Note: This was first published as a feature article in DogFancy magazine.

If you are an animal lover, there is a good chance that you are on the mailing list of at least one animal welfare group. Periodically you probably receive a form letter from an organization that wants you to help stop pet overpopulation. The computer-generated letter includes a personalized greeting, a simulation of the spokesperson’s signature, pictures of either adorable puppies and kittens or abused, emaciated dogs and cats – and lots of statistics. The obvious purpose of the photographs is to gain your sympathy. The statistics are there to prove that there is a real problem with animal overpopulation and that this particular group is the one most worthy of your support. Your generous donation will help these nice people solve the overpopulation problem and help the animals – or will it?

The most often used and least understood tools of the humane movement are statistics. From local animal shelters to national humane organizations, advocates for animals use numbers to further their cause. Whether the numbers clarify or confuse the issue is often ignored. Their primary purpose is to sway public opinion. To correctly evaluate these statistics, it is important for you to ask some questions about them. First, where do the numbers come from? Second, why and how were they tabulated? Finally, what do they really show?

Tracking and accountability:
At their most basic level, statistics may be used to track the operations of a shelter and provide accountability to the public. Doug Fakkema, an animal care and control consultant, sees this use of statistics as a way to ensure an honest relationship between the shelter and the community.

“I think it is appropriate to display shelter statistics to the public, even if it is only on a chalkboard by the front desk,” says Fakkema. “It is common for someone to come into the shelter and say to the staff, ‘Oh, you will find a good home for these animals, won’t you?’ When that happens, it is a perfect opportunity for the staff person to point to the chalk board and say, ‘Well, these were last month’s figures, so you can see there’s a chance that we won’t.’ Whether the person necessarily understands it or changes his or her behavior in the future, it is still better for the shelter worker to be able to honestly respond.”

At the Humane Society in Seattle, Washington, Executive Director Nancy McKenney has a similar perspective. “Statistics help our employees when the public asks how many animals we take in and what our average adoption rate is. The public wants to have some idea of our success and the chances for a particular animal to be adopted. I think they are generally more interested in what happens at our local shelter, rather than national figures. So we show them the statistics, but we don’t use national trends. Our staff needs to be aware of how our agency is doing in order to answer those types of questions.”

Internal Problems:
McKenney thinks statistics are best used inside the shelter to identify problems and track the efficiency of specific programs. She is cautious about basing decisions solely on numbers. “You can make the numbers say anything you want. I have felt for a long time that people in our industry haven’t had the tools necessary to collect the correct information, to analyze appropriately what the numbers are telling us and how to utilize that knowledge.”

For McKenney, surveys and reports are not automatically used to make policy decisions or define a problem. When statistics are used to fuel debate or guide public policy, discrepancies often cloud the issue. “Two years ago, we dealt with a proposal to enact an ordinance to ban breeding in the Seattle area,” says McKenney. “National statistics were being thrown around as part of the debate. When we tried to see if there was a local correlation with the national numbers, we discovered that all four shelters in our area were keeping statistics differently. How could we come together as a community and try to solve the problem if we couldn’t agree on defining the problem?”

The lack of standardized accounting of statistics is a constant problem for humane groups. Most agencies use their own terminology and jargon. In some shelters, a reclaimed stray is called an “RTO,” which stands for “returned to owner.” Another shelter in the same area may call the stray an “RA,” or “reclaimed animal.” Animals taken to the shelter by their owners may he called “owner released” (OR), “surrendered by owner” (SBO), “owner turn-in” (OTI) or any other term that the agency chooses. For neighboring shelters., this use of jargon is a nuisance. If you are trying to tabulate the information from thousands of shelters across the country it is a nightmare.

Fakkema experienced this problem when he was the executive director of the humane society in Santa Cruz, California. “The American Humane Association tried several times to get standardized reporting,” says Fakkema. ‘They tried to get as many shelters as possible to report so they could compile accurate, national statistics. The problem with the survey was that the form wasn’t quite the same as the one we were using at Santa Cruz.”

Arbitrary Numbers:
Nonstandard reporting methods are not the only problem with gathering accurate statistics. Some shelters create arbitrary definitions that can change the tally dramatically. The animal control department for King County, Washington, was one of the agencies involved in the proposed breeding ban. In a report of pet statistics for 1990 through 1994, King County listed two types of animals that were euthanized: healthy and adoptable animals versus unadoptable animals. The total number of animals destroyed in 1994 was 8,738. The number of adoptable animals destroyed was 3,154. The second number obviously sounds better, but what makes an animal “unadoptable?” If a national survey includes King County’s numbers, which euthanasia figure will be used?

Fakkema says these types of numerical problems are not always a matter of innocent miscommunication. “Some organizations play games with their numbers. They may even change the numbers to suit themselves. They do this by arbitrarily increasing the number of animals adopted and decreasing the number of animals euthanized.

“They can do that by playing games with adoptability issues. The agency decides that they won’t count the 14 litters of kittens they got this week, because they weren’t adoptable by the shelter’s standards. That leads to the opportunity to remove a significant number of animals from the total count. The percentage of animals adopted can then be compared with the now much smaller number of ‘adoptable’ animals. Now you can report a much higher, but false, adoption rate.”

Fakkema recalls one executive director who simply took the numbers of animals adopted and the number destroyed and reversed them. Instead of showing that only 10 percent were adopted, the percentage changed to 90 percent. Fakkema says that this practice may be the result of sincere motives. “That particular director thought it looked better to the public to show 90 percent adoptions, rather than 90 percent euthanized,” he says.. “I’ve heard people in animal care and control rationalize the manipulation of these numbers. They believe that if they tell the truth, it will make them look like the ‘bad guys.’ They think that if they present themselves as the had guys, they won’t be able to get their message across. They truly believe that manipulating the numbers has a higher purpose.”

Credibility:
For responsible animal welfare agencies, misrepresentation of the numbers is both frustrating arid damaging. In a culture where so many good causes need funds, the manipulation of statistics can reward the wrong groups. For honest shelters, there is no defense against those that make outlandish claims.

In 1992, in an attempt to rectify the lack of credible animal figures, a coalition of animal advocacy groups formed a task force on pet overpopulation. The group included several major humane organizations, purebred dog and cat groups, and veterinary associations.

Carter Luke. of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (MSPCA), is the president of the National Council on Pet Population. “In the past, the way that animal statistics have been gathered at the national level has been flawed. In my opinion they are unusable,” says Lukc. “As recently as two years ago, two national humane groups released, within one week of each other, the number of animals killed in American animal shelters. One group released a number of five million, the other said 12.1 million. For these two widely varying press releases to come out within one week of each other indicates that something’s wrong.”

Many experts believe that the current methods of determining animal populations leads to this type of inaccuracy. The most common method is to request data from several large shelters. The figures from these shelters are combined into averages that are published as national statistics. This practice is so inaccurate that the numbers are almost worthless because of the large number of groups that adopt out animals, the lack of tracking numbers and the wide variation in the existing tracking systems.

Luke has doubts as to the validity of polling only large shelters as a means of getting statistics..” Anyone who tries to collect data learns this-a lot of places don’t even keep track of the animals that come to them. They don’t have any idea how many animals they saw, how many are dogs or eats, or what happened to them. They just don’t keep those numbers because they are ‘too busy.’ The council’s efforts to gain more accurate information started with three basic tasks: create a list of animal shelters, develop a simple and uniform tally sheet, and then actually get the data.

“Clearly, one of the things the council started on was to create a better list of shelters. Secondly, it started a regular census of those shelters,” says Luke. “We didn’t want to poll just the 10 biggest, or the 35 that chose to respond to a survey. We defined a shelter as any place where they handle more than 100 animals per year. That yielded a list of more than 4,000 shelters across the country. If they didn’t answer, we called them back. We wanted to get as well-rounded a picture as we could of the national figure.”

Countless Groups:  Selecting an arbitrary standard for defining a shelter was an obvious necessity. It is often difficult, if not impossible. to identify all the groups and individuals in a community who take care of stray and unwanted pets.

Ken White, current director of the Arizona Humane Society and former vice president of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), was a member of the National Council on Pet Population. In his capacity as a vice president of HSUS, he visited many areas across the country that are excluded from the council’s list. White says: “The truth is that there are loads of places in this country where a small community shelter handles 60 animals per year, a local veterinarian has a contract with the county and handles 30 more animals, there is a sheriff whose brother-in-law takes home 55 animals, and a pet store that also accepts animals-all of them near another, smaller community where there is no place that accepts excess animals. Those areas are not going to be figured into the total, even though collectively they represent a considerable number of animals.”

To test his belief that these isolated areas contain untold numbers of animals, White had one of his staff recheck an area that had already been tabulated.

“We went to one of the states where we had already gathered the statistics for shelters with more than 100 animals. We tried to find out how many shelters, facilities or individuals were helping less than 100 animals in an institutionalized fashion. You begin to get a sense that there are a whole lot of people out there who are not being counted,” says White.

Luke shares White’s concerns about the limitations of the council’s list. “Certainly there are going to he some that we miss. We have learned that we have created, by far, the best list there has ever been, but there are problems with it. However, it is a start. You can’t begin with flawed data and suddenly have perfect records. It will be improved over time.”

Coping with a Flawed System:
For local shelter directors like McKenney, even accurate national statistics will be taken with a grain of salt. “I think people need to be aware of the statistics. They can be helpful in the same way that consumer advice can help you make a decision about buying a product. If the numbers indicate a national trend, local communities may be alerted to evaluate their services. Following national and regional statistics is not accurate-you can’t always look at what happens in the New York City area and assume that it automatically applies to your community as well.”

White summed up the problem in a recent issue of Shelter Sense, a publication of HSUS. ‘The success of our organizations cannot be properly judged by a ledger sheet reporting the percentage of animals adopted. Our business is, instead, to model and promote a broadly embracing human ethic. As such, we need to loudly acknowledge the imbalanced equation (too many animals, too few homes) that leads to the death of so many millions of animals. We need to do that and get on with the work of changing it.”

Until an accurate census is available, local communities will continue to make decisions, enact laws and allocate funds based on flawed accounting. Irresponsible pet owners wilt still believe that their excess puppies will all find good homes. Animal lovers will still receive pleas from groups who use inaccurate numbers to gain donations. While national humane groups struggle with the task of collecting and tallying data, local shelters, animal lovers, brothers-in-law and veterinarians will continue to provide care for the animals-whether they are counted or not.