The everyday work of One Welfare in animal sheltering and protection

The paper examines how the concepts of One Health and One Welfare, which emphasize interconnections among human, animal, and environmental well-being, are taken up in North American animal sheltering and protection. While One Health often focuses on zoonoses, One Welfare extends to ethics, economics, and social dimensions, and is increasingly invoked to justify supportive, rather than punitive, approaches that help maintain human–animal bonds. Despite widespread adoption of One Welfare language and initiatives (e.g., community veterinary outreach, pet food banks, emergency boarding), little research has analyzed the actual frontline work these initiatives require or how multi-agency collaboration is accomplished in practice. The research question is to explicate the everyday work of animal protection officers and shelter staff in enacting One Welfare initiatives, and to understand how that work is institutionally coordinated and constrained. The study’s purpose is to reveal tensions between institutional intentions and on-the-ground practices, showing the importance and challenges of keeping people and animals together within legal and organizational frameworks.

The authors outline how One Health and One Welfare are used in animal sheltering and pet ownership contexts to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and support for vulnerable people and their animals. Prior work highlights shifts from punitive control to supportive measures (e.g., subsidized veterinary services, sterilization, pet food support), and reports quantitative metrics of service utilization (e.g., Pets for Life, community veterinary outreach). Research connects One Health to social inequity and housing security and describes educational benefits of One Health/One Welfare models for veterinary students. Despite this, most literature emphasizes aspirations and service counts rather than the granular, everyday work processes by which these services are delivered or coordinated, especially across agencies. Limited empirical research on animals living with people experiencing homelessness or housing vulnerability shows mixed findings on animal health and welfare, suggesting case-by-case assessment rather than broad generalizations. Work on animal hoarding often advocates multi-agency approaches without detailing practical mechanisms for cooperation. The authors identify a critical gap: the lack of analysis of frontline practices, decision-making, and inter-institutional coordination that operationalize One Welfare in animal protection.

Design: Institutional ethnography (IE) was used to investigate everyday work processes and how they are organized by institutional texts and relations. Setting and participants: The British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (BC SPCA) was the central research partner. Participants included BC SPCA administrators and managers, animal protection officers (APOs), frontline shelter staff, and the animals involved in sheltering/protection. Ethics approvals were obtained from the University of British Columbia BREB and the BC SPCA. Data collection: Over 8 months in 2019, the primary author conducted participant and naturalistic observations, focusing especially on ride-alongs with APOs responding to public calls. Fieldnotes were recorded before/after site visits. Verbal consent was obtained from members of the public at visit sites in accordance with TCPS2 guidance. Informal interviews occurred during/after observations to clarify work steps and use of texts (forms, protocols, laws, database screens). Documents and blank forms referenced by staff were collected, and the researcher had regular access to the digital shelter database. In early 2021, four Zoom-based focus groups were held: two with shelter staff (n=2 and n=4), one with APOs (n=5), and one with administrators (n=11), lasting 40–67 minutes. Focus groups discussed literature review findings and how they aligned with participants’ experiences. Data analysis: Following IE procedures, analysis iteratively mapped what participants did in daily work and how activities were organized by institutional processes. Techniques included identifying uses of texts, writing preliminary accounts to surface tensions (disjunctures), and indexing audio transcripts and fieldnotes to empirically track work processes (e.g., sub-indices for providing alternative measures such as supplying donations, requesting financial/veterinary assistance). Preliminary accounts were developed into full ethnographic accounts describing the social organization of APO efforts. Confidentiality measures included pseudonyms, neutral pronouns, and alterations to non-essential case details.

• Officers’ everyday One Welfare work centers on providing “alternative measures” to support owners and keep animals with them when legal criteria for distress are not met. These measures include providing supplies (food, bowls, leashes, carriers, litter), referrals to low-cost/free veterinary clinics, subsidized sterilization, and compassionate/emergency boarding. • Ethnographic account: An APO assisted an elderly supportive-housing tenant with an elderly cat by providing a carrier and referral to a free clinic; the cat was not legally in distress but needed veterinary care. Despite support, the cat was not taken to the clinic and later died, illustrating the uncertainty and difficulty of achieving improved animal outcomes when owners face constraints (e.g., cognitive decline, mobility, logistics). • Institutionalization of alternative measures: Historically informal, this work is being formalized within the BC SPCA through texts like the “Alternative Measures Programme APO Request” form, aligning with the BC SPCA 2019–2023 Strategic Plan to keep people and animals together and reduce shelter intake. Officers are increasingly expected to document supports provided, generating organizational metrics. • Benefits and discretion: Alternative measures can reduce shelter intake and costs, avoid euthanasia for animals unsuited to shelter environments, and preserve human–animal bonds. Officers exercise considerable discretion, sometimes reclassifying potential cruelty complaints into alternative measures (e.g., securing owner consent for boarding instead of seizure) to achieve better outcomes. • Workload and logistics: APOs prepare for calls by stocking trucks with donated and purchased supplies and by maintaining informal knowledge networks of community resources (e.g., breed rescues, social service agencies). This supportive work is time-consuming and often repeated. • Repeated, short-lived improvements: In some cases, years of repeated alternative measures (e.g., providing straw, flaps, enrichment, food) failed to produce lasting improvements, though the documentation helped build a legal case if removal became necessary. Administrators voiced concern that the push to keep families together may overlook the animal’s welfare when owners face persistent barriers. • Multi-agency collaboration challenges: Officers reported frequent misunderstandings with supportive-housing staff about the SPCA’s legal mandate (helping animals in distress) and expectations (e.g., being the “bad guy” to remove animals when legal thresholds are not met). Shelter staff recounted cases with large, sudden influxes of animals (e.g., ~40 rats from one SRO unit) and disagreements with social workers over recognizing animal hoarding. These miscommunications strained resources and could result in poor animal outcomes. • Overall, improving animal welfare via alternative measures is complex, uncertain, and constrained by owners’ housing, health, and social circumstances, as well as by differing institutional mandates and processes across animal welfare and human social services.

Findings show that operationalizing One Welfare on the frontline requires APOs and shelter staff to balance legal enforcement under the PCA Act with supportive interventions aimed at keeping people and animals together. While alternative measures can produce organizational efficiencies and humane outcomes, they often entail repeated, labor-intensive efforts with uncertain impact on animal welfare when owners face entrenched challenges (e.g., cognitive decline, poverty, housing instability). The literature on animals with people experiencing homelessness/housing vulnerability suggests variable animal health and behavior, reinforcing the need for case-by-case assessment rather than blanket assumptions. Formalizing alternative measures introduces new accountabilities (documentation, metrics) but does not provide standardized procedures or criteria to guide decisions in complex situations, thereby relying on worker judgement and ingenuity. Multi-agency collaboration, promoted under One Welfare, is hampered by differing mandates, expectations, and regulatory regimes between animal welfare and human social services, producing misunderstandings and suboptimal outcomes for animals and staff. The study argues for evaluating the effectiveness of different interventions across contexts and for building organizational mechanisms to share best practices. It also calls for IE studies beginning from the standpoint of human social service providers to map their ruling relations and identify points of alignment/conflict with animal protection work, as well as participatory IE to understand the practical barriers owners face in using provided supports. Ethical guidance is essential when engaging vulnerable populations.

The study ethnographically documents the everyday, largely invisible work that animal protection officers and shelter staff perform to enact One Welfare through alternative measures. It shows that while such measures can keep people and animals together and reduce shelter reliance, they are time-consuming, often repeated, and not guaranteed to improve animal outcomes due to owners’ constraints and inter-institutional complexities. The paper highlights tensions between organizational intentions and frontline realities, and the lack of standardized procedures for supportive interventions. It recommends: (1) research to evaluate the success of different alternative measures across varied circumstances; (2) organizational opportunities for APOs to share best practices; (3) deeper IE analyses of collaborations between animal welfare and human social services, including starting from human services’ standpoint; and (4) participatory research to understand how supportive-housing residents access or fail to access provided supports for their animals.

The analysis is qualitative and exploratory, based on ethnographic observations and focus groups within a single organization and context, and does not quantify outcomes or generalize animal welfare effects of alternative measures. The paper explicitly notes it does not fully explicate the tensions identified in the data and presents preliminary analysis. Multi-agency collaboration processes are described from the animal welfare standpoint and warrant further investigation from human social services’ standpoint. To protect confidentiality, datasets are not publicly available.