I’m working on one of my favorite projects this summer! I teach animal shelter staff and volunteers to use low-stress handling techniques to improve the quality of life of shelter pets. I’m currently working with a shelter team who wants to learn how behavior science can help them impact the lives of the animals they hope to adopt out to great homes. Shelter pets deserve more than survival – they deserve quality of life.
My colleague and I developed the training program over 10 years ago. When I say “training program,” you might think we are training animals – but we’re training people. It’s a series of classes, including classroom discussions and hands-on practice in restraining animals, leash skills, and more. But it’s more than handling skills – it’s a shift in mindset.
Preventing Disease and Stress: Both are Important
The animal shelter industry has a long history of training staff to use the correct cleaning agents to reduce disease impacts but not teaching them to use behavior science to minimize stress and maximize quality of life for shelter pets and themselves. Disease prevention in a population of animals from largely unknown backgrounds in very close quarters is highly important. But so is the psychological well-being of those animals.
There’s a whole perspective of considering what animals are experiencing at any moment. They are continually learning from every interaction. Though we do this work because we love animals, I find that we are not always choosing our actions with an eye toward how our choices affect each animal’s experience.
Animals are Learning All the Time
With training in carefully choosing handling techniques that make sense to animals, we can use time efficiently and be effective in giving the animals all the treatments and examinations they need. At the same time, we can ensure that animals are happily engaged in learning good ways to behave as pets while we clean their enclosures and at all other times.
After all, animals are learning all the time, during every experience of every day. Are we teaching them the right lessons? We can either teach them useful things or simply let them learn what they will and then complain if they learn something we don’t like! This includes outward behaviors like jumping up on people, playing too roughly, and painful mouthing. But it also includes the emotional sources of those behaviors, like stress and anxiety that can result from continual challenges, threats, and other impacts. These impacts are often perpetrated by humans who don’t even realize how the animal is perceiving the action.
Animals are learning while staff and volunteers move them from one place to another within the shelter. They’re learning when people take dogs out for walks with the intention of enriching their lives. With training, humans find that they can facilitate animals developing the skills they need to help their new owners enjoy them and keep them for the rest of their lives.
Training the People Helps the Pets
The animal shelter staff learned to consistently apply handling techniques. The animals became easier to handle, appearing to have clear expectations of what was going to happen. Our safety record improved. Both dogs and cats displayed more friendly gestures as an outcome of decreased stress responses.
These are not science-based statements, but anecdotes expressed by staff over 10 years. We have not been able to set up scientific studies to document the outcomes of the training program. However, we have interviewed the shelter staff extensively. Their opinions are overwhelmingly positive, describing the effects their team had on animal behavior inside the shelter.
Consistent Calmness
Kennels full of 30 – 40 dogs were regularly quiet, without the constant barking you often hear in shelters. Cats and dogs approached kennel and cage gates calmly and curiously when people came into the room. The staff and volunteers experienced the joy of dogs walking with them on loose leashes, typically after about 3 days of using the skills they developed through the training program.
Remember that the program did not include selective training of certain animals, which is the popular approach. Our program ensures the entire staff is skilled in helping the animals succeed during enclosure cleaning, being moved around the shelter, and time spent alone. The shift in mindset that accompanies the skills they learn creates an environment where animals feel safe. They can expect the same low-stress handling from everyone in the shelter. When the people know what to do, the animals don’t have to guess what’s going to happen next. They don’t have to be always prepared to defend themselves, allowing much more relaxation.
Train the People, Save the Pets
Changing how we handle animals changes their futures. Stress doesn’t have to be part of survival. Reducing stress levels in the shelter allows animals to learn lessons we want them to learn, assuming we teach deliberately within every interaction. It is possible that when adopters take calmer pets home, they are more likely to keep them throughout their lives because they are easier to deal with than stressed animals.
We Even Empower Those Who Resist
One of my favorite stories about those years was a particular team member who did not take the training seriously. There’s one in every crowd and we had a few over the years! This animal caretaker didn’t want to bother to learn or use the leash skills that were policy and taught in the classes. But because everyone else behaved in a consistent manner with dogs on leashes, the dogs knew just what to do once the leash was attached, no matter which human was at the other end.
One day, we saw this guy walking with a cute blue and white pit bull at his left side on a loose leash. The dog was happy and relaxed, glancing up at the handler every once in a while, looking around at the scenery as she walked. Everyone recognized this dog as one that didn’t have a clue about walking on a leash at first. This observation was on the dog’s third day in the shelter with someone who was not even trying to apply the behavior science-based leash skills taught in the program. She had learned her job from the other employees and carried it out even when her handler didn’t try to do his part. The dog knew just what to do and that made this learning-resistant employee’s job easier.
We Humans are the Key
You see, when humans hone their skills in leash management and animal handling and have a basic understanding of how animals learn, they can dramatically change quality of life for shelter pets. We hear so much about how stressful shelters are, but what are we doing to reduce the stress we are allowing and in some cases inflicting on animals? Do we have to continue running animal shelters the way we started out so many years ago? There’s a world of folks out there making changes now, and the training program I’m talking about is now being implemented in a second shelter.
Obstacles in the Shelter Industry
Why so few? Why is everyone not on the bandwagon? That’s a loaded set of questions. The shelter and rescue industry has a lot of issues, not the least of which are fundraising and trying to keep a positive reputation up in a world where there are so many homeless animals and such a varied expanse of opinions about solutions to this problem. In addition, changing one’s behavior is difficult. It’s a challenge to do something different in the face of the myriad stimuli driving you toward a particular behavior you’ve practiced for a long time.
Behavior Science Factors
The challenge of changing our own behavior is the heart of behavior science. We’ve studied and documented how strong a behavior can become through reinforcement. We know that behavior is reinforced naturally, based on direct consequences through the environment. It can also be reinforced on purpose, by our own choice.
I’ve written many times about the impacts of a strong learned behavior on the challenge of learning something new. This is a challenge in training dogs and cats, and it’s the main obstacle to teaching our pets to behave in ways that we can live with. We strive not only to reinforce the behaviors we want to see but also to not reinforce the behaviors we don’t want our pets to exhibit.
Stress Doesn’t Have to be Part of Survival
All this information is part of the shelter staff training program. Those who work in animal shelters and in rescue groups benefit from understanding how animals learn and the effects they can have on animals’ learning through their own behavior choices. This understanding raises their animal handling to a new level. Their thoughtful consideration of how to restrain an animal in a way that creates positive learning experiences during the shelter intake process and throughout the animal’s stay at the shelter improves the animal’s well-being.
Helping Animals Thrive, One Human at a Time
Imagine how these positive experiences and reduced stress levels can affect the type of pet an animal will become in a new home. Even with a new owner that may not be the most experienced, a pet partnership can start well and give everyone the best chance of success. The story above tells how reduced stress and skill improvement can transfer to different staff members, even one who resists following instructions. The learning will also accompany a pet to his new home.
Changing Animals’ Futures
Part of the training program is about how shelter staff can communicate what they have learned, imparting information to new pet owners that they can use themselves in settling their new pet in. It’s not enough to just talk about it, so we hope to build further applications in which adopters can learn the same skills in reducing stress, preventing problem behaviors, and teaching animals a beneficial repertoire of behaviors. This is one area where many shelters are already doing a good job.
Adoption is Not the End Goal
Starting new owners off with pets that are less stressed and already have some skills in relaxation, regulating emotional responses, and calmly making good behavior choices can give adopters the boost they need to succeed with a new pet. We hope that the comprehensive approach of our behavior training program, focusing on the skills of the humans in charge, can result in more pets staying in the homes of those who chose them for their entire lives. I hope to implement a study to document the incidence of how many people keep their adopted pets for life and why.
Why I Teach
For now, I continue to teach behavior science, stress reduction and prevention, and why our handling and other behavior choices are so impactful on the lives of animals. It starts with understanding that you don’t know what you don’t know. One of the best choices we humans can make is to implement the changes needed to learn new ways of behaving that benefit animals. Once we know what we don’t know, we can begin to fill that gap.
My Current Project
Just yesterday, I had a wonderful group of dedicated shelter volunteers in a class where they analyzed dog body language from videos of dogs playing together. Most of these folks had been volunteering at the shelter for over 5 years, some nearly 10 years. They had great questions based on their previous experiences with shelter dogs. They were thrilled to learn concepts new to them and humble in the realization we all often have about how much there is to learn! We had delightful discussions and I thoroughly enjoyed working through this class with them. I look forward to all the upcoming classes where I’ll get to see them again.
I love teaching people and their pets, as I do in the private training packages I offer. I am also passionate about teaching behavior science and animal training to groups of people who work in animal shelters and rescue groups, those on the front lines of having immediate impacts on individual animals who need a boost. We can all work together to make every interaction a positive one.
If you know of a shelter or rescue group that is ready to do better, I hope you’ll share this article and/or ask me for further information about the training program. Use the contact form HERE. I’d love to help.
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