Cats in Animal Shelters
Do younger cats have different outcomes than older cats?
Long Beach Animal Care Services is an animal shelter that serves areas in California such as Long Beach, Cerritos, Los Alamitos, and Signal Hill. In addition to cats and dogs, they take in birds, rabbits, reptiles, and more!
Using the Long Beach Animal Shelter dataset found on the City of Long Beach Open Data Portal, we found that cats were the most common animal type to be found at their shelter.
Our communication goal is to visualize how the outcome of cats relates to their age, duration of stay at the shelter, and their intake condition.
The original dataset contained more than necessary variables and categories, so we narrowed them down.
For the intake condition, out of the multiple values within those categories, we picked the top results that were the varying degrees of ill and injured. We combined ill severe, ill mild, ill moderate, and injured severe, injured mild, injured moderate into one value of “ill/injured.”
As for outcome type, we focus only on the top four outcome types that are rescue, adoption, euthanasia, and transfer.
We also created a categorical variable called “age” by calculating the intake date with the their date of birth. We created another categorical variable called “duration of stay” by calculating the intake date with their outcome date data.
Younger cats are cats that are less than two years old. Older cats are cats that are two or more years old.
We created four values within our duration of stay variable. Anything < 7 days was considered “short stay,” 7-29 days as “medium stay,” 30-89 days as “long stay,” and ≥ 90 days as “very long stay.”
For both older and younger cats, the most common duration of stay is short stay, so we will focus on cats in this category for our visualizations. 466 older cats (36.61% of total older cats) and 4087 younger cats (49.34% of total younger cats) have a short stay at the shelter.
It is important to note that there are approximately 8x more younger cats than older cats. We adjust this limitation by looking at the percentage rather than just the count.
For both older and younger cats, cats who have a short stay and a normal intake condition tend to be adopted. Specifically, 29 older cats (2.28%) and 195 younger cats (2.35%) meet these conditions, meaning that very few cats who have a short stay are adopted.
Does age influence how many cats stay for a short period of time, have an intake condition of being ill or injured, and ultimately end up being euthanized?
Take a look at this older cats visualization. There is a clear pattern. Older cats that are short stay and ill/injured are euthanized. Out of 466 older cats (36.61%) who have a short stay, 259 (20.35%) are ill/injured, and 250 (19.64%) are euthanized, meaning that 96.5% of older cats who have a short stay and are ill/injured are euthanized.
To summarize, a huge percentage of older cats with these ill/injured conditions are euthanized instead of being given the time to rehabilitate and get adopted.
Take a look at this younger cats visualization. 250 (3.02%) of these younger cats were ultimately euthanized.
When comparing this percentage to the older cats visualization, we can see there were also 250 (19.64%) older cats.
Based on these findings, older cats are approximately 6x more likely to be euthanized when they have a short stay and have an intake condition of being ill/injured.
But are these findings accurate?
In the older cats visualization, normal and ill/injured were the two most common intake conditions represented.
In the younger cats visualization, however, under age/weight, normal, and ill/injured were the three most common intake conditions.
When you look to the right, you can see that 2603 younger cats (31.43%) have a short stay and an under age/weight intake condition. And out of those cats, 691 (8.34%) are ultimately euthanized.
But even when we combine the total percentage of euthanized younger cats that have a short stay and have either an under age/weight (8.34%) or ill/injured (3.02%) intake condition, the percentage is still 11.36%, which is 8.28% less than the percentage for older cats with these same conditions.
This means that our claim is still true! More older cats than younger cats are euthanized.
Let’s continue to investigate the younger cat visualization.
Out of the 2603 younger cats that have a short stay and are under age/weight, 1548 (18.69%) are rescued!
This means that younger cats that have a short stay and an intake condition of being under age/weight are approximately 2.2x more likely to be rescued than euthanized.
To summarize, here are our two takeaways.
First, older cats that stay for a short amount of time and are ill or injured are euthanized.
Second, younger cats that stay for a short amount of time and are under age or underweight are more likely to be rescued than euthanized.
Considering our takeaways, here are some things to ponder.
In the battle for adoption, older cats are already losing because of pre-existing ideals around youth and vitality. But older cats continue to suffer during their time at shelters.
Especially when shelters lack resources, they have to decide whether to pour their limited resources into younger or older cats. If resources are limited, is it more realistic for shelters to euthanize older cats instead of rehabilitating them? And if there were more resources and support, would older cats be given a better chance?
Local communities can help increase the amount of resources for animal shelters! Support your local animal shelter today!
Donate to Long Beach Animal Shelter: https://www.longbeach.gov/acs/programs-services/donations/
Donate to Evanston Animal Shelter: https://evanstonanimalshelter.net/membership/