Animal Welfare Professionals

Cost per care-day -- i.e. the average cost of keeping one animal cared for in the shelter for one day. Typically taken over the course of an animal's entire stay, so will include both daily events (e.g. feeding) as well as one-time events (e.g. SN surgery).

I'm curious to hear from folks who actually calculate and keep track of this, and would love to hear about your approach. Of course, there's variability from one shelter to another, but that's part of my interest here.

Thanks for your help!

-Mike

Hi Mike, thanks for presenting at #BFNC18.  I enjoyed your presentation very much. 

I'm also very interested in hearing how others derive cost per care-day, as we currently have not come up with a good way to get at this piece of data in our environment.  Would you also include adoption counseling and adoption processing into animal care?  My instinct says we have to include this part of the operational costs since getting them adopted is part of the overall care of the animals, though others might disagree.

One difficulty for us is that we have to evaluate costs for both our nonprofit with the municipal contract and the City's retained costs for operating the shelter.  We do most of the animal care and adoption functions, but do not have responsibility for animal control/field services.  Even during stray holds we still do most of the care.  The City's costs involve the building (built in 2009), maintenance, utilities, info tech equipment and services, and animal control officer labor.

Also, we have to consider whether to include all of the associated costs of operating or whether to allocate some percentages to animal care since we don't only handle animal care.  We do have some administrative functions and duties and may be able to remove these costs, but not very easily.  We would probably remove out costs for fundraising and that sort of function.

Once we have a total number of care days for the period in question, I think we'd just divide.

Let's say our shelter operations/care costs are $50,000 in a given month, and that we have 200 animals in the shelter every day during that 30 day month, we'd have 6000 animal care-days during the period.  $50,000/6000 = $8.33 cost per care-day.  Does that seem reasonable?