Supply and Demand of Companion Animals: Findings at the Community Level from the Shelter Perspective

The survey that provided the data for this paper was funded through the generosity of Mars Petcare and PEDIGREE Foundation, as part of a project to assess the supply and demand of companion animals in the US.?

Are there more dogs and cats in shelters than potential adopters–is the supply from shelters greater than demand–or is it the other way around??

As shelters struggle to place pets in adoptive homes at the same pace at which they are coming into their custody, many have assumed the reason for their difficulties is that there is simply an overpopulation of pets. This assumption is what underlies the rationale for euthanizing thousands of healthy dogs and cats each year. And yet, useful data to help local shelters test this life-or-death assumption has been lacking.?

National and State-Level Calculations May Miss the Mark

National figures, often used in exploring this issue, are not sufficient for local decision-making. Those produced by leading organizations such as the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and the American Pet Products Association (APPA) vary widely, and because their assessments are national, or at most state-level, applying them to specific communities may significantly miss the mark at the local level. A 2021 survey commissioned by the Human Animal Support Services (HASS) project has aimed to begin addressing this issue. The survey gathered community-specific data for assessing overall demand for pets at the local level and then looked at existing local supply of and demand for shelter pets in particular. The survey encompasses six diverse communities piloting HASS, along with the state of New Hampshire.* The pilot communities include Cabot, Arkansas; Dallas,Texas; Detroit, Michigan; Fresno, California; Palm Valley, Texas; and Washington, D.C.?

Calculating Community Demand

Designed to include a representative sample of all community members, the survey was not pointed only at pet owners, allowing an assessment of what percentage of surveyed households in each community have cats or dogs, a basic factor used in calculating demand. All respondents were asked about the number of pets they currently have (if any). The survey also asked participants about the number of pets that left their household and the circumstances of their departure (such as dying, being euthanized, becoming lost, being rehomed, or surrendered to a shelter) to assess the percentage of households likely to want to replace a pet. US census data provided the total number of households in each local area in calculating total demand for each community.?

Calculating Local Shelter Supply in Relation to Community Demand

HASS researchers then combined the survey data with 2022 intake and adoption numbers from Shelter Animals Count for all shelters in each area surveyed to assess the supply of shelter dogs and cats across each community. Based on the raw numbers of likely available dogs and cats from local shelters, and of likely demand for pets in households across each county (or, in the case of New Hampshire, across the state) the results are encouraging: In every one of the study areas, calculated demand outstripped supply from shelters.?

Cautionary Notes

This assessment, however, comes with some cautionary notes.??

First, the calculation of demand simply shows the total volume of pets likely to be acquired by households in each locality. Not all of that demand will be filled (supplied) by shelters. New puppies and kittens from breeders, for one thing, add to overall supply. The HASS survey asked respondents where they had acquired their existing pets and found varying percentages adopted from shelters, purchased from breeders, or coming from friends/family, for example, in each community. In fact, the HASS data shows that in half of the counties included in our study, local shelters are not capturing enough of the area’s overall demand to balance against the number of dogs and cats they together take in.?

A second major point is that not all pets are alike. Shelters take in a variety of dogs and cats, including senior pets, or pets with special needs, which may narrow the scope of demand for some parts of shelter populations and increase their length of stay–a key contributor to overfull shelters.

What’s Next?

Despite these cautions, shelters have reason to be optimistic.???

The gap between higher overall demand and lesser shelter supply is considerable in our study. This suggests that shelters don’t need to capture all of the demand for pets to adopt out their populations of cats and dogs.?

Additionally, demand is elastic, as every good marketer and salesperson knows. This is a foundational point for shelters. The broader data we have points the animal welfare industry to look inward and begin testing assumptions about a lack of sufficient demand for shelter dogs and cats.

From other HASS projects and from data at other organizations, we know that shelters have plenty of room for improvement in placing pets in homes. Shelters may act by eliminating the unnecessary barriers that they tend to raise for potential adopters, often not consciously, and by improving on customer service. Since the pandemic, the sheltering industry has been faced with increasingly stiff competition from the online sale of puppies and kittens, by sellers who make customer experience a priority. At the same time, data from the Human Animal Bond Research Institute and PetSmart Charities shows that many people who end up buying a pet attempted to adopt first and in some way met an obstacle.??

As for pets that may be harder to move into homes, another dataset gathered alongside the HASS survey data should cause a re-examination of assumptions about placing those animals. In a study of data from Adopt a Pet’s Rehoming platform focusing on big dogs and senior pets, the platform performed better than shelters in placing these harder-to-adopt-out groups. While it took longer to adopt them out than for “easier” animals being rehomed, the study suggests a possible response. A better way for shelters to deal with these populations may be to support families in rehoming their older pets and big dogs themselves, rather than having them surrendered. Shelters might also consider how foster placements can ease the burden of longer lengths of stay on overfull shelters for some types of animals.?

We wouldn’t be HASS if we didn’t also point out that shelter “supply,” or intake, may also be changed. If community programs can divert more pets by offering resources that keep pets with their families, shelter “supply” should decline.

Final Thoughts

A final caution: Like every other existing method for calculating pet supply and demand, the HASS analysis is necessarily based on a set of assumptions, and we work in an industry that is still working towards a complete accounting of pet populations. Even the method for how the population is surveyed (web panels versus phone surveys for example) will influence results. (The HASS survey was web-based, with all local households eligible regardless of how long they had resided in the community.) A productive next step would be to test various survey methods in the same community and compare results.?

The benefit of the HASS study at this stage is that it zooms in on the local level, where we are able to see more detail and variations within and between communities, ask useful questions, and point to actions that can be tested. These tests in turn may help us better understand how to get a closer read on what is possible in avoiding euthanization of healthy dogs and cats.Those pets deserve more optimistic approaches to solving shelter overcrowding. While data scientists may have the luxury of waiting for a more perfect calculation method, shelters do not. We owe it to the animals in our care to use what is a reasonable assessment to guide action even while we keep learning how to get better calculations. The current question for shelters is not “are there enough homes for shelter pets,” but “how can local shelters capture more of the considerable demand for pets?”

*The survey included New Hampshire as a whole to reach the required response rate from households in that small state. The state was chosen to include a geography not otherwise represented in the survey.