Austin Animal Center Shelter Outcomes

Context

The Austin Animal Center is the largest no-kill animal shelter in the United States that provides care and shelter to over 18,000 animals each year and is involved in a range of county, city, and state-wide initiatives for the protection and care of abandoned, at-risk, and surrendered animals.

As part of the City of Austin Open Data Initiative, the Austin Animal Center makes available its collected dataset that contains statistics and outcomes of animals entering the Austin Animal Services system.

Content

The dataset contains shelter outcomes of several types of animals and breeds from 10/1/2013 to the present with a hourly time frequency. The data is updated daily.

The Austin Animal Center's original dataset includes columns for name, date of birth, outcome, animal type, sex and age at time of outcome, breed, and color. Outcomes range widely and include things like adoptions and transfers to other shelters.

From a thread in the discussion, here are definitions of some of the outcome types and subtypes:

• Adoption
  • the animal was adopted to a home
• Barn Adoption
  • the animal was adopted to live in a barn
• Offsite Missing
  • the animal went missing for unknown reasons at a partner offsite location
• In-Foster Missing
  • the animal is missing after being placed in a foster home
• In-Kennel Missing
  • the animal is missing after being transferred to a kennel facility
• Possible Theft
  • Although not confirmed, the animal went missing as a result of theft from facility
• Barn Transfer
  • The animal was transferred to a facility for adoption into a barn environment
• SNR
  • SNR refers to the city of Austin's Shelter-Neuter-Release program. I believe the outcome is representative of the animal being released.

Acknowledgements

The dataset is provided by the wonderful folks at the Austin Animal Center, the largest no-kill animal shelter in the United States. The AAC makes available the data on the Austin Open Data Portal. More information on the dataset can be found one the Shelter Outcomes page.

A simple script to programmatically extract the Austin Animal Center's shelter outcome dataset through the Socrata Open Data Access (SODA) API can be found as a Github Gist here. The shelter outcomes endpoint is https://data.austintexas.gov/resource/hcup-htgu.json.

Inspiration

The dataset was explored in a series of Jupyter Notebooks that end with a pipeline prediction model written in scikit-learn. The series of notebooks can be viewed here:

• Part One - Downloading, Cleaning and Feature Engineering the AAC Shelter Outcome dataset
• Part Two - Exploratory Data Analysis of Shelter Cat Outcomes with Pandas and Seaborn
• Part Three - Predicting Shelter Cat Adoptions and Transfers with Scikit-learn

The inspiration for sharing this dataset and the associated notebooks is to spread awareness and provide another set of data to help support and care for the animals who need it most. By increasing the amount of data and knowledge around best practices and data analysis, those in the animal welfare community can more effectively respond and identify animals that need more support to avoid unwanted outcomes.