Think Megan’s Law sex offender registry. But with fur.
A new bill in Sacramento would create a public database of people convicted of felony animal abuse — including names, photos, crime details, etc. — with an eye to helping shelters and rescues screen potential adopters, and to help regular folk better protect animals from repeat abuse.
Do we really need such a thing, you ask?
In Santa Barbara last year, David Genovese pleaded guilty to five counts of animal cruelty and admitted a special allegation for personally using a deadly weapon. The details are gut-wrenching. Sheriff’s Deputies found Sultan the cat in Genovese’s vehicle with a paracord around its neck, paws bound with duct tape, broken teeth, bones and severe head trauma — just the latest in a line of cats he had adopted in good health from local animal shelters.
“At some point in 2024 the defendant began accumulating, torturing and disposing of cats in the Santa Barbara area,” the District Attorney’s Office said in announcing his guilty plea. “Between August 4 and September 6 of 2024, the defendant adopted four cats from both the Santa Barbara and Santa Maria Animal Shelters; their conditions and whereabouts are unknown. The defendant was also determined to have stolen two kittens from the same animal shelter in Los Angeles on January 15, 2025; also still missing.
“While a warrant was obtained for the defendant’s arrest, on January 29, 2025, he stole 2.5-year-old orange tabby cat named ‘Lancelot’ from a family home in Ventura…. Lancelot was found deceased in the trunk of the defendant’s vehicle, his paws bound with packaging tape, similar to Sultan….”
Sorry to bum you out, but that’s the cleaned-up version. If California had such a registry, the thinking goes, shelters might have had a fighting chance of stopping Genovese before he procured his victims.
Perhaps embarrassingly, Florida is ahead of California here: it launched an Aggravated Animal Cruelty registry on Jan. 1. Twelve weeks later there are almost 2,200 people on its list.
Perhaps even more embarrassingly, Tennessee is way ahead of California here: It launched an Animal Abuse Registry a decade ago.
Enter now Assembly Bill 2344 by Assemblymember Matt Haney, D–San Francisco, sponsored by Laguna Beach’s own Social Compassion in Legislation, a political action group that focuses on animal safety. The bill would require offenders to register for 10 years, and direct the Department of Justice to create a web site with the details by Jan. 1, 2028.
“Animal cruelty is unacceptable,” Haney said in a prepared statement. “By giving shelters, rescues and the public a tool to prevent repeat cruelty, the registry will help protect vulnerable animals and ensure California leads with both compassion and common sense.”
Who could oppose such a registry? Well, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for one — but more on that in a minute.
‘Hell, yes!’
How many convicted animal abusers are there in California?
Nobody tracks that data. We have no idea. And that seems crazy.
The proposed bill is at least the second stab at fixing that for Judie Mancuso, founder and president of Social Compassion in Legislation. One might say its Senate Bill 1277 in 2010 was ahead of its time; the bill died after legislative analyses estimated its initial costs as high as $2 million a year.
“You come out the first time with it and people look at you sideways and scratch their heads,” Mancuso said. Then came Tennessee, then Miami County, then Florida. “Later, it gets unanimous support. I got a call from Haney’s office — ‘Florida did it, that raised the profile. Do you want to try again?’ I said, ‘Hell yes!’ This is a long time coming.”
The Megan’s Law web site provides the perfect model, and tech has greatly improved over the past 16 years and shouldn’t generate such tremendous cost estimates. “The infrastructure is there,” she said. “It’s a new day.”
Severe cruelty should have lasting consequences, Mancuso and Haney agree. Transparency and accountability are essential tools to track offenders and make it harder for them to slip through the cracks.
We publish a registry of people who abuse people. Why not create the same thing for people who abuse animals? Mancuso mused.
The bill would also create an animal protection fund to help support the registry and local spay-and-neuter programs. It’s slated to be heard in the Assembly public safety committee later this month.
Objections
Before we detail the ASPCA’s position on registries, let’s acknowledge criticism of the ASPCA itself, from paying its top exec some $1.2 million a year to sharing little of its riches ($446 million in revenue in 2024) with local SPCAs, while spending more than $71 million on advertising and promotion.
The ASPCA says it’s not an umbrella organization for local SPCAs, and, essentially, if people make that mistaken assumption when they donate, that’s their bad.
Anyway, the ASPCA argues that abuse registries are expensive to institute and maintain; have limited reach and are rarely used; are limited in scope and don’t offer real protections for potential victims of animal cruelty. The group also says registries can create a ‘vigilante’ mentality in the public, and that they may actually decrease the prosecution of serious animal cruelty cases.
“A recognized consequence of sex offender registries has been an increase in plea bargains for serious crimes, e.g., rape being pled down to simple assault, to avoid registration,” the ASPCA said in its position paper.
“The existence of an animal abuse registry may likewise have negative effects on the prosecution of serious animal cruelty crimes as it would potentially result in registerable offenses such as felony animal torture being pled down to misdemeanor offenses. In addition to avoiding the registry, a plea to a lesser offense frequently may eliminate the option for long-term probation and psychological assessment and treatment. As such, the existence of a registry could inadvertently prevent offenders from receiving appropriate supervision and treatment, thus putting additional animals at risk.”
Interest in animal abuse registries has been driven by a growing body of research indicating that repeated acts of intentional animal cruelty are associated with a greater incidence of other crimes, including interpersonal violence, it said. But “it is not necessarily predictive,” the ASPCA said.
“The main study often cited is the 1999 Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ survey of prosecuted animal cruelty offenders who had significantly higher incidence of other offenses when compared to matched controls without an animal cruelty background. However, the other offenses were as likely to precede the animal cruelty offense as to follow it – and thus this data was seen as supportive of a ‘general deviance’ model of animal abusers rather than a ‘progression’ model.”
The ASPCA appreciates that registry proposals spring from a genuine motivation to take animal cruelty seriously, but believes it would be better to strengthen and broaden existing animal cruelty laws; use well-enforced no-contact orders; and include animals in domestic violence protective orders.
Interesting. We’ll note here that, as a parent, we do periodically check the Megan’s Law web site and gaze at the faces of not-so-distant neighbors who’ve done awful things. As a dog, cat and bird parent, we would certainly check an animal abuse registry to see if any offenders were in close proximity. We’d also fully expect — and vociferously demand! — that animal shelters and rescues check it religiously before releasing animals to would-be adopters.
There’s a well-researched tie between animal abuse and other crimes; is the order of offenses necessarily vital here? And, because of that connection, it makes sense to keep careful track of animal abusers. Some folks in Del Mar have tried to do that on their own, after an animal killer absconded with a kitty named Bert, who was set on fire and died with burns over 75% of her body, internal bleeding and kidney failure, according to their account on PetAbuse.com. But it’s a laborious task best suited to the government prosecuting these cases.
We could name the new law after Sultan. Or Lancelot. Or Bert. And our law would be better than Florida’s.