Shelter Learniverse and Industry-Wide Calendar

Pet Professional Guild Presents (fee applies): What do (and don’t) we know about how genetics affects canine aggression? In this webinar, Jessica Hekman will take a deep dive into her own area of research – how genetics affects personality in dogs. How much of canine personality is due to genetics and how much to environment? How do researchers track down genes related to personality? Have any such genes yet been found? Can we expect a genetic test for dog reactivity any time soon? In this webinar, Jessica will particularly address examples from human literature about traits that are similar to reactivity and aggression in dogs, why they are so hard to understand from a genetics viewpoint, and what the future holds for us.

Maddie’s Fund Presents: Maddie’s Fund, in concert with American Pets Alive!, hosts a weekly hour-long Zoom call for animal welfare workers and volunteers. While these calls started out as a response to COVID-19, it’s grown into so much more. These calls are a safe place to discuss uncomfortable topics, all while sharing a common goal of preserving the human-animal bond.

KSMP Presents: This week we’ll continue the conversation we started on February 18: an oral history of the partnership between Long Beach Animal Services and Stray Cat Alliance to implement one of the early SNR/RTF/community cat programs in California. Kelly Miott (erstwhile with Long Beach Animal Care Services), Staycee Dains (current director of LBACS), and Anna Wong and Christi Metropole (Stray Cat Alliance) have agreed to join us. This is an experiment but hopefully will be fun and interesting and will inspire more sharing of the many great stories in California animal welfare and sheltering.