Are we making a difference?

Many of us invest time and resources in vaccinating dogs against rabies. We know this will not only protect dogs but also the people they live amongst.  There are many examples of studies reporting vaccination of dogs to be a highly effective method of protecting public health, but do you have evidence from your own work?

Many of us also invest in managing the dog population in other ways, such as limiting reproduction or persuading and supporting owners to provide greater care and oversight to their dogs. But how do you know if these activities are impacting dogs and their communities in the way you hoped?

In short; how do we know our hard work is making a difference? The International Companion Management (ICAM) Coalition felt that answering this question was critical.  For donors, managers and beneficiaries of interventions, impact assessment can be highly significant. It can expose inefficiencies that can then be addressed or providing evidence of positive impact and therefore the opportunity to gain greater recognition and support.  For those of us looking to develop policy or practice, impact assessment of varied interventions in different contexts provides the evidence-base required for making intelligent decisions about how to manage dog populations humanely and effectively.

By collating examples of successful impact assessment in dog population management, animal welfare and human health, the ICAM Coalition developed ‘Are we making a difference? A guide to monitoring and evaluating dog population management interventions’.  This guidance provides detailed descriptions of potential indicators (measurable signs that change is happening) plus cost-effective ways of measuring these indicators.  The indicators can be used to reflect change in eight different impacts, including improving public health and reducing dog density or stabilising population turnover.

By presenting these impacts together, intervention managers can consider other benefits that could be achieved through additional activities.  As well as reducing the public health threat from dog bites or rabies infection, a program could also contribute to reducing the incidence of leishmaniasis or echinococcosis. Many potential impacts are interrelated; programmes that improve the health of dogs by fostering better dog ownership practices may indirectly reduce the public health threat and improving the public perception of community dogs.

The resulting document is necessarily long, to encompass all the impacts that interventions around the world are working to achieve. But most interventions will have only a few impacts in mind, so much of the document is not relevant to them. With this in mind, ICAM also provide an online navigation tool, which asks a series of short questions about the dogs and the intervention, and then creates a tailored document based on the answers. The result is much shorter and bespoke guidance. There are also a couple of tools available to help people train and test themselves on body condition scoring, one of the recommended indicators of dog welfare.

The ICAM coalition wrote the guidelines to be relevant internationally but with a particular desire to support those of us implementing rabies control and dog management in resource-limited communities; hence the focus is on simple methods and meaningful indicators. The goal is to help us to evaluate our work efficiently, and therefore increase the rate at which we can adapt, improve and replicate humane interventions for the benefit of the dogs and the communities they live amongst.

Contributed by Dr Elly Hiby, ​ICAM Coalition Scientific Coordinator and ​Independent Consultant. The ICAM coalition includes RSPCA International, World Animal Protection, HSI, WSAVA, IFAW and  GARC.