122 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
122 lines
6.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "How to manually check hundreds of animal shelters - every 14 days"
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date: 2025-11-08T12:05:10+02:00
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lastmod: 2025-11-09T21:05:10+02:00
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draft: false
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image: "uploads/checking-shelters.png"
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categories: [ 'English' ]
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tags: [ 'notfellchen', 'animal shelter', 'animal welfare', 'django' ]
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---
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I run a website called [Notfellchen](https://notfellchen.org) that list animals that are waiting for adoption. It's
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currently restricted to fancy rats in Germany and that for good reason: Running this website involves **checking every
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shelter every two weeks manually**. You need to visit the website, check if there are new animals, contact the shelter
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and add them to notfellchen if they allow it. This takes time. A lot.
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This blog post will outline some of the things I did in order to streamline this and make it possible to **check every
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german shelter in 2.5 hours**.
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## General process
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When you establish a process. want others to help you or if you want to find inefficiencies, it's a good idea to
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formalize it. So here is a rough BPMN diagram of the whole process.
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{{< html animal-discovery.drawio.html >}}
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## List of animal shelters
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Focusing on the first step: We want to check the website of an animal shelter - but where do we get a list of animal
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shelters from? Luckily there is an easy answer: [OpenStreetMap](https://openstreetmap.org) and I wrote a
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whole [other blog post on how I imported and improved this data](https://hyteck.de/post/improve-osm-by-using-it/).
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## Species-specific link
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Importing this data provides us (most of the time) with a link to the shelter's website. However, rats are usually not
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listed on the home page but on a subsite.
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In order to save time, I introduced the concept of a species-specific link per organization and species.
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So for the Tierheim Entenhausen this might look like this
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| Species | Species specific link |
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|---------|--------------------------------------------------------|
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| Cat | https://tierheim-entenhausen.de/adoption/cats |
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| Rats | https://tierheim-entenhausen.de/adoption/small-mammals |
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As animal shelter pages look very different from each other, clicking this link provides an enormous time benefit
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compared to clicking through a homepage manually.
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# Org check page
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I set up a special page to make it most efficient to check shelters. It's structured in four parts:
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* **Stats**: The stats show how many animal shelters are checked in the last two weeks and how many to go.
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* **Not checked for the longest period**: Shows the animal shelters to check next, it's therefore sorted by the date
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they were last checked
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* **In active communication**: A overview of the organizations where there is communication (or an attempt thereof).
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This can take multiple das or even weeks so the internal comment field is very useful to keep track.
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* **Last checked** It sometimes happens that I accidentally set a organization to "Checked" by accident. I added this
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section to make it easier to revert that.
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## Shortcuts
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To make it even faster to work through the organizations I added some shortcuts for the most common functionality and
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documented the browser own shortcut to close a tab.
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* `O`: Open website of the first organization
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* `CTRL+W`: Close tab (Firefox, Chrome)
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* `C`: Mark first organization as checked
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## Results
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After implementing all this, how long does it take now to check all organizations? Here are the numbers
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| Measurement | |
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|-----------------------------------------------------------|--------------|
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| Time to check one organization (avg.) | 12.1s |
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| Organization checked per minute | 4.96 org/min |
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| Time to check all (eligible) german animal shelters (429) | 1 h 16 min |
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This excludes the time, it takes to add animals or contact rescue organizations. One of these actions must be taken
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whenever an eligible animal is found on a website. Here you can see how this interrupts the process:
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And here is the breakdown of time per activity. A big caveat here is, that I did not follow up on previous conversations
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here, therefore the contacting number is likely an underestimation.
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| Activity | Time spent | Percentage |
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|------------|------------|------------|
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| Checking | 54 min 44s | 72.3% |
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| Adding | 11 min 15s | 14.9% |
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| Contacting | 9min 41s | 12.8% |
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To me, this looks like a pretty good result. I can't say which optimizations brought how much improvement, but I'd argue
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they all play a role in reaching the 12s per rescue organizations that is checked.
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In order to check all german animal shelters, one needs to put in about 2 and a half hours every two weeks. That seems
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reasonable to me. Further improvements of the likely do not lie in the organization check page but the contact process
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and adoption notice form.
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For now, I'm happy with the results.
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# Addendum: Common annoyances
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When doing this over the last few months I encountered some recurring issues that not only were annoying but also take
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up a majority of the time. Here are some that stood out
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* **Broken SSL encryption** So many animal shelters do not have a functioning SSL certificate. It takes time to work
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around the warnings.
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* **No results not indicated** More often than not, animal shelters do not have rats. However, when you visit a page
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like [this](https://tierschutzliga.de/tierheime/tierparadies-oberdinger-moos/tiervermittlung/#?THM=TOM&Tierart=Kleintiere)
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it's hard to know if there is a technical issue or if there are no animals for your search.
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* **No static links** Sites where you have to click through a menu to get to the right page, but you can not link
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directly to it.
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* **No website** Seriously, there are some animal shelters that only use Instagram or Facebook to tell people about the
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animals they have. This is not only a privacy nightmare, it's also incredibly hard to find out which information is
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up-to-date. Furthermore, there exists no data structure, so posts about animals often miss crucial information like
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the sex.
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While I obviously have some grievances here, I know the organizations never have enough resources, and they'd
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usually love to have a nicer website. Just keep that in mind too. |