Reports
Use the pull-down menus to select a report, then click the "Show" button.

Show selected shelters ranked by homeless:

cats dogs

adopted transferred released alive euthanized

2009 2010 partial

Purpose
I decided to build ShelterWatch because I couldn't find a website that compared the effectiveness of open-admission animal shelters. I wanted to make it easier to answer the question "in county xyz, what happens to a typical cat or dog (or kitten or puppy) that is surrendered by its owner or taken to the municipal pound as an unwanted stray?"

Animal shelters in rural jurisdictions or counties with below-average per-capita income usually have few allies to turn to for help with these homeless animals. They generally adopt out the animals they can and euthanize the rest. More affluent counties are often home to privately-funded humane societies or animal-rescue organizations that are willing to take adoptable cats and dogs from the pound and try to find permanent or foster homes for them. In some jurisdictions, long-established humane societies or SPCAs perform animal control and manage the local animal shelter under contract with the municipal government.

But some affluent counties save a much higher percentage of their homeless animals than others. In most cases the difference is attributable to the philosophy of the shelter's management, not to the animals themselves or the attitudes of residents of these counties. Citizens may assume that because their municipal government delivers human services at a high level, its animal shelter also works hard to save the homeless animals consigned to it. That may or may not be true.

ShelterWatch will try to show how homeless animals in different affluent jurisdictions fare. My hope is that tracking and comparing outcomes data will motivate animal lovers to help their local shelters adopt the practices – like spay-neuter assistance programs, rescue-group collaboration, fostering, and TNR – used by their most successful peers.

Data Sources
When shelters use the Annual Animal Statistics Table developed as part of the Asilomar Accords to publish their animal outcomes data, I have incorporated that data into the ShelterWatch database.

For Virginia shelters that don't publish their outcomes using the Asilomar format, I've used the Online Animal Reporting database maintained by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

The Asilomar format asks shelter managers to characterize their cats and dogs as either "healthy", "treatable - manageable", "treatable - rehabilitable", or "unhealthy and untreatable". "No Kill" shelters generally claim they won't euthanize animals in the first three categories. From my perspective, there are a few problems with this categorization scheme:

• it's difficult to get representatives of different institutions to agree on how to define the four categories;

• once the definitions are agreed on, different administrators can reach different verdicts on how to classify an animal;

• the classification system creates an incentive for shelter managers to classify all of their euthanized animals as "unhealthy and untreatable";

• the four-category format greatly increases the paperwork required to track animal outcomes, which undermines the willingness or ability of shelters to use the format.

So I decided that the ShelterWatch database won't use these classifications, and will only record the aggregate totals for animals received, adopted, transferred, and euthanized instead. That allows an apples-to-apples comparison between Asilomar Accords tables and data from, for example, the VDACS Online Animal Reporting system.

While some shelter managers might object that their euthanization numbers are skewed high because they're forced to accept high percentages of unhealthy animals, I'll argue that distributions follow the law of large numbers, i.e. while 10 dogs received by Arlington might differ significantly from 10 received by Richmond, a population of 1000 dogs received by the two shelters is likely to be substantially the same.

The one exception I've made in the database is for owner-requested euthanasia (ORE). When I can get them, I subtract the ORE totals from both the intake and disposition numbers, so they're not reflected in a shelter's euthanization rates. If you see results for your shelter listed here and you don't think I've incorporated your ORE, e-mail the data to shelterhawk (at) yahoo (dot) you-know-the-rest.

Comments
ShelterWatch is affiliated with ShelterHawk, a blogging site that offers perspectives on specific shelters and issues and invites feedback and comments from readers. The treatment of homeless animals can provoke strenuous debate, and ShelterHawk invites differing opinions. ShelterHawk can also be used to critique the information presented on this website.

By contrast, ShelterWatch will focus on making animal-outcomes data accessible and transparent. Discussion and interpretation of that data will be left to other forums.