Why we can’t get good data

I’ve been blogging for a little over two years now and one of the biggest hurdles I’ve found to strategic thought about animal welfare in Australia, is a lack of available data.

It’s not an enormous ask in the technology age; pets are registered and microchipped, incoming stray pets are recorded in computer databases, and animal welfare groups taking on various council pound contracts would keep data on incoming and outgoing pets to use for tendering and performance reports. And yet most of the data I’ve used on Saving Pets has been captured from media slips, given out in unrelated council reports, or leaked.

So why is it so hard to get information on the situation of pets in Australia? Why wouldn’t we want the public to have good data?

The truth has a lot to do with ‘strange beliefs’ as explained by Michael Shermer in this video;

Bad science is absolutely rife in animal welfare and I personally see the No Kill movement as the effort to replace bad ideas, unproven ideas and ideas based on bias; with good scientifically considered initiatives.

First, as mentioned in the video, in science we have to keep track of the misses as well as the hits. We absolutely have to have the data of how many pets die in a shelter each year, to be able to compare what that shelter does with their peers. You can’t tell what’s really working (or not) without being able to see what variations led to that result.

Unfortunately, there is a resistance to this from everyone involved in the process. Councils won’t release the data because they don’t want a kick back from their residents should they not measure up. Groups who’ve taken over pound contracts don’t want this information to be made public, in case they lose the tender, or support from donors. So they go to great lengths keep all of this data away from the public domain.

Instead of data, they present simply a theory; ‘people are irresponsible, and we kill pets because homes can’t be found for them all’.

But we be asking for proof of this theory. Opinion is not science. A case study doesn’t equal an explanation. And without a balance between data and theory, there is no way we can get close to solving the issue. We’re just chasing strawmen.

So, why haven’t the animal welfare industry, who’ve been so vocal and effective in lobbying for laws effecting pet ownership in Australia (like mandatory desexing) taken a stand and demanded data from any group or council working with these animals? You know, the kind of action that would allow the development of a scientific approach to the issue?

The answer is cognitive bias

When we hear something that fits within our personal beliefs, we have no reason to ask for more data.

What’s more, if we hear something that agrees with our beliefs and then someone else asks for more proof, we will stand and defend ‘our’ theory against them. Even when they’re just asking for the proof, we maybe should have asked for ourselves.

Working in rescue, our cognitive bias is usually towards the idea that people are crap. We don’t get the perspective that comes from seeing hundreds of thousands of pets living in loving homes, we don’t get the distance that comes with looking at statistics, rather than real life animals. So it’s not only easy to believe the theory presented to us in replacement for good council data, we defend it.

The theory that ‘people are irresponsible’ is nowhere near a comprehensive enough to build good policy for pet ownership, nor does it take into account the variation of the performance of individual councils. And yet we defend it as the problem with pets in Australia.

The theory that ‘we kill pets, because homes can’t be found for them all’ ignores everything we know about the unattractiveness of pounds to adopters, the nature and numbers of people looking to acquire a pet and adopt and the lack of modern marketing techniques. And yet we defend it as the reason pounds kill.

The people who have control of councils, are the people we need to change. And we begin that change by demanding that they give us the true scientific data regarding the outcomes pets in their shelters, rather than defend them blindly, in their theories that they are simply doing an irresponsible public’s dirty work.