Puppy Essentials – Your Virtual and In-Person Guide to Early Socialization and Development – is a fun, interactive, training resource from DogNostics Education that can be used virtually to guide puppy owners through the first essential lessons. The focus of Puppy Essentials is socialization to situations, people, objects and other puppies; developing bite inhibition; preventing resource guarding; preventing separation anxiety; learning about canine communication and working with collaborative care skills.

Learning Objectives: 

• Help educate your clients about the importance of socialization. 
• Help your clients prevent resource-guarding issues. 
• Help take the fear out of being alone. 
• Teach clients to ‘speak dog.’ 
• Provide a guideline and suggested curriculum for virtual and in-person puppy socialization classes. 

Fear is an emotion and, as such, subject to respondent conditioning. Therefore, trying to solve fear related problems by focusing solely on modifying the behavior may be pointless. Fear related problems need a respondent as well as an operant approach.

Fear learning is a type of emotional learning that is quite persistent for various reasons:

a) It is linked with survival.

b) The brain is prewired with a negativity bias.

c) Sensory information conveyed by the thalamus reaches the amygdala (the brain’s center for emotional processing) much faster than it reaches the neocortex (the brain’s center for cognitive processes and thought). This means an animal will more readily emit an emotional response than a thought-out one.

This presentation focuses not only on fear learning, but also on the mechanisms that make it so persistent and why a respondent approach to solving fear related problems is essential. Some guidelines for effectively working with fearful dogs will also be presented.

Learning Objectives:

• The function of emotions.
• How fear learning occurs.
• Systematic desensitization is much more than gradually reducing distance between the dog and the feared stimulus.
• How to effectively apply systematic desensitization when working with fearful dogs.
• Why respondent extinction may backfire in some cases.
• How differential reinforcement of incompatible behaviors may, in fact, be flooding.
• Some guidelines for working with fearful dogs.

Volunteers are the life-blood of many organizations. But how do you find these important members of your team? During this webinar, we’ll discuss:

• Simple recruiting ideas that won’t break the budget
• Why mentoring is important to your cause
• How to get better performance without giving yourself a nervous breakdown.
• What does it take to retain and maintain long term volunteers?

WEBSITE LINK:  https://www.justiceclearinghouse.com/webinar/the-care-nurturing-and-enrichment-of-tame-feral-volunteers/

In prosecuting animal cruelty offenses, success largely depends on the prosecutor’s witnesses testifying confidently and competently. (After all, our victims cannot take the stand for themselves!) Unfortunately, testifying in trial is not a natural-born skill, and individuals involved in the animal welfare community—animal service, veterinarians, and animal shelter staff—do not have nearly enough opportunities to practice it.

In this webinar, Oregon Animal Cruelty Deputy District Attorney Jake Kamins will give you the tips you need to present your testimony effectively and efficiently, always keeping in mind his “golden rule” (TELL THE TRUTH!) You will learn how to prepare for the big day, what questions to ask in advance, and how to keep yourself calm and composed even under the harshest cross-examination.

Are prairie dog colonies causing conflicts in your community? Or are you looking for the best way to preserve populations of this keystone species? Either way, join us for a free webinar, in which we will share the best methods (shaped from our years of experience in the field!) for coexisting with prairie dogs and solving conflicts.

Topics covered will include:

• Basic prairie dog biology/ecology

• Role of prairie dogs as keystone species

• Basic prairie dog management plans (links to online template management plans)

• Conflict prevention mechanisms

• Coexistence tactics including barriers & buffer zones

• Passive and wild to wild translocation

• Further training opportunities & resources

• Q&A

Join Gina Knepp, a leading expert in lost animal reunification, as she leads a panel discussion with shelter directors across the country, showcasing the tremendous strides that have been made getting lost pets back home where they belong. Formerly Return to Owner, but recently rebranded as Return to Home, shelters have discovered that pet loss prevention and proactive efforts at reunification are paying off!

• Gina Knepp, Michelson Found Animals
• Julie Banks, Riverside County Animal Services
• Rebecca Guinn, Lifeline (Atlanta)
• Shelly Simmons, Greenville Animal Care (South Carolina)

WEBSITE LINK:  https://www.calanimals.org/on