veterinarians worked from a mobile unit set up in a field across the road. The animals were under the care of Christine De Anda, associated with Rock N Paws animal rescue. She has vowed to fight the seizure.
Hibiscus, Intake #1
The shelter staff at the Castaic and Palmdale intake bays asked one of the volunteer photographers to log faces before they logged numbers. He did Hibiscus first. She did not blink. She did not look away. The volunteer’s hand was shaking. Hibiscus’s was not.
She is now in foster care with a retired veterinary technician named Loretta Akin in Acton. Loretta has fostered for thirty-one years. She is sixty-eight. She has not, in her own words, ever had one come out of intake quite this calm.
What 300 Cats Looks Like, In a Shelter
The other Southern California shelters that took overflow — Pasadena Humane, Best Friends Lancaster, SPCALA Long Beach — each cleared kennels in a single afternoon to receive vans. Adoption fees were waived. Volunteer foster coordinators sat at folding tables outside the bays running paperwork until ten at night.
A second-grade teacher from Lancaster named Carlos Estevez drove up after his school day with two empty hard carriers and one nervous question: “Can I just take two? Any two?” He left with a black-and-white shorthair he named Wednesday and a long-haired orange named Sunday, and a foster contract that he signed leaning on his hood in the parking lot.
The Slow Number Behind the Big Number
Three hundred is a headline. The real number, the one that takes longer to absorb, is the number of foster homes it takes to actually move three hundred cats out of cages and into living rooms. Across Los Angeles County, that figure climbed past four hundred and was still climbing the day this article was published.
Hibiscus, Intake #1, was the first. She is the one the shelter staff will mention by name for a long time. Not because she was the most pitiable. Because she was the first to look back.
If you are in Los Angeles County and have ever thought about fostering — even short-term, even one cat for one weekend — the next two weeks are the window. Pasadena Humane, SPCALA, Best Friends Lancaster, and DACC are all running waived-fee adoptions and emergency foster programs. The need is not abstract. It is named Hibiscus, Wednesday, Sunday, and two hundred and ninety-seven others.
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