Exploring the Inequities of Animal Services
Author: Tom Kremer, Human Animal Support Services
One of our beliefs at Human Animal Support Services (HASS) is that challenges faced by animal shelters cannot be fully understood when examined only through the lens of the shelter. Rather, animal intake is largely shaped by the social and economic realities of the communities they serve – animal issues aren’t separate from people issues. This has meant an ongoing shift of attention from shelter outcomes (i.e., adopting or transferring out more pets) to greater attention for factors related to intake, getting at the circumstances that bring animals to shelters in the first place.
Shelters would benefit greatly from a better understanding of their communities and the ways that local issues may manifest in shelter interactions as well, such as housing restrictions and policies, as well as the accessibility of veterinary care. More broadly, as an industry, the degree to which shelter intake is driven by the consequences of systemic racial and economic inequities in the U.S., which have created sharp disparities in income and access to resources, such as housing, food, and medical care (for both people and pets), is underappreciated. We try to contribute to this conversation in a project soon to be published, in which we leverage our close working relationship with a diverse group of shelters to further investigate these dynamics.
In the HASS Intake Triage Project, we are working with shelters on collecting more usable intake data than has been collected traditionally, to more accurately understand why people surrender pets, and ultimately try to tailor resources that could keep people and pets together. In an upcoming analysis of this data, our work steps outside the shelter boundaries to examine how social vulnerability interacts with both shelter intakes and adoption outcomes. One question we’re tackling that isn’t frequently asked is whether the communities the shelter serves for owner surrenders or for picking up stray animals are the same as those served as adopters of new pets.
This analysis was inspired by a 2021 paper from University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers using a Canadian metric of social vulnerability to compare the “flow” of animals into the shelter and out for adoption from SPCA shelters in British Columbia. Our analysis builds upon this work, examining seven U.S. shelters from diverse regions and types, using the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). While the UBC paper was limited in scope to only animals that were owner-surrendered and then adopted, we worked extensively to include stray intakes as well, as this is the largest intake group for most shelters.
Our analysis is focused around the following key questions:
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This work is currently being prepared for publication, so stay tuned for the detailed findings. To offer a little snippet here, the following figure shows the flow of adopted animals in all seven shelters between the SVI quintile of the intake location and the SVI quintile of adopters’ locations. (Quintile1, in purple below, indicates the lowest level of vulnerability; and 5 the highest, in yellow.) If intakes and adoptions were from areas of similar vulnerability, the five quintiles would be roughly similar in share for both intakes and outcomes, but the picture the data paints is rather different. Watch for the full publication for a detailed report of this finding and more.
Intake and Adoption SVI quintile for all intake types and species for seven U.S. communities.