Correspondence - #52 - Laserfiche WebLink

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The OCAC/OCCR slide shown earlier is presented in an annotated form in the file "Bite Statistics - annotated. pdf". The annotation shows the correct numbers and the size of the error. The number of bites is still lower in 2020-2022 than in 2019, BUT that's an apples -and -oranges comparison. Compared to 2019, the 2020-2022 period had fewer intakes, fewer adoptions, less animal care staffing, and fewer volunteers. (There was even a drop in county -wide bites.) Have OCAC/OCCR even considered the effects of these other factors on the number of bites? Not only did OCAC/OCCR present false data, they failed to carry out any analysis. OCAC/OCCR didn't even grasp that you need to adjust the number of bites by, for example, the number of animals. An initial attempt at a more granular analysis immediately runs into problems. There was disturbing negligence in collecting the data in the first place. For example, a reasonable analysis would want to look at bites to children or to senior citizens; but the victim age is missing in a large number of cases. The bite circumstance field is in most cases "OTHER" - not very useful. Staff are sometimes identified only by title, making it impossible to tell if the same staff are repeatedly suffering bites. Given these difficulties, a complete analysis of bite incidents will have to wait. But there is a basic adjustment we'll look at below to arrive at a fair comparison. For Dog Bites, the Reduction is mostly Demographics Cat programs and their modifications over time are not familiar to the author of this report. In discussing policies specific to dogs (play groups, access to the kennel buildings), we have to focus on dog bites, not the total. OCAC/OCCR didn't even achieve this simple feat of logic. There were 34 bites by dogs in 2019, and 19 in 2022. This is already a far cry from OCAC's 55-to-12 wild claim. But remember that, compared to 2019, in 2022 there were fewer dog intakes, fewer dog adoptions, fewer kennel attendants, and fewer volunteers. If we average two fiscal years to estimate one calendar year, the number of Kennel Attendant dropped from 21 to 16.5; Senior Kennel Attendants from 5.5 to 4; and Volunteer hours dropped from roughly 22,000 to 16,000. To compare bites across years without an adjustment would be foolish. Here we'll focus on adjusting by the number of dog intakes or adoptions. Even the simplest adjustment by dog numbers makes the difference shrivel. If we adjust the 2019 number by the number of dog intakes, i.e., multiply by the ratio of (2022 dog intakes) / (2019 dog intakes) it goes from 34 to 25.5, and the 2019-2022 difference shrinks to just 6.5 bites per year. We can do an even better comparison by looking at the one piece of information that is almost always recorded in the bite database, dog age. It turns out that the bite rate is strongly dependent on dog age. A large portion of the reduction in dog bites between 2019 and 2022 can be explained by a simple shift in the numbers and the age -distribution of shelter dogs. This will be shown via the Table "Dog Bites based on 2018-2022 Statistics". Each column represents an age bracket for dogs, in years. (This table is derived from an animal database dump, and imperfections in this dump necessitate omitting a very small percentage of the entries. The effect on the analysis we are doing here is negligible.) There is a small number of Unknown ages and the Total is also shown. Bites - Page 3 of 8