Finding Forever Homes
If you’re looking to add a new furry friend to your family, you may be encouraged to “adopt not shop”. That is, to find a new dog at a local shelter or rescue organization rather than a pet store or breeder.
But where do adoptable dogs in come from?
This question can be complicated, so let’s start with one dog. This is Bleu.
Bleu was one of 1,265 dogs available for adoption in Washington on PetFinder, September 20, 2019. But Bleu didn’t originate in Washington. According to his description, he was brought into the state from a shelter in California.
On the day that Bleu was available, 27% of the adoptable dogs in Washington came into the local rescues and shelters from out of state.
Bleu was one of 1,265 dogs available for adoption in Washington on PetFinder, September 20, 2019. And, like all the other adoptable dogs in the state, Bleu originated in Washington.
But Washington is one of only 13 states that didn’t import adoptable dogs from other states or countries. And out of those 13 states, Montana and Alaska are the only two states that also didn’t export dogs elsewhere.
Bleu was one of 1,265 dogs available for adoption in Washington on PetFinder, September 20, 2019. And, like all the other adoptable dogs in the state, Bleu originated in Washington.
But Washington is one of only 13 states that didn’t import adoptable dogs from other states or countries. In fact, Washington exported 55 adoptable pups to other states.
In-State
Out of State
So, if these dogs weren’t strays or surrendered by their owners locally, where did they come from? I looked at the PetFinder profiles of all 58,000 dogs available for adoption across the US on a single day and found 2,460 dogs whose travel was described in enough detail to follow. Let’s follow this group of animals on their journeys to find a new home.
In many other states, adoptable dogs may come from or go to far flung locations for a “forever home”. If you’d like to explore the movements of animals in and out of your neighboring states, select a different state in the dropdown below.
So, if these dogs were intended for adoption in other states, where did they go? I looked at the PetFinder profiles of all 58,000 dogs available for adoption across the US on a single day and found 2,460 dogs whose travel was described in enough detail to follow. Let’s follow this group of animals on their journeys to find a new home.
Shelters and rescue organizations have moved animals around the country, reportedly, since the mid 2000s, with some pointing to Hurricane Katrina as the primary catalyst. Evacuation plans during the detrimental 2005 storm didn’t account for moving or accommodating pets or stray animals, so an estimated 250,000 animals were left behind.
Around 15,000 of those animals were saved during the aftermath of the storm by Louisiana’s SPCA and other rescue organizations from across the country. Then these animals were transported all across the country to wait to be reunited with their families or to eventually find a new one.
Since then, new legislation has been enacted to ensure that pets are a planned part of evacuations. And rescues are still involved in animal safety during emergencies. In fact, 54 of the animals (2%) in our dataset were described as displaced by recent storm activity. But these days, the transport of animals goes far beyond emergency response.
In 2018, the ASPCA reports that they relocated over 40,000 animals from areas of “high homeless pet overpopulation” to “areas with a higher demand for adoptable dogs”. Although our data represents only a snapshot in time, we can get an idea of where, geographically, these areas may be.
imported dogs
exported dogs
In many northern states, rescue dogs are in demand, but sometimes in short supply. Families in these areas have reported wanting to adopt a dog, but the ones that were local and met their needs in both size or temperament were unavailable too quickly.
People in southern states, often have the opposite problem. Due in part to less rigorous spay and neuter programs, poverty, a warmer climate, and in some cases, a different perspective on the role pets play in their families, stray dogs are very common in some areas of the south. And the shelters and rescues only have so much space to put them.
In the past, large numbers of animals were euthanized as a way to free up space, but as the “no-kill” movement has gained momentum, this practice has declined dramatically. A 2017 study estimates that out of the 5.5 million dogs brought into shelters in the US annually, 780,000 (15%) are euthanized. (Due to legitimate health and behavior concerns, this number is unlikely to ever reach zero.) Animals are moved around the country to free up space where it is needed and to bring a supply to the northern dog-demand.
As pet owners look to rescues and shelters for their next companion and some state legislations start requiring that pet stores only sell animals from rescues, people are starting to ask if everyone who wants a rescue dog can even find one.
So, we look to other areas that have an abundance of adoptable dogs: other countries. Out of all of the dogs we identified as imports into a new state, 18% of them came from outside the US. According to our snapshot data review, the US imported 131 dogs from Puerto Rico (a US territory), and 76 from South Korea, making them the 6th and 8th most common imported sources for adoptable dogs nationwide.
The movement of animals both domestically and internationally has been met with a mixed bag of responses. For some people, a dog in need anywhere deserves a good life and home, and they’ll do anything in their power to see that happen. They spend countless hours driving dogs across the country in search of a “forever home.” Pilots volunteer their time to fly animals. Others help to clean up, train, and house newly imported dogs until they are adopted.
For other people, the risks of disease and parasite transfer to new areas may outweigh the benefit of finding every dog a home. Earlier this year, Rhode Island’s state veterinarian told Pew that, “From a pure health perspective, we shouldn’t be doing this...But it’s political now. People think they’re doing a good thing. They want to do this.” After Rhode Island’s incidence rate for the deadly (and contagious) canine parvovirus went from two incidents per year to two per week in 2012, they have a right to be worried.
And it’s not just Rhode Island. Heartworm rates in Seattle-dwelling dogs have skyrocketed over 300% between 2012 and 2017. Climate change and a lack of prevention may have played some role in that jump, but Dr. Brian Joseph, the State Veterinarian at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told SeattleDogSpot that rescues (either accidentally or willingly) bringing heartworm-positive dogs into the state likely share some of the blame.
Within the past 6 months alone, the Center for Disease Control has put a temporary ban on importing dogs from Egypt due to concerns of canine rabies (a strand eliminated from the US in 2007) and a new strain of the highly contagious canine distemper virus was found on a dog imported to Canada from South Korea.
Transporting unhealthy dogs is, of course, not the intent of reputable rescue organizations. There are plenty that prioritize the health of the animals and require validated health records before moving any animals. But since there is little nationwide regulation (or even central data collection) on animals moved within and into the country, unsafe transport operations and less-than-reputable “rescue organizations” have emerged. Often known as “retail rescues,” these organizations buy dogs from “puppy mills”, dog auctions, or other unsafe conditions, move them across the country, and sell them to unsuspecting families as “rescued” animals.
And this is the crux of the debate. We can’t answer the moral dilemma of whether or not these animals should be moved for you. But, we hope, that our single-day snapshot of adoptable dogs on PetFinder provides you with a small peek at a large and complex situation.
Methods
Using the PetFinder API, details about all 58,180 dogs available for adoption in the 50 US states and Washington DC on September 20, 2019 were collected. Since PetFinder does not provide an entry field for an animal’s location before arriving at its current organization, I parsed the text of each pet’s “description”. I started by limiting text to anything that came after the word “from” but before the word “to”, or after “located in”. I then analyzed the remaining text using entity recognition from the spacyR package. I manually checked the data for anything mislabeled.
In all, over 3,000 dogs were described as having originated in places different from where they were listed for adoption. The count discussed in this article (2,460) is lower because we eliminated any listings for animals from a vague region (e.g., “the south”, “the Carolinas”, “LA or TN”) instead of a specific state or country. We also assume that this is an underestimate since not all shelters or rescues will include this information in an animal’s PetFinder description. Any animals that were described as transported by their previous owners instead of by the rescue or shelter were also removed from our data.
Some dogs were listed as being from several places. For example, one was described as “rescued from the euthanasia list at a tiny Alabama shelter and brought to a rescue in Georgia”, but the dog was listed as available for adoption in Massachussetts. In this case, the earliest location is the one reported.
In 238 (9.7% of) cases, the dogs were shown as available for adoption in one state, but they still resided in another. For instance, a dog that was available for adoption in Washington had the disclaimer “Dogs will be transported from Texas upon approved match.” We still considered these to be “imports” since they are listed as available for adoption upon searching PetFinder for dogs in that state.
Data and R Code to analyze data are both available here.