Guru-Measuring

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I have been looking at various shelter stats cross the country. Not many publish their outcome statistics of impounds, adoptions or kills. The most complete stats are from Los Angeles Animal Services, which this month added new categories of statistics, such as trapped cat and neonate impounds. No other shelter system publishes such detailed numbers. The system with the second best numbers is New York City. If anyone can find any other shelter systems with complete stats, please send me the link.

Interesting observations, Philadelphia and Maricopa County do not publish statistics.

San Francisco Animal Care and Control does not publish its statistics, although SF/SPCA does.

Boks obtained phenomenal success in NYC during the two years he was there. Adoptions increased almost 70% and euthanasia decreased by 27%! Impounds were constant over that period. That is a remarkable improvement, especially as NYC had less than half the budget of LAAS and yet handled 85% of LA’s impound load. NYC has a current kill rate of 45%, a little better than LA’s 46%.

SF/SPCA has an incredible adoption rate for 2005: 91%!

That has to been seen in context though.

The SF/SPCA had only 3,600 impounds during Fiscal 2004-2005 compared to the approximate 47,000 for LAAS, or about 8%. Yet, given this very small impound load, they had a budget of $11,000,000 vs. about $17,000,000 for LAAS that year. In addition, they had 150 employees to handle 3,600 animals compared to 290 to handle 47,000 animals.

This means SF/SPCA had one person for every 24 animals brought in—per year!!! LAAS had approximately 162 animals per person per year, or almost 7 times the workload. No comparison, is there? To be comparable, LAAS would have to have 1,960 employees and a budget of $132,000,000!! NO COMPARISON.

In addition, SF/SPCA is not a municipal shelter. It cherry-picks the animals it wants to take from SF Animal Care and Control. SFACC does not publish its own statistics, but we can gather some info from the SPCA site. There we learn that SFACC adopted out 3,517 animals. We have no idea what their impound load was, their budget or manpower. It could be they took in 100,000 and killed 96,500. We don’t know, they won’t tell us.

In addition, SF/SPCA works in partnership with the Maddies adoption Center.

I agree that until everyone publishes complete stats, budget and manpower, we have no idea how well each system and GM has performed.

Given the numbers I can find, it seems Boks led the NYC shelters to a remarkable turn-around during the two years he was there, his budget and impound load, but until LAAS gets another 1,600 or so new employees and an additional $110,000,000 in budget, we will not see no-kill on the level of SF/SPCA. Even then, since SF/SPCA cherry-picks animals from SFACC, we will still not see a 91% adoption rate-ever.

I think in the short term, Boks is good as it gets. Winograd or someone else might do better or worse—I don’t know. To even speculate on his potential outcome, we’d have to know how well he did in Philadelphia and whether the improvement was sustained after he left.

Please, if anyone can find statistics for any shelter systems that handles more than 20,000 animals a year, please let me know.