The cheapest thing an organization can produce is a statement. It costs nothing to write, nothing to post, and, crucially, nothing to abandon. That is the lens worth bringing to the animal-welfare world’s diversity reckoning, because the story here is not really about whether shelters and rescues meant what they said in 2020. It is about the gap between saying a thing and building the thing, and what that gap reveals once the public pressure to say it fades.
In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, a wave of organizations across nearly every industry pledged to do better on race. The rescue world, an industry that markets itself as a champion of compassion, joined in loudly. Five years later, the pledges make a useful case study, not because the people who wrote them were insincere, but because statements and structures decay at very different rates. One is rewritten when the moment passes. The other, if it ever gets built, tends to stay.
What the statements actually said
The declarations were everywhere. The ASPCA published a commitment “to fostering a collaborative and compassionate culture and to principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Best Friends Animal Society’s CEO wrote that the organization would “work to actualize” diversity and inclusion “through all of our connections inside and outside of animal welfare,” and a companion post documented racism its own staff had experienced.
Others followed. Farm Sanctuary declared that “true solidarity is constant and demonstrated through a commitment to taking action against that which is unjust.” The American Animal Hospital Association stated its support for “our Black colleagues, veterinary clients, and the entire Black community.” PETA handed its statement to a BIPOC writer.
Read together, they share a structure: strong language, a moral framing, and very few specific, measurable, funded commitments. That is the tell. A statement promises a feeling. A structure promises a budget line, a hire, a scholarship, a policy change. The animal-welfare sector produced an abundance of the first and comparatively little of the second, and the difference is exactly what the following years exposed.
A reckoning that didn’t stick
To take stock, it helps to listen to someone who has tracked this from inside the conversation. Kassidi Jones, a BIPOC academic-advocate and Pit Bull parent who documents the racism baked into canine rescue, has watched awareness rise and then quietly recede.
“I think that there has been some positive movement. Folks that had never had these conversations began to have these conversations,” Jones says. “But unfortunately, I think most of the people that got involved were doing so because everybody else was. There are no financial repercussions for not saying anything, so most people do not feel obligated to do that work anymore.”
That last sentence is the whole thesis in miniature. When the cost of silence dropped, so did the speech, because for most organizations the commitment never moved from statement to structure, never became a thing with consequences for abandoning it. Jones has felt the limits firsthand. Brands approach her for collaborations, then ask her to soften her message. “‘Be less scary to white people’ is how I interpret it,” she says. “They’ll want me to do a blog, but not mention the horrific details that I would mention on my page.”
The exceptions, tellingly, have been organizations built around equity rather than ones that merely endorsed it: CARE (Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity), the DEI training firm Consciously Unbiased, and the Arizona Pet Project, which helps low-income families keep their pets. The pattern is consistent. Where equity is the structure, the work continues. Where it was only ever a statement, it lapsed.
”Equitable” is a structure word, not a statement word
James Evans, founder and CEO of CARE, draws the distinction the entire industry blurred. “That’s ultimately what the PR machine is designed to do, to say, ‘Hey, we’re not racist. We’re cool!’” he says. “But that does not say, ‘We are equitable.’ Being equitable is something very different.”
It is different because equity is operational. It shows up in who gets hired, who is allowed to adopt, which laws an organization fights, and where the money goes. Evans points to data his organization helped generate. “CARE did a study with Harvard Project Implicit across animal welfare, and it clearly shows that the bias in the field is pro-white, and the thing they dislike the most is poverty,” he says. “So if you are poor and Black, or poor and Latino, then you’ve got two biases working against you at the same time.”
That bias has a human face. A CARE associate named Leslie, a Black woman and former police officer, was rejected 16 times trying to adopt a Great Dane; many rescues never responded, and those that did said they doubted she could afford the dog. Stories like hers are why Jones argues the sector has to dismantle one of its own founding ideas, that, as she puts it, “pet ownership is a privilege, not a right.” The mission too often reads, she says, as: “They need homes. But not your home, because it’s not up to my standard of wealth and care.” That framing, she contends, shames individuals for what are really systemic problems of poverty and access.
What the numbers still show, in 2025
Here is the part that turns this from a 2020 retrospective into a current one. The structural picture the advocates describe has not meaningfully changed, and the most recent data makes that concrete.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, roughly 91 percent of veterinarians and about 92 percent of veterinary technicians are white, even as the pet-owning public is far more diverse. Evans has long pointed to that imbalance across the field’s gatekeeping roles, leadership, policymaking, sheltering, animal control, and veterinary medicine, and the workforce data continues to bear it out. Industry coalitions formed in 2020, including the Diversify Veterinary Medicine Coalition, are working to widen the pipeline through scholarships and mentorship, but a pipeline takes years to change a workforce, which is precisely why a structure beats a statement: it keeps working after the news cycle moves on.
The broader environment has also shifted. Across many sectors in 2023 through 2025, formal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs came under sustained political and legal pressure, and a number of corporations publicly scaled back or rebranded their DEI commitments. That backdrop sharpens the original question. Promises made in a supportive moment are now being tested in an unsupportive one, and the organizations that built equity into their operations are better positioned to weather it than those that only ever issued a statement.
Where the durable hope is
The encouraging signs are structural, too. CARE offers a DEI curriculum for shelters and rescues and scholarships aimed at placing more BIPOC people in veterinary and leadership roles, and it is running a years-long study on how animal control polices BIPOC communities. On the policy front, breed-specific legislation and insurance rules that disproportionately affect BIPOC owners of dogs like Pit Bulls and German Shepherds remain a live fight, and there are wins: a lawsuit pushed Prince George’s County, Maryland, to stop enforcing its Pit Bull ban. “If it can happen in one place,” Jones says, “it can happen in many places.”
To Evans, the solution is singular and unglamorous: more BIPOC people in the roles that decide things, legislative seats, rescue leadership, grant oversight, and veterinary practice. That is a structural ask, the kind that survives a change in the political weather precisely because it is built, not declared.
“There’s strength in numbers,” Jones says. “We really just need one major example showing people that it’s possible to do this work, to rescue, and keep the mission of housing and caring for animals at the forefront while still being conscious of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. These don’t have to be competing aims. A rescue can thrive doing both of these jobs at once.”
That, in the end, is the measure worth applying to any organization’s promise, in animal welfare or anywhere else: not how the statement read in 2020, but what structure, if any, it became by 2025.
References
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey: Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity.” https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm.
- “Diversify Veterinary Medicine Coalition.” https://www.diversifyvetmed.org/.
- Companions and Animals for Reform and Equity (CARE). “Project Implicit Study on Bias in Animal Welfare.” https://careawo.org/.
- “Court Filings Show Prince George’s Co. Stopped Enforcing Its Pit Bull Ban.” WTOP News, 2023. https://wtop.com/prince-georges-county/2023/03/court-filings-show-prince-georges-co-stopped-enforcing-its-pit-bull-ban/.
- “Changing the Color of Our Movement.” Best Friends Animal Society. https://bestfriends.org/stories/julie-castle-blog/changing-color-our-movement.
