Animal Shelter Intake & Outcome Trends

Tableau Dashboard

About this project

Austin Animal Center (AAC) is the municipal shelter for the city of Austin and unincorporated Travis County. The shelter accepts stray and owned animals regardless of age, health, species, or breed, and their goal is to place all adoptable animals into forever homes through adoption, foster, or rescue partners. Read more about Austin Animal Center here.

This project explores trends for dogs and cats at AAC over a period of 9 full years (2014-2022). The dashboard is focused on dogs and cats only, though AAC does accept livestock, wildlife, and birds (i.e., any species). Number of intakes, length of stay, top breeds, and type of intake by year and age category are shown in the dashboard.

Analysis Questions

Have total number of intakes changed over the years?
How long do animals typically stay in the shelter? Are there any relationships or trends between length of stay and age or breed?
How do animals come into the shelter (e.g., owner surrender, stray, etc.)? Has this changed over the years?
What are the top dog and cat breeds coming into the shelter?

Insights

In 2020, intakes for dogs and cats decreased by more than 50% from the previous year. This is expected due to the impact of Covid-19 (e.g., more people were staying home and not traveling and therefore in a better position to adopt or foster a pet), but nonetheless was interesting to see confirmed by the data. In 2021, dog intakes increased by 15% and cat intakes increased by 48% as compared to 2020.
For both dogs and cats, older animals had a longer length of stay as compared to younger animals, with the exception of geriatric cats. It is important to note, though, that there were fewer intakes for senior age dogs and cats as compared to younger dogs and cats.

Use the interactive chart (bottom left) to view the Top N dog and cat breeds coming into the shelter, either overall or by year.
Use the interactive chart (bottom right) to view the trends over the years of different intake types for dogs and cats.

SQL skills demonstrated in this project

I started this project in SQL. The intake and outcome data were in two separate tables, so I joined them and proceeded to create additional columns and some initial analysis in SQL. One I had all of the columns I needed, I exported the data to create the dashboard in Tableau. See additional project images for some examples of my SQL queries. My full SQL analysis project can be viewed in my GitHub repository