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Here is the key information we gathered from "The Equation for Lifesavin,'" a webinar presented by the ASPCA's Miranda Spindel, DVM, MS, and Emily Weiss, PhD. No making you wait here—tip number one is the equation!
Check Your Math
To calculate Live Release Rate, divide the number of animals leaving your shelter alive (via adoption, return to owner, transfers, return to field) by total intake.
Reduce Intake
Tag!
Invest in tagging machines that enable you to create customized tags with the guardian's or adopter's contact information. The ASPCA's research shows 90% of animals, including cats, tagged this way at the shelter retain their tags on follow up. Personalized tags enable animals to be returned to their guardians without ever entering the shelter.
Target Risk
Look at your own data to determine who's coming in your door (adults or juveniles, altered or intact, specific breeds, etc.), from which sources, and when. Focus your preventive programs on the real sources of the animals who come to you.
Keep It Clean (part 1)
Your data, that is. If your intake data isn't reliable, you can't effectively target animal populations at risk. A few key data points to capture and keep squeaky clean:
- Intake address: where the animal was found, not the address of the finder
- Spay/neuter address: where the animal was trapped, not the address of the colony caretaker
- Date of birth: The path of adult animals to and through your shelter, and the outcomes, can be different from newborns and juveniles
- Stray vs. owned: Again, these animals may follow different paths and experience different outcomes
Spread Out a Safety Net
Programs such as pet food banks, behavior helplines and pet-friendly housing lists can help to keep animals in their homes.
Increase Shelter Health
Examine And Treat At Intake
A brief intake exam helps you identify illness or injury requiring immediate treatment and/or isolation. Vaccinating and treating for parasites immediately upon intake (not a few days later) protects individual animals and the shelter population as a whole.
Go Round and Round
A daily medical round of the entire shelter helps you identify medical issues sooner rather than later. A daily inventory helps you keep each animal moving efficiently through his or her stay in your shelter.
Keep It Clean (part 2)
Shelter sanitation is the foundation of health in every shelter. Clean effectively for the diseases you are likely to experience in your shelter.
Spay/Neuter On a Dime
Make sure your spay/neuter capacity matches the demand. Every day that an animal waits for surgery is a day of risk for that animal. Get 'em altered so they can go home.
See How You Stack Up
Keep records of diseases encountered in your shelter, the treatments and other responses (foster care, isolation, etc.) to them, and the outcomes, including deaths. Look at these records for any trends in rates of diseases, the effectiveness of your responses and the outcomes. Compare these stats to statistics from other shelters to see how you fare.
Increase Live Exits
Surrender With SAFER
When possible, conduct a canine aggression assessment, such as ASPCA's SAFER™, with the owner present so that you can discuss behaviors identified during the assessment. The more you know, the better you can make good choices for that animal. Assessing at intake also means that you can get dogs to the adoption floor sooner.
Enrich Their World
Maintaining an animal's behavioral health through daily enrichment, social interaction and housing that offers some choices (hide or stay out, snooze or play, etc.) is vital to reducing stress and maintaining the animal's adoptability.
Find Out Their Feline-alities
ASPCA's Meet Your Match Feline-ality adoption program is a great way to help adopters find the cats who'll fit best in their families. Feline-ality is proven to increase cat adoptions, reduce length of stay and reduce returns.
Focus On Getting Them Home
Look at all your policies and processes to see which may be preventing an animal being adopted sooner rather than later. The more streamlined and simple your operations, the sooner animals can get home and the more animals you can help. The Adoption Forum II report (.pdf) has lots of ideas to help you get started.
Listen to the complete recording of this webinar and download the slides for more tips on putting new ideas into action to decrease length of stay and increase adoption numbers. |
