Problem to Solve

In 2021 alone, Chicago Animal Care and Control, the city’s only publicly funded shelter, took in 4,122 stray, surrendered, or confiscated dogs. While some of the dogs who end up in the municipal shelter will be returned to their owner or adopted out directly, more than half of these animals are transferred to another animal rescue organization through the shelter’s Homeward Bound partnerships.

To learn more about the journeys of these rescued pups, we pulled data from the Petfinder API for dogs located within 100 miles of Chicago. Petfinder is the most widely used online database of adoptable pets. Many Chicago animal rescue organizations maintain their own organization pages and adoptable pet listings on the site. We are building an interactive data visualization dashboard to explore how different dog characteristics affect the average length of stay of these Chicagoland dogs in a shelter or foster placement prior to adoption.