Understanding length of stay in animal shelters
Statistics are critical to saving pets in shelters. That’s why Best Friends goes to great lengths to collect and analyze as much data as possible from U.S. shelters, publishing the highlights in our annual reports. Without the data, it’s difficult to track progress or identify areas for improvement.
However, useful interpretation of shelter statistics requires an understanding of their context. Simply counting the number of animals admitted to a shelter over a particular period of time, for example, only tells us so much. Were these pets surrendered by their people or animals brought in as strays by field services staff? The answer is important to determine which steps should be taken to achieve the best outcome for each animal.
Length of stay (LOS) is one of those data points that can be tricky to interpret without context. In general, a shorter average LOS is desirable. By reducing the amount of time animals spend in care, a shelter frees up resources to help more animals. As a rule of thumb, this can be useful — but, again, context matters.
LOS must be weighed against the eventual outcome. Promptly reuniting lost pets with their families, for example, will reduce LOS. But young kittens who lose their lives in shelters that don’t have the resources to care for them also technically have a short LOS. By contrast, fostering generally increases LOS — but also saves more animals’ lives.
Even the way LOS is measured can vary depending on context. In most instances, LOS reflects the number of days an animal is in an organization’s care. This makes sense if, for example, a shelter is trying to calculate their daily cost of care or staff time. But if the goal is to evaluate the impact of a new marketing campaign on adoptions, then it probably makes more sense to calculate LOS based on the time animals were available for adoption (e.g., not including delays for medical issues or legally mandated “stray holds”).
The details of how LOS is measured in any particular instance are less important than the consistency across comparisons. What’s important is that comparisons are apples-to-apples (e.g., before and after the implementation of a marketing campaign, across the same organization types).
LOS is typically expressed as an average (or mean), but this, too, requires some unpacking. It’s often the case that more than half of the animals in a shelter’s care move through the system very quickly, well below the average LOS — which is driven up by the relatively few “long-stay” animals. That’s why you’ll sometimes see LOS expressed as a median (i.e., the middle value between highest and lowest) rather than average. So, although the average LOS can be useful to track, it can also mask underlying conditions or trends among the larger shelter population.
One common trap is focusing too much on long-stay animals at the expense of those who make up the bulk of the animals in care. Yes, the long-stay animals require some additional attention (e.g., foster placement, marketing), but the short-stay animals — again, the bulk of the animals in care for most shelters — tend to be where the bottlenecks are most likely to occur.
Given all the nuance surrounding LOS, some might wonder if it’s all that useful. Absolutely! Like so many other useful statistics, LOS reveals something important — but only if we’re clear about exactly how we’re using it. By understanding the “flow” of animals in and out of an organization, staff can allocate resources to save more lives.
