Animal Welfare Professionals

This message was posted by a user wishing to remain anonymous

Hello,

I am working with our shelters vet team on a better system of pathway planning for our open intake municipal shelter. Unfortunately, there isn't clear system set up by previous administration for the recommended list of negative outcomes. It leaves alot of room for guess work on which animals should be euthanized on days we would need to. These are animals that have been deemed to have behavioral concerns that would be unsafe for public adoptions as is or sick needing long-term treatment or treatment beyond the average adopter's ability to provide. These animals are placed on a list when their stray hold is over and networks to hundreds of rescues that partner with our shelter they have days sometimes weeks or months to pull them from the shelter. If we have open kennels and there is no emergent need to, we do not euthanize & there have been weeks this has happened but there have also been weeks the opposite is true. Anywhere from 2-10 may be chosen on a given day. We have 90 kennels and 180+ dogs on average. We are an evacuation site for natural disasters and often get hoarding & investigation cases. Those circumstances we send out urgent pleas for all of our rescue but often struggle to make space and euthanasia becomes necessary. The uncertainty and unclarity of why certain animals are chosen that day from the rescue list has created distrust and tension with our rescue partners and stress for our rescue coordinators having to try and communicate with them. What the vet team I would like to is create more transparency and clarity in our supervisors' decisions. We hope to do this with the addition of this weighted scale or rating system similar to the color-coded systems.  What I am asking for is feedback positive or negative, do you have something similar, what's your experience working with rescue with a system like this in place. Negative outcomes aren't our goals but they are also unavoidable in our current setting. Our goal is to help indicate what animals are not improving, who are declining, who we recommend over others and why in a clearer way to make the decision easier on those needing to do so. We all understand the burn out working in shelters can bring our goal is to just alleviate that stress a little more for the animals and the humans caring for them.  Thank for your feedback.

#AdmissionsandIntake(includingIntake-to-placement)

This message was posted by a user wishing to remain anonymous

Following as I too am looking into pathway planning and figuring out transparency for euthanasia decisions. My shelter is much smaller and especially over the past year have needed to make euthanasia decisions due to lack of space when that wasn't a consideration prior. I really like the 'scoring system' to make the decisions more objective - this is a fact so this is the corresponding score. Just for clarification, you state that when space is available euthanasia's do not occur, so would the dogs be evaluated as space runs out? Does that mean you are scoring each and every dog every time this occurs? Overall, I think this is a great easy to understand method to determine negative outcomes as this weighted scale is solely based on objective information. This is a big undertaking so thank you for sharing and taking on this project to try and lessen burden where possible. 

I'm curious what your foster base is like, if you can somehow have a short list of animals that are more in need of being in a foster home like fearful or some medical cases that can be dealt with within a foster home like the example of the puppy who was exposed but not showing signs of parvo. If you have a priority list of animals to send to foster it can help free up space and reduce animals on the potential euth list.

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Laurel Nelson
Cat Welfare Supervisor
Nebraska Humane Society
NE
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This ASPCApro presentation by Dr. Miranda K. Workman might spark some ideas: Behavioral Euthanasia: Approaching Decisions with Care and Impacts with Compassion (2023). 

It focuses on "behavior-based euthanasia decisions within a collaborative, integrated care environment. It includes tools to guide those conversations and decisions that can provide space for both care and compassion - for sheltered animals, for shelter staff, for volunteers, and for the community."

Thanks for bringing up this important topic.

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Renee Dunaway
Dir. Multimedia Learning & Consultation
ASPCA
NC
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