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  • Webinar – 10/23/24 – Counter-conditioning for Fearful and Anxious Dogs: How to Get it Right with Dr. Zazie Todd – PPG (fee applies)

    Webinar – 10/23/24 – Counter-conditioning for Fearful and Anxious Dogs: How to Get it Right with Dr. Zazie Todd – PPG (fee applies)

    When a dog is frightened, we often make use of classical conditioning. Counter conditioning is a very effective tool to help dogs learn to like things they were previously afraid of, but many people make mistakes in its implementation—and then think it hasn’t worked. This talk will give an overview of those all-important details and why they matter.

    The details include how to make a clear contingency, when and how to combine counterconditioning with desensitization, and the role of an element of surprise. Plus we’ll talk about the best ways to explain these ideas in client-friendly ways. Along the way there will be nods to the science of counter-conditioning and how it has changed since the days of Pavlov.

    Learning Objectives

    • Spot common mistakes that people make in counter-conditioning
    • Understand the role of an element of surprise
    • Develop and perfect counter-conditioning plans

    WEBSITE LINK: https://www.petprofessionalguild.com/webinars-events/webinars/counter-conditioning-for-fearful-and-anxious-dogs-how-to-get-it-right-wiht-dr-zazie-todd/

  • Webinar – 12/5/24 – Essential Messaging for Work in Animal Care & Well-being – Life of Riley

    Webinar – 12/5/24 – Essential Messaging for Work in Animal Care & Well-being – Life of Riley

    Stories and messages are powerful, and we need new ones now more than ever in our work for companion animals and people.

    Speaker: Hanna Lentz, Executive Director, Supporting People and Animal Relationships for Change

    WEBSITE LINK: https://lor.dog/webinars/

  • Online Certificate Program – Starts 1/6/25 – Animal Shelter Management Certificate Program – Community Program Development – Humane Network/UoP (fee applies)

    Online Certificate Program – Starts 1/6/25 – Animal Shelter Management Certificate Program – Community Program Development – Humane Network/UoP (fee applies)

    Upcoming Community Program Development Course: Involving the community is critical to the success of any animal shelter as few shelters have the resources to meet all of the needs without substantial community involvement. Adoptions, donations, and volunteers, are essential components in life-saving. This course will teach you how to develop all of the necessary community programs that make up a successful, sustainable no-kill shelter and how they work together.

    Please note upcoming section runs 1/06/25 – 2/16/25

    About the Certificate: 

    Society’s relationship to pets continues to evolve. The majority of people consider their pets to be beloved family members and expect their local animal shelter to work diligently to save the lives of the dogs and cats that enter the facility. This program will provide the knowledge you need to assume a management or leadership role at an open-admission animal shelter. You’ll learn how to maximize a shelter’s lifesaving potential through program management, community engagement, and shelter operations while at the same time preparing yourself for an exciting career.

    The five courses are:

    • Leadership covering strategic planning, analyzing operations, decision-making, managing people and processes to achieve results, organizational responsibilities, and working with a board of directors.
    • Shelter Operations covering adoptions, animal care and sheltering fundamentals, animal behavior and enrichment, and customer service.
    • Community Program Development covering volunteers, foster care, spay/neuter, pet retention, events, and community relations.
    • Animal Health and Clinic Operations covering understanding shelter medicine, basic animal health considerations and care, euthanasia decisions, and clinic operations.
    • Marketing and Development covering development fundamentals, fundraising strategies, marketing fundamentals, adoption promotion, social media and websites, and media relations.

    Each of these courses include live video conference sessions with top experts in the field providing students valuable contacts within the field. Additionally, alumni have access to exclusive networking opportunities and receive notification of employment opportunities.

    You can sign up for individual courses or all five for a discount. All five must be completed to get a certificate.

    Who will benefit from the program?

    • Professionals seeking a career change to something more personally fulfilling.
    • New shelter directors.
    • Shelter directors or managers wishing to improve their organization’s live release rate and sustainability.
    • People working in the animal welfare field who wish to advance into management roles.
    • Board members of animal shelters.

    Credit for program/courses

    Upon completion of all five courses, you will receive a Certificate in Animal Shelter Management from the University of the Pacific.

    Each course earns:

    • Continuing Education Units (CEUs) from the University of the Pacific
    • Association of Animal Welfare Advancement CAWA Continuing Education (CE) credits

    Schedule and Registration

    Each of the five online courses are six weeks long and are offered sequentially. The entire program is about seven months long, and a new round starts again after a short break. More information on start dates of each course and the registration form can be found on the University of the Pacific website. 

    ​WEBSITE LINK:  https://uc.pacific.edu/public/category/courseCategoryCertificateProfile.do?method=load&certificateId=192577

  • Webinar – 11/16/24 – Colony Caretaking Tips and Tricks – Community Cats Podcast

    Webinar – 11/16/24 – Colony Caretaking Tips and Tricks – Community Cats Podcast

    Ants getting into the cats’ bowls or slugs making mealtime a slimy mess? Raccoons invading your colony? Got fleas? How do you keep the water from freezing in the middle of winter? Or calm the irate neighbor whose flower bed has been turned into a litter box? Find out how to deal with these and many more colony caretaking challenges from Neighborhood Cats with their 20 years of experience dealing with all things community cat. Come and share your battle-worn secrets too!

    WEBSITE LINK:  https://www.communitycatspodcast.com/events/colony-caretaking-tips-and-tricks-presented-by-neighborhood-cats-nov-2024/

  • Webinar – 11/5/24 – Using Innovative Alternatives to Incarceration and Recognizing the Role of Trauma in Violence Against Animals – NACA/Justice Clearinghouse

    Webinar – 11/5/24 – Using Innovative Alternatives to Incarceration and Recognizing the Role of Trauma in Violence Against Animals – NACA/Justice Clearinghouse

    The animal law movement has, for the most part, been successful in showing society that animal cruelty is a problem. Now, a dynamic and evolving area of focus is creating targeted criminal justice outcomes to better help animal victims, heal individuals who committed cruelty, prevent future crimes against animals, and build healthier and more resilient communities. This webinar will discuss innovative work that identifies alternatives to traditional sentencing practices, which appropriately and accurately address underlying causes of animal cruelty, provide fairness to all parties involved in animal cruelty, and that work to curb the rate of future cruelty. Specifically, this webinar will discuss the role trauma can play as an underlying cause to cruelty, as well as methods to address and heal such trauma so it does not perpetuate animal cruelty in the future.

    WEBSITE LINK:  https://www.justiceclearinghouse.com/webinar/using-innovative-alternatives-to-incarceration-and-recognizing-the-role-of-trauma-in-violence-against-animals/

  • Webinar – 11/6/24 – 2024 Veterinary Medicine Legislative Review – The Bridge Club

    Webinar – 11/6/24 – 2024 Veterinary Medicine Legislative Review – The Bridge Club

    Back by popular demand, our annual review of the legislative efforts that are changing veterinary medicine across the country. We will go state by state on major issues of title protection, new schools, virtual care and more. Don’t miss out on this one!

    WEBSITE LINK: https://www.thebridgeclub.com/events/2024-veterinary-medicine-legislative-review-1

  • Webinar – 11/14/24 – Maddie’s Insights: Beyond “Doing Better” – Using Behavior Data to Monitor Well-Being in Cats – Maddie’s Fund

    Webinar – 11/14/24 – Maddie’s Insights: Beyond “Doing Better” – Using Behavior Data to Monitor Well-Being in Cats – Maddie’s Fund

    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. This webinar 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.

    Register: https://maddies.fund/MIwebcastsRegister

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

    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.

    What attendees 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

    Speaker:

    Jacklyn Ellis, PhD
    Director of Behavior, Toronto Humane Society

    Jacklyn Ellis is board certified by the Animal Behavior Society as a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, is Certified in Shelter Behavior – Cat by the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants and is the Director of Behavior at Toronto Humane Society. She earned her PhD in Animal Welfare at the Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island, where she conducted research on methods for reducing stress in shelter cats. Her work has been published widely in peer reviewed journals and she has presented at many national and international conferences, particularly on feline stress and elimination behavior. She has recently authored two chapters for a new edition of the leading textbook on the behavior and welfare of shelter animals.

    WEBSITE LINK:  https://maddies.fund/MIwebcastsRegister

  • Online Event – 11/5/24 – All Call: Integrating Social Work Into Shelters – California for All Animals

    Online Event – 11/5/24 – All Call: Integrating Social Work Into Shelters – California for All Animals

    Join your colleagues at noon on November 5 for a conversation with veterinary social worker Raquel Bernaldo, Friends of the Alameda Animal Shelter (FAAS) Community Services Manager, and Deja Johnson, FAAS Community Services Lead. Submit your questions for Raquel and Deja in advance.

    About the presentation: At Friends of the Alameda Animal Shelter (FAAS), we are an open-admission shelter and a community resource dedicated to keeping pets and people together. Our presentation will explore FAAS’s Healthy Pets Healthy People programs and our shift from traditional charity models to mutual aid, where we focus on trust, community partnerships, and recognizing pet owners as the experts on their animals. Programs include free pet food, no-cost vaccines, the Skyla Fund for veterinary assistance, spay/neuter vouchers, microchipping, and up to 90 days of emergency boarding.

    Mutual aid moves beyond charity’s limitations by eliminating conditions like income verification, fees, adherence to timeliness, etc. and focusing on building connection, trust, and safety. We’ve redefined volunteer roles, differentiating between the shelter’s animal care expertise and our department’s role in supporting pet owners. This shift required intentional work to reestablish leadership, align programs, and build collaborative partnerships with local businesses, veterinary clinics, grooming services, and social service providers.

    The presentation will feature a conversational dialogue, supported by slides, to illustrate how FAAS has created a sustainable, humane model for community-based animal welfare.

    About the All Call: The All Call is a twice-monthly, California community call for animal well-being professionals that occurs on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday. The one-hour call is a dedicated space to share and learn from each other. Popular topics include initiatives that create a more inclusive culture for both staff and community, programs that keep pets with their people, industry trends, research studies, as well as the hard stuff, like what’s not working or what is particularly difficult during times of scarcity. The call is a mix of presentations, storytelling, open discussion, and Q&A time.

    The All Call is hosted by California for All team members Allison Cardona, Nadia Oseguera, and Ivy Ruiz, and is enriched by rotating facilitators. You only need to register one time. Calls are sometimes recorded; recap emails with supplemental resources are sent post-call.

    Register here: https://tinyurl.com/all-call

  • Webinar – 10/29/24 – Sharing Solutions to Support Lost Pet Programs – HASS

    Webinar – 10/29/24 – Sharing Solutions to Support Lost Pet Programs – HASS

    Stray pet intake is overwhelming animal shelters and there is a rising need for solutions to get those pets back home. Join industry experts from three HASS pilot shelters—Cincinnati Animal CARE, Greenville County Animal Care, and San Diego Humane Society, to learn about their pet reunification programs and how their efforts can be replicated where you live to get more lost pets home.

    Register below and join us live on Tuesday, October 29 at 5 p.m. CT. After the live event, a recording will be emailed to all registrants within one week.

    WEBSITE LINK: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/7816739797796/WN_htCUCWZzSuyhnwXUy3px7Q#/registration

  • Online Event – 10/15/24 – State of HASS Webinar Follow-up Q&A Session – HASS

    Online Event – 10/15/24 – State of HASS Webinar Follow-up Q&A Session – HASS

    Mike Wheeler, Director of Community Services at Cabot Animal Support Services, is planning an informal Q&A with people who attended the State of HASS live webinar or watched the replay to dive deeper into some topics and hear more from you.

    Sign up here to join us for a follow-up session to learn more and ask questions about HASS data, research, and progress. You will also hear more about what one pilot director, Mike Wheeler from Cabot Animal Support Services, is doing in Arkansas to make it the HASS capital of the world!

    WEBSITE LINK: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd_-D0s3U9jbb59hepOChPFUVzNJujjCr3bHFL2cRmSl4PK0A/viewform