Busting The Warehousing Myth

Shelter's admit animals from the community with varying degrees of health and disease. Therefore, the longer an animal is within a shelter environment, the more likely that animal will encounter a disease causing agent and become sick.

Shortening the average length of stay of animals in the shelter by speeding up the process by which it takes to move that animal from intake to adoption, a shelter can turn over cage space faster, reduce the chances an animal will get sick, and save more lives.

When intake exceeds outflow animals start to accumulate. This can result in staff having a harder time caring for all the animals, more spaces are needed for cleaning, staff cutting corners which diminishes the effectiveness of their cleaning. This results in the amount of disease in the environment going up which causes a rise in disease rates, which results in isolation facilities getting overwhelmed. All this then results in an increased length of stay, which then contributes to further increased disease rates.

Good management is key to a good health program and keeping animals healthy in a shelter. It is also key at preventing over-crowding.

Health needs to be a high priority because unhealthy animals increase length of stays, which leads to over-crowding.

Developing goals for health programs will help shelters improve disease rates in shelters. This is done by first determining the baseline of disease in the shelter, then implementing preventative measures and then reviewing progress on a regular basis.

Paying attention to the flow-through process animals go through and performing daily assessments of each animal will help identify bottlenecks and will help the shelter determine ways to shorten length of stays.

Disease surveillance and monitoring programs will help shelters monitor the overall health of the population of animals in the shelter.

Efficient flow-through of animals involves keeping track of how well animals are moving through the shelter from intake to adoption (with all the stops in between such as health exams, spay/neuter, behavior evaluation, illness treatment, etc) in the shortest time possible as well as recognizing and addressing areas that are obstacles for this. Keeping a daily assessment of progress each animal is taking will help monitor efficient flow-through.

Every single person who handles an animal in the shelter plays a role in helping that animal maintain good health. It's not just the veterinarian or the veterinary care staff. If a person handles an animal roughly, then the animal's stress level goes up. If a person doesn't wash their hands between animals, going from a sick animal to another animal, they are the single most important mode of transmission of disease to that animal. Management helps minimize disease by stressing to all staff and volunteers that everyone has a role to play in maintaining the health of an animal in the shelter.

A shelter can help make health a high priority by providing regular staff and volunteer training and re-training reminding them that they have a crucial role to play in maintaining the health of animals in the shelter.

An "Infection Control" staff member can help over see the implementation of health-related protocols.

Using state-of-the-art written protocols will help staff and volunteers stay on track with caring for and maintaining the health of sheltered animals.

A health committee can help a shelter set goals and monitor goals to see if the shelter is reaching them.

By monitoring the incidence or frequency of disease (i.e., tracking the number of cats that get sick with upper respiratory disease each month) a shelter can demonstrate how well the population is doing. A shelter can monitor how well a preventative measure is doing. Shelters can track if the disease incidence is increasing or decreasing and if the disease manifestations changing. Shelters can also keep track of the time an animal takes to recover as well as other measures.

There are a lot of strategies to assist a shelter from preventing warehousing of animals. Restricting intake, enhancing return to owners, expanding foster care networks, developing an effective adoption program and strengthening or developing a transfer program are all important considerations to help prevent overcrowding. All of these are strategies that can minimize the emphasis or reliance upon euthanasia to help balance out intake and outflow.

Not all animals infected and shedding an infectious disease show clinical signs. Animals can look perfectly healthy and still be infected with and shedding an infectious disease into the environment.