The author investigated the impact of the cooperation of veterinary medical schools in increasing pet adoption by offering free sterilization. Studies have been conducted investigating the positive influence of pre-adoption neutering of animals on the probability of pet adoption. The articles provide insights into factors that influence the length of stay and what characteristics influence adoption. In this section, we describe the research conducted on animal shelters evaluating euthanasia and factors associated with animal adoption. Though medical and behavioral issues are harder to solve, the overpopulation of healthy adoptable animals in shelters is a problem that can be addressed through machine learning and predictive analytics. With the finite room capacity for animals that are abandoned or surrendered, overpopulation becomes a key challenge. The causes for the overpopulation of animals include failure to spay or neuter animals leading to reckless breeding habits and abandonment or surrender of offspring, animal abandonment from owners who are no longer able to take care of or do not want the animal, and individuals still buying from pet stores. sick, disabled), or behavioral issues (ex. There could be several reasons for the euthanization of animals in a shelter, such as overcrowding, medical issues (ex. These organizations are usually run by volunteers, and animals are viewed during local adoption events that are held at different locations, such as a pet store. Animals may also be adopted from a rescue organization, where pets are fostered in a home or a private boarding facility. Staff and volunteers run these facilities. Public and private animal shelters include animal control, city and county animal shelters, and police and health departments. There are various places to adopt an animal, and each potential owner must complete the adoption process and paperwork to take their new animal home. Animal adoption from shelters and rescues Though animal shelters provide incentives such as reduced adoption fees and sterilizing animals before adoption, only a quarter of total animals living in the shelter are adopted. Moreover, 10–25% of the total euthanized population in the United States is explicitly euthanized because of shelter overcrowding each year. In other words, about 50% of the total canines and felines that enter animal shelters are put to death annually. In the United States, about 6–8 million dogs and cats enter animal shelters every year, and 3–4 million of those animals are euthanized. The proposed two-phased tool can be used by rescue shelters to achieve the best compromise solution by making a tradeoff between the adoption speed and relocation cost.Īs the problem of overpopulation of domestic animals continues to rise, animal shelters across the nation are faced with the challenge of finding solutions to increase the adoption rates. Future studies involve determining which shelter location will most likely lead to the adoption of that animal. The findings from this study can be utilized to predict and minimize the animal length of stay in a shelter and euthanization. Upon further observation of the results, it was found that age for dogs (puppy, super senior), multicolor, and large and small size were important predictor variables. The results demonstrated that the gradient boosting algorithm performed the best overall, with the highest precision, recall, and F1 score. The performance of these models was determined using three performance metrics: precision, recall, and F1 score. Logistic regression, artificial neural network, gradient boosting, and the random forest algorithms were used to develop models to predict the length of stay. This involves predicting the length of stay of each animal at shelters considering key features such as animal type (dog, cat, etc.), age, gender, breed, animal size, and shelter location. The overall goal of this study is to increase the adoption rates at animal shelters. Among the 6–8 million animals that enter the rescue shelters every year, nearly 3–4 million (i.e., 50% of the incoming animals) are euthanized, and 10–25% of them are put to death specifically because of shelter overcrowding each year.
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