Rule 11 · the crux
Cost model
Two baselines, side by side, because comparing Rule 11 against the wrong one produces the misleading '+2.4%'. All dollar figures below come from Pulse's own labor-cost engine run read-only against the current production schedule window.
Baseline A — animal-care ONLY (the narrow, wrong comparator)
Animal-care spend / wk
$50,035.96
spec, department-attributed
Why comparing Rule 11 against this is wrong
Rule 11’s roster is drawn from a wider pool (animal-care + interaction) than this narrow baseline covers. Benchmarking the wider-pool cost against the narrower baseline is what produced the earlier misleading +2.4%. It compares unlike to unlike.
Baseline B — the TRUE pool (the right comparator)
Animal-care pool
$50,036
Interaction pool
$13,971
already on payroll
TRUE current pool / wk
$64,007
animal-care + interaction, both already paid
Rule 11 vs true pool: $-13,245/wk · -20.7%
Rule 11 re-tasks the interaction staff, it does not hire. $50,761.76/wk vs $64,007/wk is a real cut.
Why it works — the shift-structure story
Current avg shift
9.7 h
337 animal-care shifts/wk
Rule 11 shift
8 h
427 shorter shifts/wk
Total hours move
+1.8%
3,355 → 3,416 h/wk
Coverage goes from ~48 to 61 people/day while total hours barely move. Proof-of-life is heads-per-day, not hours. The last ~2 hours of a 9.95-hour shift is about $9,825/wk that buys zero extra coverage — Rule 11 redistributes those hours into more, shorter shifts with more distinct people on the floor.
Impossibility proof — the 30% cut cannot come from animal care
- 1,080.5 ÷ 18 = 61 keepers/day = 427 keeper-days/wk minimum.
- Animal care cannot go below ~$48,000/wk under Rule 11.
- A proportional 30% target ($34,714/wk) would need $10.16/hr — below every real keeper rate.
State plainly
The 30% cut cannot come from animal care. Rule 11 makes the floor of animal-care spend structural.
Where the 30% actually lives (issue #11)
| Org labor / wk | $154,170 |
| 30% target | $46,251 |
| Animal care | 32.5% |
| Interaction | 9.1% |
| Everything else — never analyzed | $90,191 (58.5%) |
$90,191/wk (58.5% of org labor) has never been analyzed. That is where a 30% program has to look. Surfaced as open question #11, not as our own analysis.
Honest disclosures
- ~$908/wk unmodeled overtime(45 animal-care staff > 40h/wk) — both headlines are honest slight underestimates.
- This build measured (read-only, 2026-07-13 to 2026-07-19 (current week, contains today 2026-07-14)): animal-care $49,054.01/wk (24/25 depts — Houston Management (zone: Husbandry Manager) — needs manual zone map (open Q#3); lifts CORE toward spec 50035.96), interaction $13,971.03/wk (matches spec exactly), engine validated to 0.034% of the $62,076.79 Houston audit.