Search Results (25)

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) Community Engagement (CE) program works with communities in New York City to improve animal welfare through accessible services and outreach to pet owners. To systematically identify welfare needs, the CE team developed a 10-item Animal Needs Assessment (ANA) tool and applied it to 519 cases (records that track from first report to resolution or loss of contact with a client) between January 2021 and September 2024. The most frequent needs were lack of enrichment or resting places, illness, behavioral needs and the removal of hazards. Social service referrals were associated with more serious animal needs, highlighting the intersection of human and animal vulnerability. Services were successfully delivered in 93% of cases, and client openness at first contact predicted successful follow-through. These findings suggest that assessment tools such as the ANA may help guide service planning and inform strategies for improving community-based animal welfare initiatives. Full article

Behavior-related factors represent a major cause of cat relinquishment to shelters, highlighting the need for reliable tools to support appropriate matching between cats and adopters. The present study applied the ASPCA^® Meet Your Match^® Feline-ality™ assessment to evaluate personality profiles of shelter cats and to examine factors associated with variation in personality expression across shelters. A total of 113 cats housed in six shelters in the south of France were assessed using a standardized behavioral protocol. Differences between shelters were evaluated using one-way ANOVA for behavioral scale scores, while associations between personality type and shelter affiliation, sex, coat color, and age were analyzed using χ² tests of independence. Significant differences between shelters were observed for the majority of behavioral assessment items, as well as for composite valiance and independent–gregarious scale scores. Shelter affiliation was significantly associated with the distribution of Feline-ality™ personality types, indicating that personality profiles were not uniformly distributed across shelters. No statistically detectable association was found between personality type and sex. In contrast, significant associations were observed between personality type and both coat color category and age category, suggesting non-random variation in personality distribution across these factors. These findings indicate that shelter-related and individual factors are associated with variation in feline personality expression. While causal relationships cannot be inferred, the results underscore the importance of considering environmental context and population characteristics when interpreting shelter-based behavioral assessments. The Feline-ality™ framework appears to be a useful tool for characterizing personality variation in shelter cats and may support improved adoption matching when applied with appropriate caution. Full article

Between September 2013 and 2022, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) received 2783 suspected animal cruelty cases involving 5745 animals through a partnership with the New York City Police Department (NYPD). These cases involved dogs (2271/2783, 82%), cats (408/2783, 15%), and other species (104/2783, 4%). Dogs were most likely to be presented for suspected neglect (1424/2271, 63%), and cats for suspected non-accidental injury (233/408, 58%). Animals were most often presented by law enforcement (1018/2783, 37%), municipal shelters (383/2783, 14%), and veterinarians (311/2783, 11%). These findings contribute to understanding neglect as a commonly reported type of animal cruelty. Cruelty toward cats appears less well understood and may be under-reported or more severe, requiring further research and attention. Full article

Domestic cats are capable of leading both solitary and social lives and socializing to humans. This type of socialization may also enhance an animal’s problem-solving ability. We examined the relationship between socialization and problem-solving ability, problem-solving speed, and latency to approach a novel apparatus in domestic cats. Socialization towards humans was measured with the Feline Behavior Assessment based on the ASPCA’s Feline Spectrum Assessment. This modified measure requires assessors to observe an individual cat’s behavior during three steps: observation test, door test, and the stroke and push test. During each test, the assessor examined specific behaviors that are indicative of socialization. Problem solving was assessed with a food-acquisition puzzle box that required the subject to pull on a tab to release a food reward. Twenty-four out of eighty-six cats solved the problem-solving task. More socialized cats were more likely to solve the problem, solve it faster, and approach the apparatus sooner. We also found a significant relationship between age and problem solving; younger adult cats were more likely to solve the problem than older adults. These results provide evidence that domestic cats are not only capable of solving this type of problem but also that their socialization towards humans influences their abilities. Full article

The Rational Function Model (RFM) is composed of numerous highly correlated Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPCs), establishing a mathematical relationship between two-dimensional images and three-dimensional spatial coordinates. Due to the existence of ill-posedness and overparameterization, the estimated RPCs are sensitive to any slight perturbations in the observation data, particularly when handling a limited number of Ground Control Points (GCPs). Recently, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has demonstrated significant performance improvements in the RFM optimization problem. In the PCA-based RFM, each Principal Component (PC) is a linear combination of all variables in the design matrix. However, some original variables are noise related and have very small or almost zero contributions to the construction of PCs, which leads to the overparameterization problem and makes the RPC estimation process ill posed. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Sparse Principal Component Analysis-based RFM method (ASPCA-RFM) for RPC estimation. In this method, the Elastic Net sparsity constraint is introduced to ensure that each PC contains only a small number of original variables, which automatically eliminates unnecessary variables during PC computation. Since the optimal regularization parameters of the Elastic Net vary significantly in different scenarios, an adaptive regularization parameter approach is proposed to dynamically adjust the regularization parameters according to the explained variance of PCs and degrees of freedom. By adopting the proposed method, the noise and error in the design matrix can be reduced, and the ill-posedness and overparameterization of the RPC estimation can be significantly mitigated. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method yields markedly improved or competitive performance. Full article

Domestic cats are euthanized at high rates in shelters, and appropriate matching between cats and adopters is believed to improve adoption success and reduce euthanasia rates. The ASPCA’s Meet Your Match^® Feline-ality™ program, designed to match cats with owners based on personality and lifestyle, has been implemented in various shelters. This study is the first systematic evaluation of its implementation process and efficacy. Using a controlled interrupted time series design (CITS), the outcome evaluation examined and compared records for five years (2015–2019) from the Seattle Animal Shelter (SAS) and the Multnomah County Animal Shelter located in Portland, Oregon (USA). The outcome evaluation demonstrated no changes in any outcomes (e.g., cat adoptions, euthanasias, returns, transfers, or length of stay) that could be reliably attributed to Feline-ality™. The process evaluation at SAS identified and quantified eight possible errors in implementation that could affect the success of Feline-ality™; the results indicated a 1.6% overall success rate. Whereas the lack of substantive effect may indicate that MYM^® Feline-ality™ does not perform as purported, it is equally as likely (if not more so) that this absence of evidence of any results reasonably attributable to Feline-ality™ has occurred because the error rate in implementation of the program was very high. The fact that a poorly implemented program necessarily impacts the results of an outcome evaluation underscores the need for process evaluation concurrent with implementation. Full article

Harmful cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) exposures can cause illness or death in humans and animals. We characterized American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) Animal Poison Control Center (APCC) harmful blue-green algae (HBGA) call data, compared it to a measure of harmful algal bloom public awareness, and considered its suitability as a public health information source. ASPCA APCC dog and cat “HBGA exposure” calls made 1 January 2010–31 December 2022 were included. We calculated annual HBGA call percentages and described calls (species, month, origin, exposure route). We characterized public awareness by quantifying Nexis Uni^® (LexisNexis Academic; New York, NY, USA)-indexed news publications (2010–2022) pertaining to “harmful algal bloom(s)”. Call percentage increased annually, from 0.005% (2010) to 0.070% (2022). Of 999 HBGA calls, 99.4% (n = 993) were dog exposures. Over 65% (n = 655) of calls were made July–September, largely from the New England (n = 154 (15.4%)) and Pacific (n = 129 (12.9.%)) geographic divisions. Oral and dermal exposures predominated (n = 956 (95.7%)). Harmful algal bloom news publications increased overall, peaking in 2019 (n = 1834). Higher call volumes in summer and in the New England and Pacific geographic divisions drove HBGA call increases; public awareness might have contributed. Dogs and humans have similar exposure routes. ASPCA APCC HBGA call data could serve as a public health information source. Full article

Change detection based on bi-temporal remote sensing images has made significant progress in recent years, aiming to identify the changed and unchanged pixels between a registered pair of images. However, most learning-based change detection methods only utilize fused high-level features from the feature encoder and thus miss the detailed representations that low-level feature pairs contain. Here we propose a multi-level change contextual refinement network (MCCRNet) to strengthen the multi-level change representations of feature pairs. To effectively capture the dependencies of feature pairs while avoiding fusing them, our atrous spatial pyramid cross attention (ASPCA) module introduces a crossed spatial attention module and a crossed channel attention module to emphasize the position importance and channel importance of each feature while simultaneously keeping the scale of input and output the same. This module can be plugged into any feature extraction layer of a Siamese change detection network. Furthermore, we propose a change contextual representations (CCR) module from the perspective of the relationship between the change pixels and the contextual representation, named change region contextual representations. The CCR module aims to correct changed pixels mistakenly predicted as unchanged by a class attention mechanism. Finally, we introduce an effective sample number adaptively weighted loss to solve the class-imbalanced problem of change detection datasets. On the whole, compared with other attention modules that only use fused features from the highest feature pairs, our method can capture the multi-level spatial, channel, and class context of change discrimination information. The experiments are performed with four public change detection datasets of various image resolutions. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our MCCRNet achieved superior performance on all datasets (i.e., LEVIR, Season-Varying Change Detection Dataset, Google Data GZ, and DSIFN) with improvements of 0.47%, 0.11%, 2.62%, and 3.99%, respectively. Full article

Companion animal relocation programs are an important method to address geographic and resource disparities in pet overpopulation through transport from areas with high homeless pet populations to areas with high adopter demand. Despite mitigation by following best practices, a potential risk of animal relocation is increased disease incidence related to infectious disease spread and the effects of stress during transport. Surgical sterilization may compound disease risk due to the impact of surgical stress on disease susceptibility and the potential for disease exposure from other patients. Our study aimed to provide information about disease and surgical complication incidence as relates to the timing of surgical sterilization in relocated dogs. A population of 431 dogs relocated to a shelter in Washington State was monitored for disease while at the destination shelter and immediately post-adoption. No increased disease incidence was identified for dogs altered within two weeks of transport at the destination shelter compared with those altered within two weeks prior to transport at the source shelter. Because of disparities addressed by relocation programs, surgical sterilization of relocated companion animals is typically best performed at the destination shelter. Our study indicates that disease incidence is not increased by spay-neuter at the destination shelter. Full article

U.S. residents’ perceptions of the impact of prominent animal welfare and veterinary care organizations on pet animal well-being and health care may not be linked to the organization’s stated mission and effectiveness in advancing it, but to the level of recognition people have for the groups. An online survey of 1000 U.S. residents was used to understand the perceived impact of organizations with self-stated dedication to pet animal well-being. Using a Likert-scale, respondents ranked 13 prominent organizations as having a low to high impact on pet animal well-being and health care. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had the highest perceived average impact, while People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had the lowest. A best–worst scaling (BWS) choice experiment was conducted with 7 of the initial 13 organizations to elicit relative rankings by forcing tradeoffs by respondents. Consistent with the Likert-scale results, the ASPCA was ranked as the most impactful organization. The ASPCA’s perceived impact on pet animal well-being and health care may be linked to their high level of recognition among respondents, as this was the organization that respondents most frequently reported having seen/heard stories related to animal well-being and health care. Full article

It is commonly believed that underweight or emaciated dogs are predisposed to food aggression toward humans. Each year, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) receives hundreds of dogs from criminal cruelty cases. The dogs range from emaciated to overweight. We analyzed existing data from 900 such dogs to examine the relationship between body condition score and food and chew item aggression toward humans. Across all types of cruelty cases, 9.2% of dogs were aggressive over the food, chew, or both, which is a lower prevalence than that previously reported among shelter dogs. Dogs from cruelty cases originating in New York City were more likely to show aggression over food (z = 3.91, p < 0.001) and chew items (z = 2.61, p = 0.01) than dogs from large-scale cruelty cases, although it is unclear why. Female dogs were less likely to show food (z = −3.75, p < 0.001) and chew item (z = −2.25, p = 0.02) aggression compared to males. Underweight dogs were not more likely to display food aggression, but when they did, the aggression was no more severe than that of normal-weight dogs (Fisher’s exact tests = 0.41 and 0.15 for the Food Bowl and Chew Item scenarios, respectively). Breed type was not a significant predictor of aggression. Canine food aggression does not appear to be an aberrant behavior caused by a history of food scarcity but may be related to biological factors such as sex. These findings could prove useful for animal behavior subject matter experts testifying in court or consulting on cruelty cases, as they could speak with scientific validity to the question of whether there is a link between previous food scarcity and the likelihood of food aggression in dogs. Full article

This survey research sampled 1000 US (United States) consumers of meat, eggs, and dairy on their attitudes towards the welfare of farm animals and the willingness to pay for products with trustworthy welfare certifications. Most respondents (70%) reported paying attention to labels that indicate how the animals were raised and 78% believed there should be an objective third party to ensure farm animal welfare. The weighted average of the marginal willingness to pay for products raised under a trustworthy welfare certification was $0.79 for eggs (a 32% premium) and $0.96 for 1 lb. of chicken breast (a 48% premium). In addition, 57% of respondents reported they would be likely to choose a restaurant because it serves welfare-certified animal products and are also willing to pay ≥$5.00 extra per entrée. These findings suggest that many US consumers, particularly millennials, would be willing to seek out higher welfare products if they trust the label claims. Full article

Feline relocation is used increasingly in animal welfare to decrease shelter euthanasia rates and increase positive outcomes. Concerns about infectious disease introduction and transmission are often expressed; however, little research has been conducted on even the baseline prevalence of infectious disease following relocation. This study, which collected data on 430 cats relocated through an established program over 7 months, evaluated the prevalence of upper respiratory infection (URI), feline panleukopenia virus (FPV) and dermatophytosis at one destination agency. The period prevalence was 25.8% for URI, 1.6% for FPV and 0.9% for dermatophytosis. Mixed-effects logistic regression was performed to investigate factors associated with URI. Younger age, increased time in transport, and increased length of stay at the destination agency were associated with increased URI prevalence following relocation. The findings of this study reveal that certain highly contagious and environmentally persistent infectious diseases, such as FPV and dermatophytosis, are uncommon following relocation in an established program; however, URI in relocated cats should be proactively managed. Animal welfare agencies can use this information to guide shelter and relocation operations and mitigate the impact of URI in relocated cats. Full article

Many shelters euthanize or restrict adoptions for dogs that exhibit food guarding while in the animal shelter. However, previous research showed that only half the dogs exhibiting food guarding during an assessment food guard in the home. So, dogs are often misidentified as future food guarders during shelter assessments. We examined the impact of shelters omitting food guarding assessments. Nine shelters conducted a two-month baseline period of assessing for food guarding followed by a two-month investigative period during which they omitted the food guarding assessment. Dogs that guarded their food during a standardized assessment were less likely to be adopted, had a longer shelter stay, and were more likely to be euthanized. When the shelters stopped assessing for food guarding, there was no significant difference in the rate of returns of food guarding dogs, even though more dogs were adopted because fewer were identified with food guarding behavior. Additionally, the number of injuries to staff, volunteers, and adopters was low (104 incidents from a total of 14,180 dogs) and did not change when the food guarding assessment was omitted. These results support a recommendation that shelters discontinue the food guarding assessment. Full article

There are approximately 200,000 unwanted horses annually in the United States. This study aimed to better understand the potential homes for horses that need to be re-homed. Using an independent survey company through an Omnibus telephone (land and cell) survey, we interviewed a nationally projectable sample of 3036 adults (using both landline and cellular phone numbers) to learn of their interest and capacity to adopt a horse. Potential adopters with interest in horses with medical and/or behavioral problems and self-assessed perceived capacity to adopt, constituted 0.92% of the total sample. Extrapolating the results of this survey using U.S. Census data, suggests there could be an estimated 1.25 million households who have both the self-reported and perceived resources and desire to house an unwanted horse. This number exceeds the estimated number of unwanted horses living each year in the United States. This study points to opportunities and need to increase communication and support between individuals and organizations that have unwanted horses to facilitate re-homing with people in their community willing to adopt them. Full article