Recipient Organization
IOWA STATE UNIVERSITY
2229 Lincoln Way
AMES,IA 50011
Performing Department
Veterinary Medicine
Non Technical Summary
Animal shelters are a place where many animals and people must come to have animals adopted out into the public. This situation is likely to lead to animals combined into a population which leads to mixing of diseases. It is therefore important for animal shelters to understand the inherent risks of their current protocols to promoting infectious disease spread within their population and take steps to mitigate this risk. The online tool we are creating will assess this risk within any animal shelter and then provide the shelter with feedback which can be placed into specialized formats for training by the shelter manager or other lead staff to provide training to the staff.
Animal Health Component
(N/A)
Research Effort Categories
Basic
(N/A)
Applied
(N/A)
Developmental
(N/A)
Goals / Objectives
We are developing a web-based tool to help animal shelters identify areas of biological risk and address those areas both through alterations in current standard operating procedures as well as training the staff and volunteers of the shelter.
Project Methods
We performed a survey of Iowa mixed and small animal veterinarians and pet owners to determine the local definitions of what should be adoptable from local animal shelters. We have used this information and a vigourous literature search to produce a web-based question set which will assess the shelters current programs and identify areas where change might be warranted. Training tools based off of this assessment will help educate all shelter staff regarding the needed operational changes.