Abstract
Animal shelters are increasingly interested in reducing their intake and helping their communities keep and care for animals. Improving Return-to-Owner (RTO) rates of stray dogs is one path to save significant shelter space, time, and costs and keep animals with their caregivers and communities. Aggregating and visualizing RTO data spatially are useful for identifying trends and highlighting areas for potential interventions. Since shelters collect similar data, an interactive web application was developed to make such an analysis easily reproducible. This paper presents the tool's capabilities via a case study of 2019 data from the Dallas Animal Services shelter, covering the relationship between stray intake and RTO rate, the distances traveled from home by RTOed strays, microchip use across the city and its relationship with RTO rate, and the length of stay of RTOs and other outcome groups. Findings include showing that 70% of RTOed strays traveled at most 1 mile away from home and 42% up to block away, and that at-large, adult strays that had a microchip had a 71% RTO rate compared with 39% without one. The results affected the shelter's hold time for strays, highlighted target areas for microchip programs, and motivated neighborhood-based methods to locate found dogs' owners. Shelters are welcome to use the tool and participate in the development of new analytical lenses and visualizations that would best suit their needs.
Highlights
Animal shelters take two approaches in measuring and evaluating their services
Since microchip practices may differ between countries, this study provides an additional replication for the results of Lord et al for a US-based shelter
The southern areas with higher stray numbers have high RTO rates compared with the northern regions, but the variability is not as strong as in the number of strays
Summary
Animal shelters take two approaches in measuring and evaluating their services. The first is looking at their outcomes, usually in terms of live release rate, and improving it through various programs [1,2,3,4]. Many shelter-level studies conducted with academia and animal welfare organizations examine trends or interventions targeted at improving outcomes [2, 5]. This should not come as a surprise, because a high live release rate is a helpful performance indicator for any shelter. The second path is to examine and reduce intakes rather than improve outcomes [6]. This has been the focus, for example, of spay–neuter programs [7, 8]
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