Thank you to Alessandro Arbib who has written this guest blog. Alessandro and his team volunteered to carry out a Pro Bono O.R. project with the RSPCA. Here he tells us a bit about the project and the experience of being a Pro Bono O.R. volunteer.
It’s a
dog's life: when O.R. meets canine welfare
The
breeding, ownership and welfare of dogs in the UK is a complex social policy area.
Without an understanding of the dog population and how it is stratified, it is
difficult to propose meaningful welfare policies. To help with this, three Operational
Researchers and an engineer from DECC have worked with RSPCA and DogED to develop
a stock and flow model of the UK dog population.
Although there has been research
into the size of the dog population, nobody has pulled all this together into a
single model that everyone can use to help focus priority issues. As a consequence,
different stakeholders have varying, and sometimes conflicting, views of how many
dogs there are and their needs. Without a consensus understanding of the
population and how it is stratified, it is difficult to propose meaningful
welfare improvement policies.
In order to collect the relevant
data and develop a useful model the RSPCA - UK’s leading animal welfare charity
- and DogED - a social enterprise applying System Thinking to canine welfare - started a project with a group of three Operational Researchers and one engineer
from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), namely me and my team.
We
accepted the project with great enthusiasm: we liked the idea of applying OR
techniques in a Pro Bono context and of working on something different to the
daily energy-related projects at the department. Our work included building
a model which evaluates the stocks and flows of dogs within the UK and
predicts the population changes over time.
Figure 1: Stock and flow diagram developed with
Vensim
It involved pulling in data from a large number of journal
papers and reports (we reviewed more than 50 data sources) and attempting to
corroborate these against each other, whilst also working to identify gaps in
existing knowledge. Needless to say, this was no mean feat – if you ask 10
people what a “stray” dog is, you’ll get 10 different answers!
At the start of the project we
were a brand new team, having worked together for less than three months.
Therefore, the project was a great opportunity to get to know each other outside
of the work environment and to develop a strong team spirit. We made the most
of fortnightly working lunches and
spent some time together during weekends; the relaxed environment and our
enthusiasm for the project always made the work very productive and fun.
Talking about fun, the RSPCA gave us the fabulous opportunity to spend a
day at the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, one of the biggest animal welfare
centres in the UK. There, we were treated to a tour of the home by the director
of operations and got to see the efforts that go into looking after so many
animals simultaneously. It was a great experience and at the end of the day we
were all considering bringing home a dog or a cat with us!
Figure 2: our visit to Battersea Dogs and Cats Home
However, it was not only leisure
time; we also worked hard to deliver the project and the experience was both
interesting and fruitful. The work matched our skill set closely and we all
learnt something from it: we deepened our knowledge in system dynamics and
applied it on a real problem, worked with different roles and in different
contexts and, above all, learnt a lot about dogs and their welfare.
At the end of the project we
delivered a comprehensive literature review and a working stock and flow model
prototype. We also identified many data and evidence gaps that unfortunately mean
the model results are not yet robust enough to inform policy decisions. We
therefore provided some recommendations on how to close these gaps in the
future. Based on this work, the client is now in a position to argue the case
for better data collection to inform policy making.
All in all the experience was fulfilling
and we would recommend it to all OR practitioners. The work was interesting and
fun and our client was always appreciative and respectful of our time constraints;
at the end it was very satisfactory to see that our work has been useful for a
worthy project.
