Animal shelters can be stressful for dogs, but human interaction can improve their experience. While at the shelter, dogs’ stress can be reduced by spending time with a person outside of their kennel as can leaving the shelter for an overnight or longer stay in a foster home. In the current study, researchers analyzed data of 1,955 dogs from 51 animal shelters that went on an outing of a few hours or fostering stay of 1–2 nights, and 25,946 dogs that resided at these shelters but did not experience these interventions (controls). Researchers found that outings and temporary fostering stays increased dogs’ likelihood of adoption by five and over 14 times, respectively. While dogs that experienced these interventions spent longer in the shelter awaiting adoption as compared to non-intervention dogs, this difference in length of stay was present prior to the dogs’ outings and fostering stays. Researchers also found that shelters’ intervention programs were more successful when members of the community were more involved in providing these experiences (in contrast to volunteers and staff) as well as when these organizations had more resources. (source)
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Backstory
According to the ASPCA Pet Statistics for 2023, millions of dogs enter animal sheltering facilities across the United States each year. While a dog’s temporary stay in the shelter is likely stressful when compared to life in a home, thankfully the outcomes of dogs that experience this fate have improved considerably over the past two decades. Overall, these days dogs are more often reclaimed by their owners, adopted, or transferred to other shelters for placement, while canine euthanasia is occurring less often.
Because a dog’s residency in the animal shelter is temporary, researchers can measure its welfare in two ways: proximally and distally. The proximal evaluation of a dog’s welfare is concerned with what the dog is currently experiencing. This approach is closest in perspective to how applied scientists measure the welfare of other captive animals in order to provide them with optimal care. Here, measurements of health, physiology, behavior, and cognition inform welfare assessment.
Human interaction is one of the most well-studied interventions in animal sheltering. Specifically, dogs spending time with a person outside of the kennel has been consistently shown to improve dogs’ proximal welfare by reducing measures of stress and improving their behavior.
Measuring dogs’ distal welfare involves the ultimate goal of animal sheltering: dogs permanently leaving the shelter and living in a human home. From this perspective, dogs’ lengths of stay and outcomes are evaluated to assess welfare. Many characteristics of the dog can influence how long it stays in the shelter and its adoption likelihood, but these qualities are often immutable, such as the dogs’ morphology or how it arrived to the shelter. Only a handful of empirically evaluated adoption interventions have been shown to reduce dogs’ time in the shelter or increase the possibility of a positive outcome. These include the facilitation of a dog’s adoption by a foster caregiver, altering the dog’s behavior with potential adopters, and removing labels used to describe a dog’s visually-identified breed.
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While the proximal effects of brief outings and temporary fostering on shelter dog welfare have been explored, what is less understood is whether dogs’ length of stay in the care of the shelter or their likelihood of adoption are altered by these interventions. Generally, canine foster care-giving has been shown to improve dogs’ distal welfare. Thus, in the present study, researchers hypothesized that both brief outings and temporary fostering would result in reduced lengths of stay and better outcomes for shelter dogs, as compared to dogs living in the shelter during the same time period that did not experience these interventions.
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Results overview
The results of the current investigation demonstrated that interventions consisting of either a brief outing or temporary stay in a caregiver’s home resulted in shelter dogs being adopted more often as compared to dogs in shelters that did not receive these interventions. Dogs that participated in these interventions were also less likely to be transferred to another facility for placement. Adoptions by caregivers were infrequent but occurred more often after an overnight stay than an outing.
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More specifically, dogs leave animal shelters alive more often when they have an outing of just a few hours or stay in a home with a person, five or over 14 times so, respectively. Moreover, these dogs typically had longer shelter stays prior to experiencing these interventions.
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In the present study, dogs that were surrendered by their owners or returned by adopters, and then temporarily fostered, were more likely to be euthanized than temporarily fostered dogs that arrived as strays or were part of cruelty or neglect investigations. Conversely, owner-surrendered and returned dogs that left the shelter on brief outings were more likely to be adopted as compared to their stray and cruelty/neglect counterparts. Additionally, researchers found that when dogs were temporarily fostered in homes with multiple resident dogs, they were more likely to be adopted and twice as likely to be transferred out of the shelter for placement. The researchers say that it is possible that a dog’s friendliness with other dogs may be related to these outcomes, a factor that has been previously reported as influential in dog adoptions and relinquishment to the shelter.
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Another aspect of dogs’ welfare in the shelter is the time spent in the organization’s care awaiting an outcome. Few experimental interventions in the shelter have been shown to reduce dogs’ time living in the shelter, while a greater number of interventions have been identified that increase adoption likelihood. In the present study, researches found that dogs that participated in either intervention had longer lengths of stay and more often remained in the care of the shelter at the end of study compared to non-intervention dogs. More specifically, they found that dogs that received a brief outing or fostering stay had lengths of stay between 32 and 34 days, respectively, prior to the intervention, while dogs that did not experience either intervention resided in the shelter for just 10 days.
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It is conceivable that intervention dogs’ longer lengths of stay before their brief outings or fostering stays may have been related to qualities about the dogs themselves; specifically, characteristics that negatively impact adoption likelihood, such as a dog’s morphology or social behavior during meet-and-greets. Animal shelters are often encouraged to use brief outing or temporary fostering programs for adoption promotion, particularly those dogs that have resided in the shelter for extended periods of time. As such, intervention dogs’ longer lengths of stay may not be related to the intervention’s effect, but, instead, were a consideration when shelter staff selected dogs for outings and fostering stays. After their brief outing or temporary fostering stay, dogs waited an average of just 10 days to be adopted, which is considerably shorter than their lengths of stay beforehand. Such a finding suggests that ultimately, these dogs’ distal welfare was positively impacted by the interventions.
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Conclusion
The scientists concluded that animal shelters should consider implementing brief outing and temporary fostering programs to improve the welfare of shelter-living dogs.
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Journal reference: Gunter LM, Blade EM, Gilchrist RJ, Nixon BJ, Reed JL, Platzer JM, Wurpts IC, Feuerbacher EN, Wynne CDL. The Influence of Brief Outing and Temporary Fostering Programs on Shelter Dog Welfare.
Animals. 2023; 13(22):3528.
https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13223528
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