How much time shelter dogs on euthanasia lists actually get
Findings from every at-risk listing Petbound has recorded since November 9, 2025. Updated daily.
How much notice does a dog on a shelter euthanasia list get?
Very little. Across the 22,064 listings carrying both a first-sighting and a scheduled date since November 9, 2025, half had 6 days or less before the date their shelter had set, and 28.8% had three days or less. Petbound stores only the most recent date a shelter published, so the real notice is likely shorter.
Does a scheduled euthanasia date mean the dog will be killed that day?
Petbound cannot tell you, and no source can from listing data alone. There is no outcome field in this data: a listing going quiet looks identical whether the pet was adopted, pulled by a rescue, given a later date, or euthanized. What the records do show is that 382 of the 1,030 pets listed today carry a date more than 14 days after we first saw them, so a listed date is not always final.
Why are dogs put on shelter euthanasia lists?
Lack of space, overwhelmingly. It accounts for 79.2% of the 22,111 listings Petbound has recorded, ahead of behavior at 13% and medical reasons at 5.8%. These are the shelters' own stated reasons, copied from each listing. The dominant driver is shelter capacity rather than anything about the individual animal.
| Reason the shelter listed | Listings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Lack of Space | 17,509 | 79.2% |
| Behavior | 2,882 | 13% |
| Medical | 1,281 | 5.8% |
| Other | 423 | 1.9% |
| Age | 16 | 0.1% |
Which states have the most dogs at risk?
California by a wide margin, at 61.8% of all 22,111 listings Petbound has recorded. Texas at 13.4%, then Georgia at 8.6% follow. Coverage spans 15 states and 74 shelters, so this reflects where Petbound collects rather than a national ranking.
| State | All listings | Share | Listed now | Shelters |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | 13,667 | 61.8% | 777 | 29 |
| Texas | 2,959 | 13.4% | 89 | 13 |
| Georgia | 1,910 | 8.6% | 43 | 6 |
| Arizona | 1,387 | 6.3% | 26 | 3 |
| Oklahoma | 1,291 | 5.8% | 9 | 2 |
| Florida | 331 | 1.5% | 11 | 4 |
| New Mexico | 123 | 0.6% | 25 | 2 |
| New York | 116 | 0.5% | 14 | 3 |
| North Carolina | 106 | 0.5% | 0 | 5 |
| Pennsylvania | 65 | 0.3% | 11 | 1 |
| Nevada | 59 | 0.3% | 3 | 1 |
| Maryland | 55 | 0.2% | 16 | 1 |
| Illinois | 17 | 0.1% | 2 | 1 |
| Ohio | 15 | 0.1% | 4 | 1 |
| Kansas | 10 | 0% | 0 | 2 |
Which breeds appear most often on euthanasia lists?
Pit Bull Terrier, German Shepherd, Bullmastiff lead the current listings, with 216 Pit Bull Terriers waiting right now. Petbound has recorded 190 distinct breeds in total. Breed is taken from the shelter's own listing, and large working and bully breeds are consistently the most represented.
| Breed | Listed right now |
|---|---|
| Pit Bull Terrier | 216 |
| German Shepherd | 201 |
| Bullmastiff | 68 |
| Siberian Husky | 54 |
| Labrador Retriever | 50 |
| American Staffordshire Terrier | 43 |
| Belgian Shepherd Malinois | 36 |
| Terrier | 35 |
How many dogs are added to shelter euthanasia lists each month?
Petbound records roughly 1,859 new listings a month across the shelters it tracks, and 1,030 pets are carrying an upcoming date right now. These are counts of listings, not of animals euthanized. Petbound has no way to measure outcomes and does not estimate them.
| Month | New listings recorded |
|---|---|
| November 2025 | 1,533 |
| December 2025 | 1,841 |
| January 2026 | 1,892 |
| February 2026 | 1,692 |
| March 2026 | 1,859 |
| April 2026 | no collection |
| May 2026 | 1,605 |
| June 2026 | 2,124 |
| July 2026 | 2,444 |
| August 2026 | 3,226 |
| September 2026 | 3,064 |
| October 2026 | 831 |
Where does this data come from?
Every listing is collected daily from dogsindanger.com, which aggregates at-risk listings published by shelters themselves. Petbound has recorded 22,111 of them since November 9, 2025, covering 74 shelters across 15 states. Nothing is inferred or modelled: every figure is a count of published listings.
Methodology and limitations
Petbound collects at-risk listings once a day from dogsindanger.com and stores one row per pet per shelter, updating that row in place when the source changes. The figures on this page are counts over those rows. What follows are the limits of what they can support.
- Petbound records no outcomes. There is no field for what happened to a pet, and a listing disappearing from the source is indistinguishable from a euthanasia. Save rates, survival rates, and counts of animals euthanized cannot be derived from this data, and Petbound does not publish them.
- Dates are upper bounds. Petbound stores the most recent date a shelter published for a pet, overwriting any earlier one. The interval between first sighting and that date can therefore only overstate the notice a pet originally received, never understate it.
- First sighting is not intake. Timestamps record when a listing first reached Petbound, not when the animal entered the shelter.
- Coverage is partial. 74 shelters across 15 states, all sourced from dogsindanger.com. This is not a national census, and states with more listings here may simply publish more.
- Collection gaps are excluded rather than shown as zero. April 2026 has no records because collection stopped, not because listings stopped.
- A separate collection fault between July and August 2026 left name, age, gender, size, and description blank on new records until it was repaired. Breed, scheduled date, and stated reason were unaffected throughout, and every figure in this report rests on those three fields.
Data last refreshed October 8, 2026. Questions or corrections: petboundorg@gmail.com.
See who is listed right now
Every figure above comes from listings that are still open to adoption, fostering, or rescue transfer.