Some Background

This week our blog could be about whatever we wanted it to be about, so I decided to give you a little background on one of my three animal shelters: The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They are a branch of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and are a private non-profit organization. They are dedicated solely to stopping the suffering to animals. Erected in 1888, they are the oldest animal welfare organization in the state. They provide the basic needs and services to thousands of animals a year. They are great at helping animals find homes and even refer to it as “matchmaking.”
They educate youth to learn the value of life and to respect all living animals, as well as the community about the importance of spaying and neutering. They investigate animal cruelty cases, making sure legal action is taken. They are looking for a change.
They are in the process of trying to get improved local/state animal protection laws, they are promoting animal welfare initiatives, and they are providing training for dogs and even offer discounts for animals that are spayed neutered or adopted from The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or Jefferson Parish Animal Control.
When they start a case against someone for animal cruelty, they care for the animal themselves. They are trying to stop blood sports in the state and are partnering with the law enforcement on all dog fighting cases.
The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals also mentors other humane societies as well as train animal control agencies on handling cruelty cases and training law enforcement to identify cruelty against animals for the blood sports.
The Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is truly a saint to all animals in Louisiana. They even offer human/animal bonding.

Help?

This week, I am preparing to send an email to my three sources of data (Jefferson Parish Animal Shelter, Louisiana Society for Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals Animal Shelter, and Southern Animal Foundation) requesting the information on the euthanasia levels of cats and dogs. The email read as follows:
To whom it may concern:
My name is (First Name Last Name) and I am a senior at (Random High School, USA). I am enrolled in an Advanced Placement Statistics class this semester and our teacher has asked us to do a project involving real life data where we analyze it and present our findings to statisticians. Being an animal lover and recently becoming involved in animal rescue, I chose to do some research on local animal shelters and the number of cats and dogs euthanized in comparison to the number of cats and dogs adopted. I was hoping you could please reply with these numbers or refer me to someone who can give them to me.

Thank you for your time and cooperation.

Sincerely,

(signature)

Tell me if you think I should add some more or if there are some areas where I should be more specific.

Why?

Some may be wondering “why are you doing this…what is the purpose?” With three questions in mind (Who is this data going to be useful for? How are we going to get the word out? and Why would our topic be interesting to others?) I started my blog for this week to give you an explanation. I hope this gives you a further understanding of what I am trying to accomplish.
Animal welfare is a concern to most people, especially those with a big heart. That leads me to believe that the data will be useful for animal lovers in the state of Louisiana, especially those in the New Orleans area. Some people dedicate their lives to saving animals from shelters and abusive owners/homes and I think that it would be important enough to know whether they need to worry more or if they can rest a little easier at night.
Before this project even started, our teacher had the idea of us presenting our projects to statisticians and some form of media. We spoke of various newspapers and news stations, brainstorming who we may want to invite to our presentations. This blog is another way that I am working towards getting this information out there.
I think that this topic will be very interesting to other people. Very few people dislike/ don’t care about animals. Granted sometimes there are strong opinions towards dogs versus cats, but my project is about the two of them alike, therefore I do not think I will have to worry about a lack of an audience. The best part about animals is that everyone relates to them.

Toolbox Alterations

I altered my toolbox in class (even though I had to redo it because the server lost the original) to add detail and make it more personalized to my topic. I specified on the three animal shelters I have intentions of questioning about their euthanasia/adoption levels amongst dogs and cats (Jefferson Parish Animal Shelter, Louisiana Society for Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals Animal Shelter, and Southern Animal Foundation). I wrote in more complete sentences to get the most detail in my data analysis toolbox as I possibly could to make it easier when I started to do my research. I specified what exactly I was using to show the distribution of my data (A. Five Number Summary- min, max, median, Q1, and Q3. B. Histogram- Bar chart representing frequency distribution. They are used to represent quantitative data. C. Standard Deviation- Shows how far away from the mean a specific value is. D. Mean- The average value of the set of observations. It is found by adding all possible observations and dividing by the total observations present. E. Possible outliers- Values that occur a significant distance from the rest of the data. Can be found using 1.5*IQR. IQR is found by subtracting Q1from Q3. If a value falls 1.5*IQR above the max, it is considered an outlier. Similarly, if a value falls 1.5*IQR below the min it is considered an outlier.)

Real and Unreal Blogs

Granted blogs are used to get YOUR voice across, there are some ways that are not recommended. For example, the Book of Mormon Search blog has some pretty cool things about it, like the way some of the words have hyperlinks that show you where those key words could be found elsewhere within the Bible. With that being said, most of the entries are just parts of the Bible copied and pasted. As aforementioned, the point of a blog is to get your OWN voice out there. If someone wanted to read a Bible, they would not want to go to a blog. I personally think that if they wanted to say something, they should have used excerpts from the Bible to make their statement effective, but the entire blog should not be one big excerpt.

A good blog, (but don’t tell her because it might go to her head) is my teacher’s. It isn’t distracting, irrelevant or unbearably stacked with knowledge that is hard to read. Most of the time, there are only a few sentences with a youtube or teachertube video or pictures taken during a class project. I think that this is a very effective and entertaining way to get a point across.

A screen shot of my teacher's blog.

Experimental Design

My project will be a research project, with perhaps a few survey like elements. I will contact and/or research at least 3 (at most 5) animal shelters in the New Orleans area to gain knowledge about when/why they euthanize animals (compare dogs to cats) and how many they euthanize for the duration of 2008. I will also compare the number of dogs and cats that were adopted for the year of 2008. I want to compare these two to determine if there may be an alternative to euthanasia and if there is anything there can be done to stop it all together. Graphs will be used to compare the proportion of euthanasia versus adoption as well as cats versus dogs. I will also use a five number summary (minimun, maximum, median, q1 [25%], and q3 [75%]) to help determine if there is a pattern.

2/5 W's

I want to do my project on how many animals are adopted compared to how many are euthanized in the New Orleans. There is a cat around our school who goes by many names, and seeing her makes me think about the other pets who aren't so lucky to have an entire school to take care of them. I want to see if there is a way to lower the euthanasia numbers and raise the adoption numbers.