How Shelter Increase the Cat Adoption Rate?
Based on data from Austin Animal Center since October, 2013
In recent years, the fullness of animal shelters has become an increasingly serious problem. In Approximately 6.5 million companion animals enter U.S. animal shelters nationwide every year, 3.2 million are cats. Approximately 1.6 million shelter cats are adopted each year.
Many old cats or cats that are not very popular breed will be euthanized by animal shelters if they cannot be adopted for a long time. Statistics shows about 70% cates are euthanized in shelters every year which really shocked me. Even worse, pet euthanasia rates have plummeted in big cities in recent years, falling more than 75 percent since 2009. Although no-kill rescue groups have received more attention in past few years , cats’ living conditions are very cramped and their quality of life cannot be guaranteed at all due to the limited funding and other resources of those rescues.
Shelters racked their brain for finding adoptive homes for cats. I’m wondering if I am able to contribute a little bit using my data analytics background. Fortunately, I found the data covers 29,421 cats from Austin Animal Center from late 2013 to early 2018. The data set collects their breed, color, spay/neuter, age, name, sex, coat as well as their outcomes (eg:Transfer, Adoption, Return to Owner, Died, Euthanasia,Missing, Disposal, Rto-Adopt). Let’s see if we can dive deep into this data and find some interesting insights to figure out what are the factors that affect the chance of adoption. If so, maybe we can help animal shelters to realize how they can increase cat adoption rate.
What happened to the cats in Austin Animal Center？
Based on the graph, even though most of the cats had been transferred, there was still a large majority of cats been adopted (Yay!). Cases like euthanasia, return to owner, death, rto-adopt, missing and disposal were actually very rare compared to transfer and adoption. Austin Animal Shelter is really well run! Given the fact that adoption was the most desirable outcome and there are pretty many cases and features to work with, I considered correctly predicting adoption outcome to be a meaningful task.
What affects adoption opportunities?
In terms of the logistic regression model, the adoption rates are mainly influenced by sterilization, name and age.
If a cat is spayed or neuter, the probability of adoption could be increased by around 1497% holding other variables constant.
If a cat has a name, the probability of adoption could be increased by around 655% holding other variables constant.
If a cat’s age increase by one day, the probability of adoption decreases by around 0.06% holding other variables constant.
Does coat color determine adoption rates?
- The adoption rate of regular species is 42.68%. The adoption rate of rare species is 46.79%. Unexpectedly, whether the cat’s breed is expensive or not does not seem to affect their probability of being adopted as people thought.
- The most common coat pattern of shelter cats is tabby.
A tabby is any domestic cat with a distinctive ‘M’ shaped marking on its forehead, stripes by its eyes and across its cheeks, along its back, and around its legs and tail, characteristic striped, dotted, lined, flecked, banded or swirled patterns on the body — neck, shoulders, sides, flanks, chest and abdomen.
2. Smoke cats get adopted at the highest rate
If your cat is pretty much solid black or gray, but the roots of the hairs are distinctly white, it is a “smoke”. Well, that’s funny… I felt like black cats have always had the misfortune to be associated with bad luck and witches. But I googled and seems this coat is sort of rare and this might be the reason.
3. Most adopted rare cats are point cats.
Point coloration refers to animal coat coloration with a pale body and relatively darker extremities, i.e. the face, ears, feet, tail, and (in males) scrotum. It is most recognized as the coloration of Siamese. This surprised me a lot. I always thought that the Siamese cat’s very friendly personality would be liked by many people.
What other fun facts?
- Male cat is more popular in general. Even both female and male cats are spayed or neutered…
But, you can easily change everything by just giving female cat a name;)
You can increase 51% adoption chance for a female cat just by a name! But you can only increase 13.5% chance for male cat by a name
2. Age 1~3 years cat is the least popular group. People prefer female cat if it is an old cat.
3. Appearance of a cat, rather than its breed, seems to be a more important aspect to adopters.
Conclusion:
In this article, I sliced and diced the data from multiple dimensions and now I have some recommendations to shelters and people who are looking for a cat:
- Please give every cat in shelter a name! Currently, only 56% of cats in shelter have a name. By giving shelter cats a name can increase adoption rate by 44 percentage point, especially for female cats, the influence is more than 51 percentage point.
- If funding allows, make sure to neuter or spay cats can increase adoption rate by 50%. Currently, only 68.4% of cats in shelter accepted sterilization.
- Next time when you visit an animal shelter, please pick those who are female cats without a name, 1~3 years old cats, female kittens, old male cats, domestic-breed cats, black/orange/white cats. They are more in need of help.
- Finally, don’t forget no matter what cat you have chosen, please treat them with all your love, because they are probably only a part of your world, but you are indeed the whole world of them.
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