Animal Welfare Professionals

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A large municipal shelter in the Midwest recently moved to a new building with double sided kennels. Each side of the kennel is separated by a guillotine door.  In the old shelter, dogs were removed by kennel staff for cleanings and taken outside, so dogs were walked and had human contact every day at least once. In the new shelter, dogs are put on the other side of the guillotine door to clean and staff do not take them out. Only a small fraction of lucky dogs might go out per day but most do not. What are your thoughts on this?

 One staff member said they researched this and it wasn't harmful for dogs' socialization and getting used to handling, but I've not been able to find any authority to support that.

#Behavior,TrainingandEnrichment

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I don't know the data on this topic, but can speak from my experience - We have that set up as well, and while the double-sided kennels are incredibly helpful for cleaning it does not change our daily enrichment protocols. Our dogs get a morning and  evening walk outside for  a chance to use the restroom. This is typically just a potty walk and less than 10 minutes each.

We also have staff and volunteers assigned for a midday session for each dog, with the goal that this is their longer break from the kennel for a pong walk, playtime, etc (on a busy day, it may have to be a quick potty walk again). We also do in-kennel enrichment daily, which is usually a frozen Kong, lick mat, or hard plastic toy covered in peanut butter for the dogs. All enrichment items are removed from kennels before staff leave for the day. We started the mid-day play session and in-kennel enrichment when we hired a PT Behaviorist in 2024 and we have seen it help our dogs a ton, behavior-wise! 

That being said - my shelter is quite small (only 23 dog runs) which of course if an easier population to handle than what many other facilities have.

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Erin Dams
Operations Director
Roanoke Valley SPCA
Roanoke VA
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ASPCA is a strong proponent of double-sided kennels as this allows us to accommodate expectations for humane housing and sanitation. Our shelter has this setup with over 45 dogs! It's allowed us to streamline cleaning and feeding, but has not impacted daily socialization and enrichment. Dogs are still walked 3 times a day, attend playgroups, group training, and run on an agility course. I believe there's an ASPCA Pro webinar on the implementation of double-sided (also called double-compartment) housing for animals so that socialization and enrichment are not sacrificed.

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Aliyah Moore
Digital Media Specialist
Humane Society of St. Lucie County
FL
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Time outside of kennels should be a non-negotiable, no matter the number of dogs you house. The double kennels are designed for ease of cleaning, less stress for fearful/aggressive dogs, and should only be used as such. Staff should have mandatory enrichment and outside kennel time scheduled for each dog. These dogs that are kept in their kennels, with little to no human interaction/outside kennel time (daily??) significantly raises their cortisol/stress levels by the day, if not hour that they sit. Adoptions will become more difficult as you see more behavior issues with each dog as they become frustrated, shut down, or develop stereotypical shelter behaviors to cope with their stress such as spinning, jumping, or pacing. 

Work with the shelters staff to educate them properly on the benefits of enrichment, socialization with humans and the correlation with adoption success. There is tons of literature, studies, and personal experiences here within the discussion forums that can easily be found. 

I hope this helps. 

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Katie Harnett
Manager
Strayhaven Animal Shelter
PA
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The staff member who told you "it's not harmful" cannot find an authority to support that because none exists. The research goes the other direction. A 172-dog multi-state interdisciplinary study showed dogs in playgroups had fewer problem behaviors, less barking, less jumping, less whining, less pacing, and more adaptability. Dogs without that daily out-of-kennel time develop the opposite profile, and the longer they sit, the more pronounced it gets.

What I think is actually going on at this shelter is a vocabulary problem.

Double-sided kennels were designed to solve a sanitation problem. They do. They were not designed to replace daily out-of-kennel handling. They cannot. When a facility design that solves one problem gets used to skip another problem, what is happening is that the second problem was never named as core operations. It was filed under enrichment.

Enrichment lives in the discretionary budget line. It is the first thing cut when the schedule tightens, when staffing is short, when somebody is looking for an efficiency win. Walking dogs and giving them human contact is not enrichment. It is the input that produces an accurate behavior profile, which produces an accurate adoption match, which keeps the dog from coming back 60 days later as a behavior return.

Returns are the second surrender. National data puts adoption return rates between 7% and 20%, with nearly 90% of returners citing behavior, and aggression alone accounting for 38.2%. Inaccurate matches are produced when the only behavior data we have was generated in a six-by-eight box with a guillotine door. Out-of-kennel time is the upstream input.

Dogs Playing for Life, the Shelter Playgroup Alliance, and Shelter Behavior Integrations have been building this playbook for over a decade. All three would tell that Midwest shelter the same thing. Daily out-of-kennel time is not enrichment, it is prevention, and the new building was not designed to replace it.

Five things daily out-of-kennel time prevents: behavioral euthanasia of dogs whose behavior was the kennel, inaccurate adoption matches, returns at 60 days, length-of-stay creep, and staff burnout from watching dogs decompensate in place.

If your colleague at that shelter is willing, send them this thread. The structural argument lands better than the moral one.

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Join The Shift To Prevention.

BJ Adkins
Founder/Director
Animal-Angels Foundation
Pinson, AL
calendy.com/animal-angels
bjadkins@animal-angels.org
animal-angelsfoundation.org
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We are a 501(c)(3) that volunteers at a local shelter in a very poor county. They have a total of 13 pens. And the shelter itself borders on deplorable. Our primary goal when we created our group was to create enrichment opportunities for the dogs. We have been fortunate to have a couple of local dog trainers that come and work with a few of the dogs a couple of times a week. They do nose-work type exercises in the parking lot and show our volunteers a way to engage them with behavioral type training. Our volunteers also walk all dogs a couple of times a day. We built  a short trail through the woods behind the shelter and take them on that as well as spend time in the outdoor pens playing and tossing balls. We fundraise for enrichment toys which also help. But we still deal with kennel stress. 

We are having a fundraiser to try to get our own small training modular unit and fenced-in area, so we can get away from the smelly pens, noisy yards, and the many outdoor cats that wander around the facility. Hopefully this will give them a place to de-stress a little. But we are very open to more ideas in the meantime. The kennel stress is a difficult problem to overcome. They have euthanized dogs due to the extreme stress some of them have endured. Particularly farm dogs and hunting dogs. We can't improve the county run shelter, but we would love to engage the dog's brains any way we can to decrease their stress level. 
Thanks for this post. We will continue to monitor this for ideas. 

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Janet Parrott
President
Loudon K9 Paws and Tails
TN
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We recently moved our dogs into a new building that includes outdoor kennels for them to use while staff clean-something we didn't have in our old facility. It's a meaningful step forward for their comfort and routine.

In addition to this improvement, our volunteers and staff walk the dogs every day. We're fortunate to have a large campus with quiet, wooded areas where the dogs can enjoy peaceful walks and enrichment time.

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Lisa Weckman
Volunteer
Heart of Minnesota Animal Shelter
MN
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