Three Things to Know
Shelters face significant resource constraints. To address these challenges, researchers collaborated with a coalition of shelters to identify critical areas where scientific research could fill knowledge gaps and improve practices.
The study identified seven key areas for future research: animal behavior, adoption practices, medical care, disease transmission, community engagement, shelter operations, and public-private-academic collaborations.
While some areas, such as animal behavior and medical care, have been the subject of ongoing research, others, including community engagement, shelter operations, and public-private-academic collaborations, remain relatively unexplored and may require increased funding.
The Full Picture
Animal sheltering, a field that has its roots in the mid-19th century with organizations like the RSPCA (since 1824) and ASPCA (since 1866), has seen significant growth and increased attention to animal welfare in recent decades. However, resource limitations persist, particularly in rural areas where resources are limited.
To address these issues, it’s crucial to understand the specific needs of animal shelters and identify the most critical, unsolved problems in animal welfare. These challenges often involve knowledge gaps, implementation hurdles, and systemic or societal issues.
To guide future research efforts and establish evidence-based practices, this study, titled “Critical Problems for Research in Animal Sheltering, a Conceptual Analysis,” identified seven key research areas. These areas were determined through a comprehensive process involving input from Human Animal Support Services (HASS, representing over 300 shelter professionals), direct observation, and a thorough review of existing literature.
Key Research Areas
1. Animal Behavior
Animal behavior is a complex and challenging area in animal sheltering, with significant implications for adoption success, animal welfare, and public safety. A key challenge in this field is understanding and modifying behaviors, especially in animals with behavioral issues such as biting or inappropriate elimination.
Behavioral Typology: To improve the lives of shelter animals and increase their chances of successful adoption and placement, developing a standardized, objective system for classifying and identifying problematic dog behaviors is essential. Such a system would help track behavioral progressions, identify correlations between behaviors, and inform effective intervention strategies.
Stress Management in Shelters: Stress is a significant factor contributing to negative behaviors and reduced adoptability. Research is needed to develop practical, non-invasive methods (e.g., thermography, salivary measures) for assessing stress levels in shelter animals. Research on strategies to reduce stress through environmental improvements can enhance the quality of life for shelter animals and minimize behavioral problems.
Post-Adoption Management: Matching animals with suitable adopters is crucial for long-term success. Balancing adopter preferences (usually appearances) with the needs of animals with behavioral issues is a complex challenge. Understanding and addressing potential home environment risks (e.g., escape opportunities, triggers for biting) can help reduce returns and adverse incidents.
Bite Prediction and Prevention: Bite incidents pose significant risks to both shelter staff and adopters. While predictive systems could help identify high-risk animals, ethical considerations must be carefully balanced. Future research should focus on improving bite prediction accuracy and developing effective prevention strategies that prioritize the humane treatment of animals.
2. Adoption and Special Needs Populations
Animal shelters face significant barriers and complex issues in maximizing adoptions while addressing the unique needs of various animal populations.
Adopting Large Dogs: Large dogs, often over 35 pounds, face adoption challenges due to public perceptions, breed restrictions, housing policies, and safety concerns. These factors lead to longer shelter stays, higher stress levels, and reduced adoptability. Addressing these issues requires strategies like community-level behavioral training and policies preventing size-based housing restrictions to keep large dogs in their homes.
Adopting Special Needs Population: Animals with unique health or behavioral conditions, such as geriatric animals, those with chronic illnesses, or behavioral challenges, require specialized care and homes. While care protocols for these populations are established, placement remains difficult. Research into improving placement strategies and understanding factors influencing special needs adoptions could yield actionable insights.
Improving Adoption Practices: Better matching of adopters to animals and understanding preferences for marketing, visitation, and engagement are essential for improving adoption practices. Adoption success varies by cultural and regional factors, making systematic examination challenging. Developing best practices for adoption matching could simplify this critical shelter function.
Unique Programs for Cats: Cats face different hurdles compared to dogs, with a higher shelter euthanasia rate (2:1) despite their popularity as pets. Adult cats, particularly those no longer resembling kittens, often struggle to find homes. Strategies like trap-neuter-return (TNR) and shelter-neuter-return (SNR) have proven effective in managing community cat populations and reducing shelter intake. Further research into social and ecological factors influencing cat outcomes is necessary to enhance live release rates.
3. Medical Conditions
Animal shelters face significant challenges in managing medical conditions and preventing disease outbreaks. Location, resources and operational constraints often hinder their ability to provide optimal care. This can make it difficult to determine which animals to treat and which to euthanize.
Low Cost Diagnosis and Treatment: Diagnosing diseases in a shelter setting can be complex. While reliable tests exist for some conditions, such as canine parvovirus, others, like canine distemper, are more challenging to diagnose. Even when tests are affordable, cost constraints can limit their use during large-scale outbreaks. Treatment can be equally challenging, as many shelters lack the resources to provide standard veterinary care. This often forces difficult decisions, including euthanasia, when care is beyond their capacity.
Shelter Medical Guidelines: There is a critical need for evidence-based medical guidelines tailored to the specific needs of shelters, particularly in resource-limited settings. Conditions like canine parvovirus, feline panleukemia, canine distemper, feline leukemia virus (FeLV), feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), kitten diarrhea, and trauma require significant resources and specialized care. Developing scalable and shelter-appropriate treatment protocols for these conditions is essential to improve animal health outcomes and reduce the need for euthanasia.
4. Disease Transmission
Disease transmission is a significant concern in animal shelters, exacerbated by overcrowding, poor hygiene, and the housing of multiple species. These factors create a high-stress environment for animals, increasing their susceptibility to infections. Outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as canine parvovirus, can rapidly escalate, sometimes forcing shelters to depopulate their entire population to control the spread. Quarantine and isolation practices are commonly used to contain outbreaks, but their effectiveness under various conditions remains unclear.
To address these challenges, shelters need improvements in several areas. Developing affordable diagnostic tools and scalable treatment strategies is crucial. Additionally, better quarantine protocols and rapid outbreak control methods are necessary to reduce the need for mass euthanasia. Optimizing shelter design to minimize pathogen transmission while maintaining functionality during crises is also essential. By focusing on these areas, shelters can improve medical outcomes, enhance disease prevention, and ultimately save more lives.
5. Community, Ecology, and Wellness (One Health)
Animal shelters are undeniably crucial community resources that contribute to both animal welfare and human well-being. However, this collaborative relationship hinges on a community that recognizes the significance of animal welfare in the broader context of public health and quality of life. Unfortunately, best practices for fostering such community engagement remain somewhat elusive within the existing body of knowledge.
Understanding Connection Between Animal and Human Welfare: Beyond their core mission of caring for and rehoming animals, shelters offer a range of services, including spay/neuter programs, behavioral support, and crisis hotlines. These services address human-centered challenges like housing insecurity, domestic violence, and guardian health issues, which often contribute to animal relinquishment. Yet, the intersection of human and animal welfare is not fully understood. There are gaps in our understanding of how to effectively address community needs and improve the efficacy of shelter services.
Establishing a Universal Code of Ethics: Public perceptions of shelter ethics, including euthanasia practices and resource allocation, can also hinder community support. Additionally, the mental health of shelter staff and volunteers is often overlooked, yet it is crucial for sustainable shelter operations.
Access to Care: Access to veterinary care is another major challenge affecting companion animal welfare. Rising costs, transportation barriers, and uneven distribution of veterinary services have limited access to care, leading to increased pet surrender and shelter intake. The growing shortage of veterinary professionals further exacerbates this problem. Innovative approaches, such as incremental or spectrum-of-care models, could help reduce costs, prevent animal surrender, and alleviate the financial burden on shelters. Understanding the medical conditions that prompt surrender and developing community-based disease prevention strategies can also improve outcomes for both pets and their caregivers.
Ecological and Environmental Impacts: The ecological and environmental impacts of shelter operations are also gaining attention. Research on community cats has highlighted the need to balance their welfare with environmental concerns and wildlife interactions. Stray and roaming animals, often studied in the context of infectious disease spread, present additional ecological challenges. Shelters must also consider their environmental footprint, including factors like wastewater management and the ecological effects of large-scale animal transport.
6. Operations
Effective shelter operations are essential for advancing animal welfare globally. However, significant challenges persist in several key areas.
Data Management: Data collection is crucial for evaluating and improving shelter services, but barriers such as limited training, resources, and prioritization hinder consistent data collection. While tools like ShelterLuv and PetPoint help manage data, gaps remain in flexible curation and sharing. National initiatives like Shelters Animals Count aim to centralize data, but participation is limited. Mandated reporting, though limited, has provided a foundation for data transparency.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Tracking shelter performance through KPIs is complex. The Live Release Rate, while widely used, has limitations and may not fully capture the complexity of modern shelter operations which include community-based prevention efforts. Developing a diverse set of KPIs tailored to specific shelter goals and community needs is crucial for better resource allocation and outcome comparisons.
Growth and Resource Allocation: As shelters grow and evolve, effective resource allocation is essential. Applying principles from health economics to animal welfare can improve decision-making for programs like parvovirus treatment or kitten fostering. Foster programs, while effective, need further research to optimize their scale and impact.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): Shelters must address inequities in their operations to better serve their communities. Underrepresentation of minorities in leadership roles and a predominantly white volunteer base are significant challenges. Public-private partnerships with animal control operations raise ethical concerns about bias in enforcement. Evaluating these policies and practices is crucial for creating equitable sheltering systems.
7. Public-Private-Academic-Corporate Collaborations
Effective collaboration between diverse organizations is crucial for advancing animal welfare. While public agencies, private nonprofits, academic institutions, and corporations each bring unique strengths, challenges remain in fostering these partnerships.
Academic collaborations between animal shelters and universities are a relatively new but promising avenue for research. These partnerships offer researchers access to a wealth of data and subjects, enabling them to study various aspects of animal welfare, behavior, and health in a real-world setting.
Legal and ethical considerations should precede collaborations between shelters and academic institutions. To address this, dialogue and potential legislative changes are needed to balance animal protection with research advancement.
Conclusion
This study has identified seven key areas for further research in animal sheltering. While other important topics, such as playgroup services, foster programs, and facility design, have established research bases, there is still room for innovation and improvement.
Programmatic innovations, like optimizing lost-and-found procedures and streamlining the intake-to-placement process, also deserve further investigation. Additionally, ethical considerations within animal sheltering, including euthanasia practices and resource allocation, warrant deeper philosophical and sociological exploration.
The research areas outlined in this study vary in terms of their potential impact and the challenges they present. Some areas, such as operations research, are relatively underexplored, while others, like disease management, face significant resource constraints. By highlighting these areas, the authors aim to guide future research efforts and improve the overall well-being of animals in shelters, as well as the people who care for them.
Miscellaneous
Data From Study:
–
Year of Publication:
2022
External Link:
Horecka K and Neal S (2022) Critical Problems for Research in Animal Sheltering, a Conceptual Analysis. Front. Vet. Sci. 9:804154. https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2022.804154