The image of a happy family visiting a shelter and being smitten with a cute puppy (cue the shot of the car driving away with the puppy sleeping on a child’s lap) is being reconsidered. (Spoiler: It was never like this to begin with.)

Nowadays, people interested in adopting a pet from a shelter can meet it virtually through popular web technologies like Zoom. A camera can be set up in a room or play yard to show the pet interacting with humans or playing with a favorite toy. A shelter case manager who knows the animal can highlight its personality traits, quirks, and training. Online programs like ASPCA’s Adopt from Home also provide online maps, adopter welcome kits, and vouchers for free vet exams to first-time adopters who might have been unaware of these services.

It might seem counterintuitive, but adopt from home programs allow potential fosters and adopters to spend MORE time meeting pets! Virtual meet and greets free up shelter staff—who are typically spread thin—to proactively schedule the time and be prepared to feature the pet online, often in different scenarios. This also allows for a greater number of pet showings in a single day, and cuts down on wait times for people who must visit the shelter in person for other reasons.

It’s difficult to find fosters for pets in the best of times. Education is one factor: many people interested in fostering aren’t sure what it involves. And many don’t realize its lifesaving impact: fostering avoids adoptable pets being killed at shelters due to space, medical issues, or other factors. At municipal shelters that offer formal foster programs (many still don’t), when a potential adopter is interested in a shelter pet currently in a foster home, the foster parent must return the pet to the shelter in order for the adopter to visit it. If the pet isn’t adopted, the foster might choose not to reclaim it, relegating it back to the shelter where it becomes less adoptable the longer it stays.

In animal welfare vernacular: “Foster is the future.” Foster homes are being seen less as a means of temporary housing and, increasingly, as the locus of learning and care prior to adoption. More animal shelters are formalizing in-house foster programs. They conduct outreach, provide supplies, and even use technology like 911FosterPets.com to connect fosters with each other and to adopters, and Fosterspace to match potential foster parents with the right pet and facilitate an ongoing dialog. These shelters provide foster counseling, ranging from how to best care for the pet to how to highlight its best features to on-camera training for in-home intro videos. Such programs also provide resources and community connections for fosters who might need support.

By avoiding the noises and smells of a busy shelter, a pet’s stress level can be significantly reduced. This usually means the pet “shows” better and can thus increase its chances of finding a forever home. Foster adoptions also decrease the workload on onsite shelter staff and volunteers, allowing them to spend time with animals still held at the shelter. Many animal welfare groups are forming coalitions to enable peer-to-peer fostering, in which community members can support one another in the care of a pet, bypassing shelter intermediation altogether. Happily, the time expenditure for fosters and adopters is about the same. Meantime, there are more empty cages and kennels at shelters for other pets who might need them.

When a good citizen finds a stray or injured animal, the usual first course of action is to bring the animal to the shelter so that it can be reunited with its family. When a family fails to step forward, that animal becomes part of a shelter population that might be crowded and killing to make space. Engaging the community around lost and found pets is especially important for cats, 400,000 of whom are still dying annually in America’s shelters. Trap, neuter, and release (TNR) and return-to-field (RTF) programs that involve neighbors helping community cats can be their saving grace.

Covid-19 has introduced the concept of finding an animal’s owner without the shelter as an intermediary. Municipalities have begun encouraging so-called “virtual impounding”—i.e., neighbors keeping found pets safe while enlisting help to find their owners. Community-centered websites like Nextdoor.com now serve as a go-to for people who have lost or found a pet or who need to find a home for one. Similarly, regionally-focused Facebook pages (like “All Things Pets San Fernando Valley” or “Missing Pets of Pasco County”) facilitate interaction between neighbors who share the goal of seeing pets reunited with their families. These solutions have become platforms for community engagement. Online tools like FindingRover.com offer easy-to-complete forms, facilities for uploading photos, and text/email notifications to microchip companies, citizens in specific zip code clusters, and possible pet owners.

This model transforms finding a home for an animal from a “pull” scenario—in which an animal remains at the shelter until the owner comes (if ever)—to a “push” model where the lost animal’s information is shared between neighbors via various communication channels. Community-based rehoming and RTF programs decrease shelter impounds and free up shelter space for other animals. They cultivate awareness about how collaborating neighbors can help save lives. Neighborhood coalitions form to tackle grassroots efforts: posting lost and found pets, creating flyers and canvassing neighborhoods, temporarily caring for pets during natural disasters, and sharing these pets on social media.

If you’ve been reading up until now, it should be no surprise that animal shelters were never early adopters of technology. Shelter management software tools assist shelters in monitoring their kennel operations and reporting outcomes. Most shelters are limited in terms of what they know about their animal populations, never mind individual animals. Animals found as strays might not be microchipped. Prior illnesses or medical issues will likely remain unknown. Even an animal returned to the shelter might end up with a brand-new name and id number, effectively erasing its history. Time-strapped shelter staff aren’t likely to remediate these issues.

Technology companies are now collaborating to solve this problem, applying the concept of continuum of care—i.e., the ability to track a human patient through a series of health care treatments—to an animal’s journey into and out of the shelter system. This involves integrating data from across shelter management systems, external data sources (like publicly-available population health data), and veterinary clinic systems, to name a few. When it comes to data, as the saying goes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Recognizing an individual animal at the time of the interaction—be it shelter intake, veterinary visit, capture in the field and beyond—can result in a host of benefits. Lost animals can be returned to their families. Animal victims of natural disasters can be triaged, cared for, and promoted appropriately. And foster and adopter matches can be data-driven—with a higher likelihood that the match is a success. The opportunities are amazing.

Even before Covid-19, shelters encouraged prospective fosters and adopters to use online resources to find and adopt their pets. However, once a pet is chosen, things turn decidedly analog as the cumbersome process of visiting the shelter in order to meet and adopt the pet begins.

Shelters are increasingly turning to new methods of pet delivery. These include delivering the animal to the foster or adopter’s home directly. (Friends of Detroit Animal Care and Control call their delivery service the “Cuddle Shuttle.”) Alternatively, the option of curbside pickup allows the new pet parents to schedule an appointment to pick up the animal at the shelter.

Both curbside pickup and animal delivery minimize foot traffic at the shelter, freeing up resources and—critical during a pandemic—helping to minimize human contact. At a private rescue center we work with, staff and volunteers assemble care packages for pickup with the pet. These packages—which contain food, treats, toys, and/or medical supplies—represent a gesture of goodwill that was previously impractical due to lack of available staff.

If you ask an individual shelter worker what he knows about a randomly-selected dog or cat, odds are the worker will insist on logging into a computer and reading the animal’s record. Thus, information about the animal's behaviors, likes, dislikes, training, response to other animals and children, and other personality traits is only as valuable as online notes taken by one source and read aloud by another. It is often unpaid volunteers who work closely with shelter animals and get to know their personalities—but shelters rarely capture and assemble the knowledge and experience with an individual animal from its volunteers or staff.

A familiar term to health care and social workers, case management, focuses on tracking a patient, citizen, or family from the beginning of their interaction with a public system to the end. In this scenario, every animal would have a primary advocate who knows and understands its history. That advocate spends time with the animal, works on its training and play time when possible, and notes any new changes in health or behavior. All of this is in the interest of representing it accurately to interested families. Also borrowing from human healthcare is the practice of “daily rounds” in shelters, where case managers visit each of the animals in their case load and note any changes in their health or behavior (ideally digitally). This sustains awareness of individual animals and ensures that their care plans are consistently relevant.

Data shows that the more information that exists about the animal, the higher its likelihood of finding a forever home. As helpful as written notes are, a human being who has worked with and even befriended an animal is a much more credible source of information. The case manager can be available to not only show the pet, but provide tips for integrating the pet into the home, thus also reducing its likelihood of being returned. The availability of a case manager to share information about an animal (ideally combined with more data about that animal—see Consolidated Animal Data) can help shelters and rescues reach their holy grail: a greater number of inquiries converting into actual adoptions!

The burden for animal healthcare has never been adequately addressed at shelters. Those that do have medical clinics can barely keep up with spay and neuter requests, never mind the more comprehensive wellness and surgical care. During a pandemic, traveling to veterinary clinics has become increasingly difficult for pet owners who might be at risk for disease, as well as for the veterinarians treating the pets. Owners looking for initial diagnosis help or those who need lower-cost solutions to brick-and-mortar veterinary clinics are often out of luck. Many are forgoing veterinary treatment for their animals entirely because of the hassle.

Through telemedicine, far-flung clinicians can now diagnose an illness with little more than a web cam. This is as true in veterinary medicine as it is in human health care. Services are becoming more wide-ranging. Emerging telemedicine vendors like Vets Plus More are partnering with mobile veterinary services to offer house calls. In-person services— such as taking lab samples, administering vaccinations, or even treating community cats—are bringing telemedicine closer than ever to full service. Telemedicine in the animal world is not exclusive to web meetings. A pet owner can call an 800 number, text a veterinary service, or access a website. The point is, once again, interactions are totally remote. On a larger scale, telemedicine can democratize access to high-quality human and animal healthcare that is both timely and cost-effective. It can represent lifesaving intervention on both counts.

Covid-19 has created a new urgency for telemedicine. It has mitigated in-person veterinary visits. This not only allows veterinarians to handle simple cases like digestive upset or skin irritation, it frees them up to handle more serious health concerns. It can also allow shelter vets time to work on newer programs like foster, pediatric, or vaccine clinics, as well as volunteer training. “Tele-triage” can also offer initial diagnostic care—particularly helpful for emergency cases—before a pet owner must travel to a clinic. Telemedicine can represent a lower-cost alternative for pet owners who might have lost their jobs or are reluctant to leave the house due to the pandemic. It also represents an environmentally-friendly alternative to veterinary visits that require extensive paper forms, fossil fuel usage, and time.

Until now, public social services have remained largely siloed. Mental health clinics aren’t working with food pantries. Food pantries aren’t working with law enforcement. Law enforcement isn’t working with social services. Social services aren’t working with animal care facilities. And the list goes on. Of course, these examples are situational and, when they work, are often based on personal relationships rather than established systems.

Outreach between established social services and animal welfare organizations is improving. For one thing, inter-governmental agencies are increasingly sharing data, allowing them to treat a family as a collection of individuals with specific needs. This may often include ensuring that the family can keep its pets when it is allowed to keep its home. The recent trend of community policing—where law enforcement professionals engage neighbors in resolving community problems—shows promise in animal welfare. Police personnel have reunited lost pets with their owners, distributed crates and bedding for animals, and even cultivated relationships to eliminate animal abuse or dogfighting rings.

It’s not easy to formalize coalitions of disparate social services efforts. Sometimes, as with the sharing of health or criminal records, it can be illegal. But when social services can come together by way of formal processes of engagement and outreach, it can help people AND animals. Gateway Pet Guardians, a shelter based in rural Illinois, leverages partnerships from food pantries, the fire department, veterinarians, and volunteers to help deliver its services while keeping animals out of its shelters, and thus lowering its costs. And it works the other way, too. Social services agencies are increasingly partnering with animal shelters to ensure people in need get help caring for their pets, either on a temporary or longer-term basis.