Five Shelter Lessons Through the Wisdom of Great Thinkers

When a shelter houses more animals than staff and resources can adequately support, everyone suffers. Keeping population size within what the team and facility can truly manage is one of the most important things a shelter can do for animal welfare.

A good preventive care plan supports both physical and mental health.

Written protocols make care consistent and reliable. Build them with input from people doing the work and keep them up to date.

Shelters with open, conversational adoption processes with few barriers have better adoption outcomes than those with strict policies. Finding reasons to say yes is more effective than finding reasons to say no.

Behaviour is dynamic and many mental health concerns are treatable. Animals that receive the right support often have a greater chance of a positive outcome.

The more you have, the more you’re occupied, the less you give.
— Mother Teresa

Imagine you’re a dog walking into an already crowded shelter. Loud barking, clanging of kennel doors, footsteps of strangers rushing past you. Every kennel you pass is full, and every dog you pass is desperate for attention, but the staff have nowhere near enough hours in the day to stop by. Shelter crowding is both unpleasant and dangerous.

When a shelter houses more animals than it can realistically care for, everything starts slipping away from control. Staff may not have enough time to catch early signs of illness or keep up with daily care. Animals may not be getting the positive human interactions they need. Housing may be full, so animals end up in smaller spaces. Sick and healthy animals may end up closer together than they should be. When animals become more stressed in these environments, they get sick more easily and their mental health worsens, making positive outcomes less likely. It becomes a perpetuating cycle.

The number of cages in a shelter is not the number of animals a shelter should have. If every kennel and cage is full, the shelter has most likely taken in more animals than it can properly care for. True capacity is more than just housing. It’s also about whether the team can truly meet the medical, behavioural, and daily needs of every animal in their care, every single day.

How do you figure out your shelter’s capacity? Start with looking at how animals are coming in, how long they’re staying, and how they are leaving. Then, match these animal groups to what your team and building can actually handle. The UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program has excellent free tools for working through this calculation.

One of the simplest and most powerful tools to track shelter success is Length of Stay (LOS). This is the amount of time an animal spends in the shelter, from intake to outcome. When the average LOS (ALOS) creeps up in shelter populations, it gives an early warning system that something needs to change. Causes for increasing ALOS include bottlenecks in the system (e.g., long wait times for spay/neuter), more sick animals being held back from adoption, or staffing gaps. We recommend routinely tracking and reporting ALOS figures. This lets the shelter tackle problems before they become bigger crises. Live release rates alone won’t give us all this information, and can give a misleading sense that everything is going well.

One last thing worth mentioning: Holding all incoming animals in quarantine often does more harm than good. In most cases, it just increases workload and crowding risk, and ironically puts animals at greater risk of getting sick!

A thorough intake exam, vaccination at intake, good housing, low-stress environment, and daily monitoring will do a much better job of keeping animals safe.

Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.
— Sun Tzu

A strong preventive care plan won’t stop every illness, but it will protect most animals in care from the most deadly diseases. For other diseases, like kennel cough, vaccinated animals tend to get less sick and recover faster.

In young puppies and kittens (under 5 months old), antibodies from their mothers can block vaccines from working. No one can predict when this will happen, so these young animals are not considered to be ‘fully protected’ by vaccines. It’s important to keep young animals out of the shelter building as much as possible, both for their health and their social development.

Section 4 of the Association of Shelter Veterinarians’ Standards of Care in Animal Shelters can guide shelter decisions on which vaccines to prioritise.

All animals should also get parasite prevention when they arrive at the shelter, especially for ones that can affect people (e.g., fleas). With parasites, it’s almost always easier to stop them early than to treat them later. Eggs of some common parasites like roundworm and hookworm can survive in shelters for a long time, and are hard to kill with standard disinfectants.

For external parasites like ticks, whether to treat all animals or only those affected will depend on how common the parasites are in the area and how much risk the shelter is willing to accept.

Don’t forget that stress is a disease risk factor too! It should be prevented as much as possible. Ongoing, chronic stress weakens immune function. It puts animals at higher risk of getting sick, even when a good preventive care plan is in place.

Shelters are already very stressful places, but small changes can make a real difference. Some things that help include giving animals a place to hide, a chance to interact with the world outside their cage/kennel, and a calm and consistent daily routine. Predictability, choice, and a sense of control matter to animals the same way they matter to people under stress.

Without standards, there can be no improvement.
— Taiichi Ohno

If a shelter doesn’t have written protocols, procedures will likely look different depending on who’s working, how long they’ve been there, and how they were trained. Written protocols are powerful communication and teaching tools. They make care consistent and reliable.

Without them, what one staff member or volunteer calls ‘normal practice’ can look completely different to the person on the next shift. New staff or volunteers do not receive consistent training, leading to conflict and confusion.

A protocol that works in theory but not in practice will likely not be followed. For example, protocols written by a single leader may miss how things actually work day to day. Protocols should always be built around input and review by staff doing the frontline work.

Protocols also need a review schedule, and not just ‘update as needed’. Guidelines and recommendations change over time. Assign someone to set review dates for guidelines to make sure they’re up to date!

If your shelter doesn’t know where to start, the Association of Shelter Veterinarians (ASV) offers a protocol repository on medical and behaviour topics to their members. These are good starting points for creating your own protocols.

If your shelter needs help with writing or reviewing up-to-date, evidence-based protocols, or if you don’t have the bandwidth, it’s okay to reach out and ask for help!

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.
– Anne Lamott

Someone walking through your shelter doors looking for an animal is already a win. They chose to come and want to help. The goal now is to make it as easy as possible for them to leave with a new family member.

Shelter staff and volunteers care deeply about the animals in their care. This passion drives them to do this work. However, this can sometimes lead to putting up barriers between animals and all the homes out there waiting for them.

Restrictive policies like long applications, home checks, and rigid rules around fencing or income grew out of good intentions. Historically, shelters tried to identify reasons why people had to surrender their pets, and then used those same factors to screen adopters out. But newer research shows that this system is flawed and doesn’t actually predict outcomes. Policies like these turn away the very people that the shelters need most.

Remember that people have other easier options to get an animal. Potential adopters who have bad experiences don’t always try again. Some go to other less regulated sources instead.

The goal is not to find the elusive “perfect” adopter. It’s to find a good match and a loving home. A conversation-based approach, where staff take time to understand what someone is looking for and help make successful matches, will lead to better outcomes for everyone. Every barrier that turns away an adopter may mean another day or week an animal has to spend waiting in the shelter system.

The Humane World for Animals Adopters Welcome manual helps organisations identify and remove adoption barriers in favour of a conversation-based approach.

The UC Davis Koret Shelter Medicine Program also published an article with some helpful resources on reducing adoption barriers.

Some griefs are medicinable.
– William Shakespeare

Even when shelters work to minimise stress wherever possible, some animals will have mental health concerns during their stay. The good news is that many of these concerns are treatable or manageable, and animals that get the help they need often go on to become highly adoptable.

Behaviour is shaped by many factors like genetics, past experiences, and the environment. An animal’s behaviours may look very different over time. When a concern does show up, there are several tools available:

Environmental management
This could mean more looking at how and where animals are housed and ensuring housing meets published standards, reducing things that cause stress, and giving them more choice and control over their space.

Enrichment
It should be the daily standard for every animal in the shelter, not an occasional extra. This can include puzzle feeders, chew toys, toy rotations, cat TV, playtime, daily dog walks and yard time, and positive connections with people.

Behaviour modification (BMOD)
It uses positive, reward-based methods to help animals feel safer and respond differently over time. This can include short, fun training sessions, slowly getting used to things that feel scary, and learning to enjoy new people and experiences.

Behaviour medication
When prescribed by a veterinarian, it can help some animals lower their fear, anxiety, and stress to a level where they can respond to BMOD programs. Medication can also improve quality of life for animals that are struggling to cope with shelter life.

These five topics come up often in shelters and rescues of every size. We hope these can be discussion starters to inspire your team to reflect on whether any of these areas resonate, and where there may be room to grow! The goal is to keep asking whether there is a better way, and be willing to make positive changes. Every small improvement adds up to better experiences for animals in your care.

This article is written based on our experience in shelter medicine and current veterinary literature. No generative AI was used to write or edit this article.

Wesley Cheung, BVSc, DABVP (Shelter Medicine Practice)
Emilia Wong Gordon, DVM, DABVP (Shelter Medicine Practice)