Adopt a Pet, It’s Pawsome
Visualizing shelter animal data from 2019 to 2021.
Pets enrich our lives. They make us laugh, offer companionship, and teach us about love and care. Being a lifelong pet lover myself, I chose to explore trends in shelter dog and cat intakes and outcomes across the U.S. from 2019 to 2021.
Approach
The dataset was obtained from Shelter Animals Count — a nonprofit organization that provides statistical database on sheltered animals. It consists of dogs and cats intake and outcome count in shelters across 50 states plus District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands from 2019 to 2021, divided into different categories.
As someone who is taking baby steps in working with and visualizing data, I understand how intimidating one single big, complicated chart might look with little or no caption or explanation. I visualized this dataset using multiple simple charts and provided key insights to guide readers through my dashboards. By studying multiple shelter data dashboards and shelter annual reports in my literature review, I am convinced this method is the most effective for the general public who might be interested in the topic but are not experts in reading data visualizations.
Process
I started by cleaning up the dataset and re-organizing it to read best in Tableau. This project was my first experience working with Tableau so there was a lot of confusion and many hours spent watching Youtube tutorials.
Design-wise, I made sure to have consistency in style, font, and color palette. I wanted the graphs to be easy to read and avoided visual clusters. I chose the complementary pair of yellow and teal to be the main color palette as it is color-blind friendly, has good contrast to each other and to the background, and is zesty and fun like the spirit of the project.
Halfway through the project, I ran 3 informal usability testing sessions to get feedback and improve the project. The participants gave me constructive comments on my choice of graphs and use of labels, and helped me detect display errors. One of my participants was a 75-year-old senior with novice technical experience. Since she wasn’t sure how to utilize interactive features in Tableau, she commented that the key insights included in the dashboards were helpful and encouraged me to continue to clarify my visualizations with titles, labels, and text, so that my project would have sufficient information and details even just as still images.
Final Deliverables
Key Findings
1. Insights on animal intakes
My first dashboard explores trends in dog and cat intakes. The total count of intakes by species was pretty balanced at 51.02% for cats and 48.98% for dogs. Stray was the most common type of intake for both dogs and cats, followed by Owner Relinquishment.
2. Insights on animal outcomes
The next dashboard summarizes trends in dog and cat outcomes. Adoption was the most common outcome for both species. Dogs were more likely to be returned to owners than cats, and the euthanasia rate for cats was higher than dogs.
3. Live outcome rate by State
Adoption, returned to owner, returned to field, and transfer out are considered live outcomes. North Dakota had the highest live outcome rate while Puerto Rico had the lowest.
4. Euthanasia rate by State
When looking at the euthanasia rate, North Dakota was again seemingly the safest state for shelter animals with the lowest rate. Puerto Rico was once more the place with the highest euthanasia rate.
5. Shelter animals outcomes in Puerto Rico
The findings in (3) and (4) caused me to come back to the second Tableau dashboard and used the filter to see Puerto Rico’s statistics. It was rather concerning and upsetting to learn that more than 65% of shelter cats were euthanized, and overall only 20% of them made it to live outcomes. The live outcome rate for dogs was not optimistic either at 54.6%.
6. Impact of Covid-19
Many of us got the impression from the press and social media that there was a dramatic surge in pet adoptions during the pandemic (for example this, this, and this article.) At first glance, this notion of a pandemic pet boom sounded rather convincing, as social distancing and working from home have caused people to find other ways to adapt and fulfill their social needs, and adopting a pet seemed like a logical solution.
However, many shelter reports and research papers in my literature review stated differently. They argued that even though some shelters might have recorded more adoptions, on a national scale, we actually saw a drop in both shelter animal intakes and adoptions from 2019 to 2020. My visualizations showed the same thing. Even though the adoption count for both dogs and cats started increasing slightly in 2021, it was still much lower than in 2019 before the pandemic hit.
The data makes sense to me. Since the intakes decreased significantly, it was logical that outcomes and adoptions also decreased, because the pool of adoptable pets became smaller. It is also important to remember that the time of Covid-19 was a time of loss and uncertainty. The physical and mental health issues, food and supply shortages, and financial insecurities during this period would cause people to avoid taking on the additional responsibility of owning a pet.
Conclusion
I would be happy if people walk away from this article learning two things (like I did working on this project):
- Contradicting many people’s belief, the pandemic pet boom did not happen; everyone did not rush to the nearest shelter to get a new furever friend for companionship.
- Hundreds of thousands of shelter animals are still being put to death each year. If you’re thinking about adding a new furry member to your household, please help save them all and help shelters across the U.S. to reach no-kill goal by adopting.
