Maddie’s^® Insights is our ongoing webcast series with practical tips based on current research to help pets and people. Our guest speaker for the November 14, 12PM PT/3PM ET webcast is Jacklyn Ellis, PhD and the Director of Behavior at Toronto Humane Society.

Safeguarding the well-being of cats is essential to the mission of any responsible animal shelter. Environmental enrichment and behavior modification are often key to this goal. Measuring response to these interventions is essential to ensure strategies are successful. “Beyond ‘Doing Better’ – Using Behavior Data to Monitor Well-Being in Cats,” will present 4 ordinal rating scales designed to evaluate different expressions of cat behavior/welfare on a 0–5 scale (modified Fear, Anxiety, and Stress score; Response to Petting score; Participation in Play score; and Food Intake Summary score) that have excellent interobserver agreement and reliability, and a few other tools to describe behavior in a quantitative way. These tools are exceptionally useful to evaluate the response individual cats have to specific interventions, make decisions about which interventions should be tried first by looking at what was effective in cases presenting similarly in the past, and evaluating the efficacy of different interventions across a population of similar cats in a research project.

What you will come away with:

• An understanding of the value of using standardized rating tools to evaluate behavior and welfare in shelters
• The ability to identify a range of practical applications for these tools, in both in the shelter and beyond

This webinar has been pre-approved for 1.0 Certified Animal Welfare Administrator continuing education credits by The Association for Animal Welfare Advancement and by the National Animal Care & Control Association. It has also been approved for 1 hour of continuing education credit in jurisdictions which recognize the Registry of Approved Continuing Education (RACE) approval.

Can’t attend live? Register anyway and you will get a link to the recording after the webcast.