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Scientific Literacy and Stray Cat Policies

Or how to read scientific papers and interrogate claims for accuracy.

I said in my previous post I eventually wanted to write something about how to read scientific papers and how to be aware of the ways a lot of credible sites summarize papers in a way that is misleading or inaccurate. Well since the topic came up yesterday now I've finally motivated myself to make this post so this is it. Although this is a bug blog, I will be focusing on specific claims made about cats because the way that scientific papers are used to affect policy is more direct and focusing on cats makes this topic more approachable and widely relatable.

I will be formatting this through the lens of finding a claim made on a site that has a citation, and how to read the original paper and compare it to the claim that the site is making. This I think is most applicable in everyday life. I'm also not a researcher or in academia, but I want to present this information as how to read a paper as a layman on a topic you don't have experience in. Hopefully by the end of this you'll have a greater sensitivity to statements made by secondary or tertiary articles, and you'll be more inclined to investigate information to it's source.

The other reason why I'm focusing this post on cats is because I ended up taking a deep dive into the policies we have about cats and how those policies are scientifically backed. We found a cat we had reason to believe was a lost pet a few months back, and we took him to a shelter so they could hold him while the owner was tracked down. During this, we were told the shelter doesn't take healthy cats, and that the policy was to put any cat you find back where you find it and "keep an eye on it", and the shelter would only take it if it was actively sick, injured, or starving.

This policy was based on guidance from the National Animal Care and Control Association.

We'll get to this is a second. Another shelter nearby that we tried had a similar policy, and their website included this graphic to explain that "When a cat is found outside, healthy and free from immediate danger, it is far more likely to return to its owner on its own."

This graphic has a source here, and we can see that it's one of the same sources used in the NACA findings.

The NACA findings consist of these main points:

Impoundment of healthy adult cats reduces the likelihood of reuniting families with pets

Impoundment of healthy adult cats may disproportionately impact under-served and marginalized communities

Impoundment has the potential to increase cat populations and impact

Impoundment fails to resolve the inciting factors for nuisance situations

Impoundment of healthy free roaming cats reduces capacity to respond to critical community needs

From the site, we have these references listed:

I'm going to focus on the first two points for space. The first two points seem to be the bulk of the argument for releasing found pets back outside and TNR is a whole other thing I don't really want to get into currently. Let's look at the first two references, which are describing lost pet cats and their owner's search and return methods.

This is the first reference, "Search and Identification Methods that Owners use to find a lost cat".

Scientific papers typically start with an abstract. The abstract is not the only thing you should read when looking at a scientific paper. The abstract is a summary that I like to think of more of a keyword organizer, it will briefly describe what the paper is about, what the author did, and what the author thinks the results of the experiment show. This paper shows the parts of the abstract very well, because instead of just a paragraph to sum up the whole thing it's broken down into sections.

So we can see the purpose of this study was to look into how owners were looking for their lost cats, and what aids in cats being found. The study was conducted through a telephone survey, and the results show a breakdown of recovery methods that led to a cat being found. One of the things that immediately sticks out to me in this section is the first line that states "73 of the 138 (53%) cats were recovered". So right away we can see that the NACA site that claims that "In fact, the most successful reunification method for cats is the cat returning home on its own." is a misleading statement, while the majority of cats that were found returned home on their own, most of the lost cats were never found at all. Saying 66% of the cats that were found came home on their own is ignoring the fact that it's 66% of the total number of found cats, but only 34% of the total number of lost cats. Another thing that sticks out to me is the statement that "Only 26 of the 138 (19%) cats had some type of identification at the time they were lost." and that "Owners allowed 82 (59%) cats to spend at least some time outdoors". So the survey was done on a group of cats where a bit more than half were allowed to roam outside and a vast majority had no identification on them. Immediately I would assume that has an effect on how they were recovered, stray cats and indoor/outdoor cats are pretty common and people don't tend to immediately assume a cat they found outside is lost. And without an identification tag, anyone who did find the cat would not be able to return it to it's owner. The conclusions the author draws is also not that shelters should deny the intake of stray cats, but that we should "educate owners about the importance of identification and the need to keep cats indoors".

Let's look at the rest of the article though.

The next section is the Materials and Methods section. Depending on the paper you don't always need to read this, it will describe how the author collected the data, usually includes some information about the statistical relevance, or describe how the experiment was performed. Sometimes this section can highlight implicit biases in the way the data was collected, for example in this paper it states that "The study population consisted of a cohort of cats that had been identified as missing by their owners through placement of an advertisement in the lost-and-found portion of the classified section in the Dayton Daily News or through contact with 1 of the county’s 3 animal agencies". So they only surveyed people that posted a lost cat ad in the paper or directly contacted the shelter about their lost cat. This would exclude anyone that looked for their cat or put up lost cat posters but didn't happen to contact the shelter or run an ad, and the people who didn't look for their cat at all but just assumed the cat ran away. Biases like this are important to be aware of when interpreting the results of a paper, even if they don't have an apparent effect on the results.

Then we come to the Results section, which essentially gives the data as it was collected with no interpretations or conclusions applied. This section has a bit more about the specifics of the methods used, how long it took cats to be recovered, and whether or not having an identification tag made a statistic difference.

Last is the Discussion section, which is where the author interprets the results and draws a conclusion based on that. This is an important section to read because it usually gives some insight into what the authors think the data means. Obviously even researchers aren't infallible, but the authors have a lot more context and knowledge on the subject the paper is about and this can be helpful if you're reading a paper on a topic you're unfamiliar with. In this instance there isn't a lot of technical knowledge that's needed to understand the paper which is part of the reason why I chose to write about cat shelter policies.

In the discussion section, the author writes "These results may, in part, be due to the fact that no animal control laws related to cats existed at the county level in Ohio at the time of the study and that no identification was required for cats. There is tremendous debate as to whether cat licensing or mandatory identification is effective in reducing the cat overpopulation problem and whether owners of cats would comply with such laws." It is important to note that the paper still noted that there was only a small difference in returning cats with identification, even in states where identification and microchipping is mandatory. Although the return rates from the shelter for cats in states that require identification was higher than in Ohio where it's not required, the number was still much lower than it is for dogs (which more commonly have identification). The author also notes that people generally take longer to contact their animal shelters about lost cats, and there was no mandatory holding period for stray cats at the time of the study but most agencies held stray cats for 3 days, which might have caused some of the lost cats to be euthanized before the owner contacted the shelter. Ultimately the author concludes that "we believe the present study illustrates the importance of educating owners about providing identification for their cats. We also believe the present study points to the need to continue to encourage owners to keep their cats indoors....Veterinarians can play a key role in educating owners on the health and safety reasons for keeping cats indoors and the importance of identification. Given that 56 of the 138 (41%) cats in the present study reportedly were not allowed outdoors, it is important to educate owners of indoor-only cats on the importance of identification and the potential risk that these cats will escape and become lost." The author does not seem to be concluding that because most of the cats that were found returned on their own, it is therefore better to leave stray cats outside. Instead the conclusion seems to be that people should be better about having identification tags on their cats, that they should contact the shelter early when they suspect their cat is lost and be proactive about following up with their shelter, and that cats should be kept indoors.

Let's look at the second study, the "Frequency of Lost Dogs and Cats in the United States and the Methods Used to Locate Them". One of the authors in this paper is the same author from the previous paper, Linda Lord. This doesn't necessarily mean anything but it's important to keep in mind if a website is citing multiple articles but the articles all come from the same author or data. I've even seen a website cite multiple sources, but when looking at these sources, all the sources were based on the same paper, which is also important to consider. If for example a website cites another website that talks about a paper and cites the paper itself as a different source, then it looks like there are two different sources for the information when really there's just one.

This paper's abstract is a lot more concise, with regards to cats it says "75% (95% CI: 64–85%) of cats were recovered...For cats, returning on their own was most common...Cats were less likely than dogs to have any type of identification. Knowledge of the successful methods of finding dogs and cats can provide invaluable help for owners of lost pets. Since 25% of lost cats were not found, other methods of reuniting cats and their owners are needed. Collars and ID tags or humane trapping could be valuable approaches." Right away we notice that the recovery percentage of cats is a lot higher than in the previous study, but that 25% is still a large percentage of cats that were never recovered. This is particularly interesting because this is the paper that the shelter cited on their website as the source for the information on their graphic about cat recovery, but again we can see the exclusion of the number of cats that weren't found is misleading.

From the Methods section, we can also see that the respondents to the survey in this paper were randomly called, and that they were asked about pets that had become lost within the last 5 years. This removes the bias of the previous paper of selecting only for people that used a local ad or went to the shelter to search for a lost pet.

The results are presented here largely as just the raw data in an Excel sheet, so I'm going to skip over to the Discussion section. In the discussion section, they say that "The definition of lost pets used in this study deliberately was designed to be broad so that owners of pets would include any time they were concerned about the absence of the pet from the home". The authors recognize that this could cause a discrepancy where there was no set time frame for how long a pet was lost for before the owner considered them lost, and they realized that people would respond to the survey under circumstances where other people might not consider the pet lost, and that allowing the pet to roam or be indoor-outdoor would change when or if the owner considered the pet lost.

The author also notes that "We did find that lost neutered pets, lost pets belonging to respondents with more education, and lost cats belonging to respondents with higher income were more likely to be reunited with their owners. This could be due to different behaviors of neutered pets or to different behaviors by owners of neutered pets. Since households with higher owner education and income levels were more likely to have neutered pets, these results could be due to some complex inter-relationships, which we were not able to study further due to our limited samples size. This does suggest future avenues for investigation evaluating other pet-keeping and health variables and their associations with human lifestyle and demographic variables." This paragraph appears to be the source of the claim from the NACA that sheltering healthy cats disproportionately affects marginalized communities. The statement the NACA makes about "Only ~40 % of people in the lowest income bracket (<$30,000 annual income) that lost cats were reunited with them, compared to > $90% reunited for those making $50,000 or more per year" seems to be based on this paper, but the actual data to back this up is presented as such:

So for people making less than 30k$ per year, 8 of the cats were found vs the 11 who weren't found, which does make about 40% found. The 90% seems to be based on adding up all the found vs unfound cats for people in the above 50k$ range, so 25 total found cats vs 1 cat that was not found. This makes 96%, which is >90% but I guess it's a bit too high of a percentage to seem accurate. It's also possible they added in the Don't Know category, I'm not sure exactly what they looked at to get the 90% number. The point is that the statement about taking cats into shelters affecting marginalized communities is a statement based on a total of 50 cats (excluding the 30-49k bracket) which the authors of the paper say is not enough data to make a definitive statement about.

The NACA website also points to the low usage of shelters through a program designed to reach low income communities, and the authors of the paper state that "Since the majority of cat owners that lose and do not recover their cat did not search at the animal shelter, there is likely an opportunity to increase messaging regarding this option as a search method for cat owners...These results may suggest that a proportion of “stray” pets in shelters are actually lost as opposed to abandoned by their owners. Lost pets in shelters may not be reunited with their owners if the owners do not know that there is a shelter that might have their pets." It seems that low usage of shelters and the extended time cat owners take to reach out to their local shelters does contribute to the low number of cats that are recovered from shelters, but to say that because of this cats shouldn't be kept at a shelter at all seems to be backwards. More education about shelter services and encouraging pet owners to utilize their shelter more and reach out earlier when their pet is lost would likely improve pet recovery from shelters. If shelters made it a policy to not hold pet cats then obviously people would not reach out to shelters to recover a cat since it is likely that the cat in question would not be at the shelter.

The author concludes "Animal shelter staff and veterinarians can provide a valuable service by making available information on how owners of lost pets can best find their pets. They could also help owners find their pets by instituting matching of reported lost pet records with reported found pet records. Veterinarians might offer microchip and identification tag clinics for community pet owners and be sure their own clientele’s pets have microchips, collars and personalized identification. Veterinary clinics and animal shelters could have a list of resources and options for advertising for lost pets; some local papers will publish a lost pet ad free and many shelters have lost and found sections. Local veterinary associations could support advertisements for lost pets...Since 25% of lost cats were not found, other methods of reuniting cats and their owners are needed. It is possible that collars and ID tags or humane trapping could be valuable and more work is needed to determine this. Veterinarians and animal welfare professional can play a key role in helping pet owners if their dogs or cats become lost by guiding owners to use active methods to find lost pets, particularly within the owners’ neighborhoods." Again, we see a distinct lack of suggestion that the conclusion of the paper is since most cats that are found returned home on their own, the best policy for shelters to have is to not accept any stray cats. The suggestion from the author is about further education on the importance of identification, guiding pet owners to more effective methods of searching for their pets, and maintaining lost and found pet records.

Both of these articles are presumably used to support the claim from the NACA site that states "Lost cats are 10-50 times more likely to be reunited with their owners if they stay in the neighborhood of origin than through an animal shelter. In fact, the most successful reunification method for cats is the cat returning home on its own". Based on reading through these two articles, they seem to be combining first article which states that 48 (66%) of the cats came home on their own vs the 5 (7%) which were found at the shelter and the second article which says 32 (59%) of the cats came home on their own vs the 1 (2%) cat that was found at the shelter. Again we can see that this claim is misleading based on the data it's sourced from, the sample size is very small and there were other factors stated in both cases that contribute to the low use of animal shelters in returning cats.

Based on these two articles, the NACA has concluded that shelters should not take in healthy stray cats. This includes cats that have evidence of being owned and lost, or evidence of being abandoned and adoptable. The cat we found had a microchip, but the phone number listed on the microchip was disconnected and the address listed had been recently moved into and the current tenant was receiving old mail from the owner listed on the microchip. Because of this, we had solid reason to believe this was a pet cat that had been lost or abandoned, and yet still the shelter was using a misleading policy written on the basis of obfuscating the actual suggestions the author made in the article it cites.

By finding the original source of these claims, and reading what the source article says, how the data was collected for the source article, and how the author of the source article interpreted this data, we can improve the way we engage with claims and facts presented on various websites and media outlets. This is going to be a two part series (at least) with the second part discussing claims on outdoor cat health, but I hope this was enough to encourage you to read the scientific articles that are at the source of a lot of policy decision and public perceptions.

Part 2

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