Beyond the Administrative Label: Municipal Shelter Conversion and Dog Outcomes in Korea, 2016–2025

Municipal conversion of dog shelters from contracted to direct operation often coincides with changes in facilities, staffing, veterinary access, adoption practices, euthanasia policy, and record keeping. The primary objective was to evaluate associations with municipality-level disposition and throughput outcomes; a secondary exploratory objective examined dog-level adoption and euthanasia pathways. We analyzed 68,032 dogs from 22 municipalities in Gyeongsangbuk-do, Korea, during 2016–2025. The primary difference-in-differences comparison included four municipalities that converted around 2021 and nine contracted controls. Event-study, exact label-permutation, and comparison-pool analyses served as diagnostics. Estimates were imprecise, no exact permutation p-value was below 0.05, and adoption and euthanasia had different pre-conversion trends. Excluding five newly digitized controls changed the adoption estimate from +4.65 to −1.86 percentage points. Censor-aware analysis estimated 13.33 additional days without a recorded disposition during the first year, but uncertainty was wide and the day-365 unresolved difference was small. In the secondary 35,366-dog subframe, mixed/Jindo-type outdoor dogs had a lower adoption hazard ratio (HR, 0.39; 95% CI, 0.35–0.45) and a higher euthanasia HR (1.61; 95% CI, 1.37–1.90). Direct operation was not supported as a uniform causal intervention; municipalities should evaluate welfare and management components and target support to dogs at elevated risk.