WHISTLE: We may not be able to predict how a dog will act (or their activity
level) in a home based on how they act in a shelter. Our hope is to get more comfortable
with being able to say, “we don’t know”. There is a lot of pressure from the public for
shelters to answer questions they just can’t answer - the more data we have - the easier
it will be for the public to accept that, take a chance, and see if this works for their
household. With this study, we may be able to confirm there is not a correlation between
activity level in shelter vs in the home. Also the differences in activity level between
dogs in shelter or in foster.
Can an activity monitor help tell you about a pet’s potential medical issues prior to you
knowing. And how can these devices be used in a shelter environment to help with the
level of care provided? Whistle is curious too in understanding environmental impact
on activity level, the licking, scratching, hours sleeping is very interesting to them to
understand baselines of licking and scratching for pets. They’re doing a study with
Banfield so this may help them to see if these pets activity (licking, scratching for
incidence) indicates food and/or environmental allergies.
Wisdom Panel: We are interested in understanding the shelter population breed makeup
compared to community population breed makeup by region or area. Are they similar or
are there certain types of dogs that are more likely to come through the shelter?
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