The study, published in the journal Discover Animals by David C. Cook of the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University, Christina Siettou of University College London, and Rob W. Fraser of the University of Kent, takes an unusually broad view of what is at stake when dog populations are mismanaged. Rather than counting only the costs of kennels and collection services, the researchers define social welfare as the combined well-being of all individuals in society, including both the intrinsic and instrumental value of animals themselves. When free-roaming dogs go unmanaged, the losses ripple outward: wild dog attacks generate medical and veterinary bills, overcrowded shelters impose mental health costs on staff, and rising euthanasia rates create moral distress and opportunity costs for veterinarians and nursing workers. The framework explicitly extends the traditional economic view, in which social welfare depends solely on human well-being, to incorporate the welfare of the animals as well.

To capture the dynamics of the problem, the team constructed a dynamic systems model describing three interacting subpopulations: owned dogs, shelter dogs, and dogs held by registered commercial breeders. Animals move between these groups through purchases, adoptions, and relinquishments, and each subpopulation changes over time through births, deaths, and transfers. The model was simulated over ten years using ordinary differential equations solved numerically in the R programming environment with the deSolve package. Crucially, the flows between populations respond to price. The demand for puppies from breeders and the demand for shelter adoptions are both governed by a price elasticity of demand, assumed to be negative at -0.5, meaning that taxes on breeder purchases or subsidies for shelter adoptions can shift where prospective owners acquire their dogs.

Social welfare enters the model through two channels. Direct losses accrue at a constant rate for every shelter dog euthanised, while indirect losses capture the stress animals endure in crowded facilities, specified as rising at an increasing rate as the shelter population approaches its carrying capacity. Both loss streams are discounted over time using a continuous discounting factor. The researchers set hypothetical values of £50 per euthanised dog and £5 per shelter dog for these parameters, and a sensitivity analysis later confirmed that these two assumptions were the most influential in the entire model, shifting estimated welfare losses by roughly 25 percent when varied by 50 percent.

Against a base case reflecting the status quo, the team simulated five hypothetical policies. Two of them produced sobering, even counterintuitive results. Increasing shelter capacity, simulated as a one-off expansion of the shelter carrying capacity, actually made social welfare slightly worse than doing nothing, producing a cumulative loss £0.6 million greater over ten years. The reason lies in the biology of stress: events that are novel, unpredictable, or outside a dog’s control, such as entering a shelter, trigger the fight-or-flight response and the release of cortisol. Short-term cortisol surges boost energy, but prolonged elevation impairs the immune system and produces anxiety and abnormal behaviours. More kennel space means more dogs housed in stressful conditions, and the model links that directly to greater welfare loss. Increasing the euthanasia rate by roughly 50 percent fared far worse, adding £8.6 million to cumulative social welfare losses compared with the status quo, the poorest result of any scenario.

The economic instruments performed better. A £200 fixed-rate tax on dogs purchased from breeders reduced demand for breeder dogs but left shelter numbers largely unaffected, producing only a negligible change in welfare. A £100 subsidy for shelter adopters, modelled on the German practice of waiving the annual dog tax for shelter adoptions, cut the shelter population by 11,360 dogs after ten years relative to the status quo and reduced cumulative welfare losses by £3.9 million. In the baseline scenario, representing current policies, cumulative social welfare losses over the decade totalled roughly £40.4 million, with annual losses reaching about £5.3 million by year ten.

The clear winner, however, was the DNA database scenario inspired by Greece’s newly legislated framework. Greece, which manages one of the highest per capita free-roaming dog populations in the world, combines compulsory microchipping and registration, a prohibition on euthanasia, strict breeding laws, and mandatory sterilisation with an opt-out route. Owners who decline to sterilise their dogs must submit DNA samples to a national database, meaning any unaltered animal is recorded and its offspring traceable, holding owners accountable for contributing to the future stray population. Non-compliance carries fines ranging from €1,000 for owners who fail to neuter or submit samples to €3,000 for breeders who fail to report or register breeding animals, with enforcement spread across municipal and national police, customs authorities, the coast guard, and forestry services.

In the UK simulation, the DNA policy was represented by raising the effective price of breeder dogs, since breeders pass on the £130 cost of DNA sampling to consumers, lifting the average price from £930 to £1,060; by lowering the natural growth of the owned dog population, as owners sterilise pets to avoid future penalties; and by reducing the relinquishment rate, since sterilisation is associated with fewer surrenders. After ten years, this scenario left 34,000 fewer dogs with breeders, 41,500 fewer dogs in shelters, and 26,210 more owned dogs than the status quo, improving social welfare by £7.3 million cumulatively, or about £1.4 million per year by the end of the simulation. Even when the researchers halved the policy’s simulated effectiveness to reflect widespread non-compliance, it remained the best-performing option, though the cumulative benefit fell to £3.4 million.

The sensitivity analysis revealed which assumptions mattered most. Beyond the two welfare loss parameters, results were sensitive to shelter carrying capacity, the initial shelter population of 250,000, and the euthanasia rate of 10.4 percent drawn from published UK data. Reducing shelter capacity by half produced a 33 percent change in welfare loss, while halving the euthanasia rate lowered losses by 20 percent. Importantly, the researchers note that provided the direct welfare loss per dog euthanised exceeds the indirect welfare loss per shelter dog, which they consider reasonable, the ranking of policies does not change, and the DNA database remains the welfare-maximising choice. The authors acknowledge that the absolute magnitudes are indicative rather than definitive, since the welfare loss values are plausible estimates rather than figures elicited through quantitative research, and they call for future studies to enable a full benefit-cost analysis.

The findings carry an urgent contemporary resonance. In 2024, the government of Türkiye adopted legislative amendments likely to lead to large-scale euthanasia of shelter dogs due to overpopulation, provoking public outcry. The model offers a quantitative warning about such approaches: raising the euthanasia rate from its base of 10.4 percent to 100 percent drove simulated social welfare to minus £135.6 million, a societal loss more than double the status quo. The study also documents the well-established toll that euthanasia takes on the people who perform it, from compassion fatigue to perpetration-induced traumatic stress among shelter and laboratory staff. Against that backdrop, the authors’ central recommendation is straightforward: the UK government should consider a dog-overpopulation policy modelled on Greece’s, because its superiority proved robust both to alternative parameter values and to imperfect compliance. Compulsory microchipping, introduced across the UK by 2016, has already been undermined by owners supplying incorrect or outdated contact details, a cautionary tale about enforcement that any DNA-based successor would need to confront head-on.

Subject of Research: Economic modelling of dog shelter policy reform and social welfare in the United Kingdom

Article Title: Social welfare implications of policy reform for dog shelters in the United Kingdom

Article References: Cook, D. C., Siettou, C., & Fraser, R. W. (2026). Social welfare implications of policy reform for dog shelters in the United Kingdom. Discover Animals, 3(1), Article 99. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44338-026-00258-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44338-026-00258-z

Keywords: dog shelters, animal welfare, social welfare, DNA database, dynamic systems model, euthanasia, sterilisation, policy reform, United Kingdom, Greece, shelter overcrowding, pet overpopulation

The concept of palliative psychiatry entered the literature in 2016, when Trachsel and colleagues argued that principles long accepted in end-of-life care for cancer and organ failure — prioritizing quality of life, relieving suffering, and avoiding both therapeutic neglect and overly aggressive intervention — could and should be applied to psychiatry. The idea targets people with severe and persistent mental illness, a population in which many trials of the best available treatments fail to improve symptoms and can, in some cases, worsen suffering. Since then, discussions of palliative psychiatry have collided with a parallel and far more politically volatile development: the movement to legalize assisted dying, used here as an umbrella term covering voluntary euthanasia, assisted suicide, physician-assisted death, and medical assistance in dying, for people whose sole underlying condition is a mental disorder.

That collision is what motivated the review. Debates over assisted dying for mental illness foreground contested concepts such as the irremediability of psychiatric disorders and intolerable suffering — the very same concepts that animate palliative psychiatry. Critics have warned that expanding access could entrench structural discrimination, including ableism, racism, sexism, and classism, while proponents argue that refusing the option abandons a suffering minority. Yet no previous review had systematically examined how palliative psychiatry and assisted dying relate to one another. The research team, led by Micaela Forte and Daniel Z. Buchman and funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: what does the literature actually say about the relationship between the two?

Methodologically, the review was exhaustive. A health sciences librarian built database-specific search strategies for MEDLINE, Embase, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL, the Philosopher’s Index, and Academic OneFile, using Boolean and adjacency operators to pair terms such as “palliative” or “non-curative” with terms for serious mental illness. Crucially, the searches captured literature on palliative psychiatry even when assisted dying terms never appeared in an article’s metadata, allowing the team to scope how assisted dying surfaces — or pointedly does not — across the field. To capture the public dimension of the debate, the researchers also searched the Global Newsstream Collection and hand-searched Psychiatric Times Online and Google. After removing 300 duplicates, they screened 647 publications by title and abstract, advanced 190 to full-text review, and retained 50 publications written between 2010 and 2025. Two authors independently screened each record, with a third resolving conflicts, and the protocol was registered on the Open Science Framework.

The analytical approach was equally careful. The team extracted one illustrative quote per publication, coded it against ten a priori categories describing possible relationships, and then used qualitative content analysis and discussion to refine the codes — recoding 25 quotes and removing codes from 14 publications before collapsing the categories into a final spectrum of six. That spectrum runs from “differentiated” at one end to “equivalent” at the other. At the most prevalent pole, twelve publications discussed assisted dying and palliative psychiatry in entirely separate sections, sometimes explicitly stating that assisted dying was outside the scope of the paper. Fifteen publications argued the two are conceptually distinct, emphasizing the contrast between life-affirming approaches and interventions that hasten or cause death. Thirteen positioned palliative psychiatry as an alternative or substitute for assisted dying. Nine said the two are related but not the same. Only two publications treated assisted dying as an example of palliative psychiatry, and only two argued that advocacy for palliative psychiatry necessarily leads to advocacy for assisted dying.

The distinctions authors drew are philosophically substantive rather than semantic. Several argued that palliative psychiatry rests on the premise that suffering can be remedied within life, directly contradicting what they described as the philosophy underlying assisted dying. Others highlighted reversibility: under a palliative psychiatry framework, individuals can change their minds and resume aggressive treatment at any time, whereas assisted death is irreversible. Some distinguished the two through the wishes of patients themselves — if a person’s goal is to maintain or enhance quality of life without pursuing symptom-free recovery, palliative psychiatry fits; those who wish to pursue assisted dying follow a different path. One recurring concern was linguistic: authors cautioned that conflating palliative psychiatry with assisted dying advocacy misrepresents palliative care’s goals, may increase barriers to its adoption, and could be misread as implying that people with mental illness are approaching end of life.

The “alternative” category may prove the most clinically consequential. Thirteen publications proposed palliative psychiatry as a middle path for people with treatment-resistant illness who might otherwise face a stark and inadequate choice between coercive suicide prevention and assisted dying. Some argued it should outright replace assisted dying in severely treatment-resistant cases; others envisioned a two-track model in which life-oriented palliative interventions and discussions of assisted dying eligibility proceed in parallel. Several authors insisted that palliative psychiatry must never be understood as justifying a lower threshold for assisted dying, and warned that requests for death should stem from unalleviated suffering despite comprehensive care — not from inadequate or inaccessible care. Some suggested that expanding palliative psychiatry could reduce the number of people with severe mental illness who request assisted dying at all, by addressing the disparities that leave them feeling death is their only option.

Context matters enormously to these positions. The reviewed publications came overwhelmingly from high-income countries: eleven from Canada, where assisted dying is legal but not for mental illness as a sole condition; ten from the United States, where it is illegal in most states; and large clusters from Switzerland, Belgium, and the Netherlands, which have long-standing legalized practices. The authors suggest that jurisdictions where psychiatric assisted dying is legal may conceptualize the relationship as a spectrum of treatment options, while jurisdictions where it is prohibited may frame the two as standalone alternatives or as opposing sides of a legalization debate. Most publications focused on severe and persistent mental illness generally, but seventeen gave extended attention to severe and enduring anorexia nervosa, with schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder also appearing. Most were commentaries, case studies, or conceptual papers rather than empirical research, and most were written by psychiatrists and other clinicians reflecting on their own practice — a pattern the review authors note leaves the conversation grounded more in clinical experience than in theoretical or empirical frameworks.

The review’s limitations are candidly acknowledged. Seven publications in French, Dutch, Spanish, and German were translated with a free machine-translation tool, raising the possibility of subtle mistranslation, and the analysis relied on one quote per publication, contextualized against the full texts. The authors also disclose that some team members have themselves published on palliative psychiatry and received federal funding to study it, making author overlap with the included literature unavoidable; they mitigated this through independent dual review and explicit reflexivity about their roles as scholars, clinicians, and people with lived experience of mental illness.

What emerges is a field in broad, if not unanimous, agreement: seventy-eight percent of the sources assert that palliative psychiatry and assisted dying are different, and almost none treat them as interchangeable. Palliative psychiatry, in most tellings, rejects the dichotomy of inadequate care-as-usual versus a hastened death, proposing instead a third, life-affirming pathway that limits coercive interventions and prioritizes quality of life. Whether conversations about death wishes and assisted dying requests belong inside that pathway remains genuinely unresolved — nine publications raised the question without answering it. As more jurisdictions weigh legalizing assisted dying for mental illness, the review’s central message is that the scholarly landscape is heterogeneous, the conceptual boundaries are real but imperfectly drawn, and both clinicians and policymakers will need far more empirical research before these frameworks can reliably guide decisions for people enduring the most severe psychiatric suffering medicine cannot yet relieve.

Subject of Research: The relationship between palliative psychiatry and assisted dying for severe and persistent mental illness

Article Title: The relationship between palliative psychiatry and assisted dying: a scoping review

Article References: Forte, M., Panko, L., Tsiandoulas, K., Rodak, T., Costa, L., Levitt, S., & Buchman, D. Z. (2026). The relationship between palliative psychiatry and assisted dying: a scoping review. eClinicalMedicine, 100, Article 104200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eclinm.2026.104200

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: palliative psychiatry, assisted dying, severe and persistent mental illness, medical assistance in dying, euthanasia, scoping review, medical ethics, end-of-life care, treatment-resistant mental illness, anorexia nervosa, mental health policy, eClinicalMedicine