Animals Count Too!

Animal health is human health

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It’s always an exciting day when my interests intersect in the best possible way! The nerdy epidemiologist in me is always looking for data that tells meaningful, compelling and impactful stories. Human-centric data is getting better, but data about animals is lagging so far behind it’s hard to even quantify what it would take to bring it up to today’s standards. We don’t quantify animals or track their movements, there are no Animal Census’ at scale.  

But I am hopeful.

If you aren’t familiar with Best Friends, the largest no-kill shelter in the United States, you should be! They are an unbelievable thought leader, change agent and anchor in the United States shelter and rescue landscape. My dog Auggie was adopted from there! I honestly can’t say enough great things about the cutting edge work they do to not only provide state of the art facilities to the animals in their care, but to give shelters a platform that allows them to see their own data as well as national data in a centralized location. Best Friends is likely the first (I wouldn’t expect anything else) to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to shelter data.  

Let me explain this. Most shelters, rescues and sanctuaries are on very limited budgets and are likely using pencil and paper or maybe a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet to keep track of their animals. Databases and staff that can manage data are very expensive whereas that paper file and some post-it notes are very budget friendly.

This doesn’t mean low tech organizations aren’t doing amazing work, quite the contrary. It probably means they are prioritizing putting their funding to their animals and not on computers…I can’t blame them to be honest.  

The challenge with low tech solutions is they often exist only within that specific organization. It is really difficult to take paper records, or excel spreadsheets from multiple organizations and merge them together. Everyone will have different formats, none of the naming will be consistent from one organization to the next, it would be absolute chaos. Several years ago, Best Friends recognized the need for data, just trying to answer the question - “How many brick-and-mortar shelters are there in this country?” (Julie Castle, CEO Best Friends, Story: Saving lives with machine learning and artificial intelligence) prompted them to assemble an army of staff and volunteers to pick up the phone, submit Freedom of Information Act Requests and deploy many other methods to contact each shelter in the United States to gather information about them. They knew they needed data and they got it.

But today, there is the Shelter Pet Data Alliance (SPDA) platform. In addition to this dashboard being beautiful I almost fell out of my chair when I learned that this dashboard employes artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) so that shelters can start to anticipate the future. Yes, AI/ML are very hot topics of the moment right now, I know first-hand that large human-centered organizations are struggling to implement. But my goodness Best Friends made it happen for the animals and I could not be happier.

The dearth of animal data was something I was aware of but it never directly impacted me until recently. I was sitting at the vet with my dog, Auggie and learned of the ‘Mystery Canine Respiratory Illness’ circulating in the United States and in my neighborhood. I spoke to the vet about the case rate and case fatality rate they were seeing. I also asked about the diagnostic methods being used and how sensitive and specific each one is. But the question I had that no one could answer was…What is the denominator? How many domestic dogs live in my county? How many wild dogs are there estimated to be?

Without knowing how many dogs there are, I have no way to know what the burden of disease is. Ten cases of respiratory illness in a county for example, is a lot if there are only 100 dogs. Those same ten cases in a county with 10,000 dogs is a miniscule amount.

All of the other questions I had like, what are the rates of Bordetella and Canine Influenza vaccines in my area were of course hopeless. Even if I knew how many vaccine doses all of the veterinarians in my county purchased and administered during a specific period of time, that number is meaningless unless I know how many total animals there are.

This is daunting.  

This is one instance when Auggie’s reactivity towards other dogs really worked in his favor. He doesn’t go on play dates or hang out with any other dogs so he has stayed very healthy. Good news, for humans too, the mysterious canine respiratory illness is not showing any signs of spillover or zoonotic potential at this point in time. There will come a day when a new pathogen will spillover- whether from wildlife like deer or domestic companion animals like dogs and cats and these questions about denominators will shift from academic fodder to public health crisis. Luckily today is not that day.

I am extremely hopeful Best Friend’s work quantifying shelter animals and making cutting edge tools available and accessible will serve as a foundation for other animal centric organizations, agencies and governments to start thinking about quantification of animals. Animal health is human health. If we don’t know how many animals there are around us, which species and in what state of health, will we be prepared for the next spillover event?