Rule 11 (Multi-Animal Stewardship): the business case

644 real animals, 138 real Pulse employees, one policy that takes effect July 20, 2026. Every number below is computed from the live AnimalCare pull and Pulse payroll data — nothing on this page is a demo.

1. Where we are now

644
animals in AnimalCare
84
animals with NO section assigned (SectionId 0)
12/15
of the top-15 sections have zero assigned users
43–52
keepers/day today (issue #9)
Section 144 — 59 cavies in one enclosure — currently has 1 assigned user. Under the refined ecology model this section alone needs 4 keepers at budget 18 to guarantee each animal gets a daily photo proof-of-life. See the Zones view for the full section-by-section picture.

2. What Rule 11 requires

Every animal, every day, exactly one named keeper. Per-animal photo proof-of-life. Per-animal explicit-accept handoffs (an unaccepted handoff leaves the original keeper owning the animal — Loki Law Rule 6). Rosters capped by an ecology budget so no keeper is stretched past a safe number of animals.

61
keepers/day required at the recommended cap (18)
$50,761.76
weekly cost at that cell

3. The honest cost story

This is the part that determines whether the owner trusts the rest of the page, so we show our work, including a correction that was made mid-analysis and is on the public record in issue #8.

Headline: correctly benchmarked, Rule 11 is a REDUCTION. Comparing the required roster ($50,762/wk) to the full pool it's actually staffed from — CORE animal care ($50,036/wk) plus the 33 EXTENDED interaction staff ($13,971/wk), $64,007/wk, all already on payroll today — the recommended cell costs −$13,245/wk (−20.7%). Rule 11 re-tasks staff who are already being paid; it does not add them.
$/weekWhy it's the wrong or right denominator
Animal-care only (strict depts, issue #9)$50,035.96 The originally-quoted baseline. Misleading once EXTENDED staff are drawn into the roster — it compares the new roster's full cost to only part of the pool it's staffed from, so a cut reads as a +2.4% raise.
True pool (CORE + EXTENDED, issue #8 correction)$64,007.00 The correct denominator: this is what the org already spends on everyone Rule 11 rosters draw from.
Rule 11 @ cap 18, 8h shifts$50,761.76 61 keepers/day, live-solved below in the Roster view.

Why it works: current animal-care shifts average 9.95 hours (337 keeper-shifts/wk, 3,355 hours) for only ~48 keepers/day. Rule 11 at cap 18 needs 427 8-hour shifts (3,416 hours — hours barely move, +1.8%) but puts 61 people on shift per day. Per-animal daily proof-of-life is a heads-per-day constraint, not an hours constraint — a 9.95-hour shift doesn't check twice as many animals as an 8-hour one. Today's long shifts spend roughly $9,800/wk buying no additional coverage.

The impossibility proof: a proportional 30% cut to animal care ($34,714/wk) cannot work under Rule 11, at any setting. Rule 11's hard floor is 1,080.5 ecology-weight ÷ 18 = 61 keepers/day = 427 keeper-days/wk × 8h = 3,416 keeper-hours/wk. Even at the single lowest wage anywhere in the 138-keeper payroll ($11.00/hr), that floor costs $37,576/wk — still above the $34,714 target. Hitting the target exactly would require paying $10.16/hr, below every real wage on the roster. Choosing this option means amending Rule 11's per-animal daily proof-of-life requirement, not finding a clever schedule. (~$908/wk of overtime premium for staff scheduled >40h/wk is unmodeled in every figure above — a slight underestimate on both sides.)

Where the 30% actually has to come from

Org-wide scheduled labor is $154,170.08/wk. Animal care (CORE) is 32.2% of that. If a 30%-of-org cut is still the target after banking the $13.2k/wk animal-care-side reduction above, the remainder has to come out of the ~68% of payroll that is guest services, management, facilities, and back-office — a bucket that has not yet been analyzed. That analysis is now tracked as its own workstream in issue #11, not presented here as a plan.

9. Open questions