Zoos · Rehabilitation · Sanctuaries · Rescues
Animal recordkeeping for zoos, sanctuaries, rescues and rehabilitation centres. Log what you saw standing at the enclosure, on a phone, online or off - and nobody types it up again.
The problem
The place the observation happens and the place the record lives are two different places, and the gap between them is bridged by hand.
At the enclosure
A whiteboard, a clipboard or a paper log - whatever is closest to the animal at the moment somebody notices something.
Later that day
Someone types it up, from the board or from memory, into the system that holds the permanent record.
Then again
A senior keeper or a registrar reviews those entries and accepts or rejects them before they are final.
And once more
At reporting time the year is transcribed again, into whatever form the permitting agency wants.
Every one of those steps is a chance to lose something.
A study of 58,185 wildlife rehabilitation cases in New York State found that the handwritten logs behind them had to be transcribed by hand into spreadsheets, and that errors and inconsistencies occurred both within and between centres - misidentified species, missing causes of distress, missing final dispositions. Incomplete records had to be discarded before the rest could be analysed at all.1
None of that is anyone's fault. It is what copying by hand does, and it is what happens when the record is written somewhere other than where the work is.
How it works
ARK is built around a single loop, and every other feature hangs off it.
Search by name, microchip, band, case number or enclosure. Or open the enclosure in front of you and pick from who lives there.
Categories your organization defines. Feeding, behaviour, treatment, enrichment - whatever your team already says out loud.
One line is a complete record. The photo comes straight from the camera. If you write it up an hour later, you can still say when it actually happened.
It is in the permanent record, attributed to you, searchable, and visible to whoever walks in next. Nobody types it up again.
Offline
Back of the property, inside a barn, in a quarantine room, or on the afternoon the site's internet is simply down. The work carries on either way.
A note, a photo, a weight or a feeding saves on your phone straight away, and uploads itself the moment you are back in range. You do not have to remember to do anything, and tapping save twice on a bad signal will not leave you with the same entry recorded twice.
Design decisions
Most of what a records system does is settled, and ARK does it the ordinary way. These three are choices. They shape everything else, and all three would be expensive to walk back.
01
This sector runs on volunteers, students, weekend keepers and one person who comes in on Tuesdays. Software priced by user teaches an organization to share a login, and a shared login destroys the one thing a record needs: knowing who wrote it.
So ARK charges for the animals you are looking after instead. Add everyone who works with them - every volunteer, every student, every vet who visits - and the price does not move.
02
You notice things at the enclosure, with one hand free and often with no signal. ARK was built for that first and given a desk view afterwards, so the phone is not a stripped-down version of the real thing.
The desk is where the reading, the trends and the paperwork happen. It is the same records either way.
03
The reason facilities stay on a system they have outgrown is almost never the price. It is that moving years of records is a job nobody has a spare week for.
So it is a spreadsheet upload, not a project. Tell ARK which column is which, look at exactly what it is about to create, and only then say yes. There are step-by-step instructions for files exported from AnimalCare and ZIMS. Run the same file twice by mistake and you will not end up with two of every animal - it recognises the ones it has already seen and tells you it skipped them.
Get in touch
There is no self-serve signup yet and no demo environment to click through. Write to us with what you keep records in today and roughly how many animals are in your care, and we will tell you whether ARK is ready to be useful to you.