How do we reduce relinquishment to animal shelters? In the U.S. and Canada, approximately 25-30% of animals that enter shelters are surrendered by owners. However, despite many shelters and rescues providing various pet support services for the past few decades, there has been little demonstrable reduction in owner surrendered animals. Currently, many animal shelters use data collected at intake, such as surrender reasons, to create programs that aim to support pet owners to keep their pets.

Join us as we dive deeper into this topic on April 11 (12PM PT/ 3PM ET) during this month’s edition of Maddie’s^® Insights: Beyond Animal Shelter Walls: Using community data to understand intake diversion of Owner Surrendered Animals. This presentation will outline research into animal shelters, pet owning communities, self-rehoming platforms and pet owners to demonstrate the complex system of pet surrender. By the end of this presentation, participants will learn how community data can complement animal shelter data to help divert animals from shelters.

Presenter Lexis Ly is a PhD student in Applied Animal Biology at the University of British Columbia’s Animal Welfare Program. Her work uses animal shelter and community data to understand how to maintain human-animal bonds, help animal shelter services provide equitable services, and reduce intake to shelters. She is also interested in veterinary disaster response, climate change and pet ownership, and bias in animal shelter adoption.

Can’t attend the live event? Register anyway! This webcast will be recorded, and a link will be sent a day after the live event ends.

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 approval for 1 hour of continuing education credit in jurisdictions which recognize the Registry of Approved Continuing Education (RACE) approval.