thank you amber as always well good morning everyone it is 8 a.m pacific standard time where i am located my name is bobby mann i'm the chief programs officer at humane rescue alliance uh so excited to be co-hosting this call with the entire maddie's family and our question of the day is what is your big win right now in your organization and we gotta we got a special guest actually to talk about this big one so alex i'm gonna toss it over to you and for your organization please share your big w
in cool so uh do you want me to share screen on this one you can do whatever you want your show uh so i'm gonna go ahead and share the screen here uh let's not let me because i'm technologically illiterate all right i'll just run with it uh so our big win is we had a litter of rabbits uh my first count was seven and then i realized i should learn how to count and uh it was nine so nine healthy babies um we have one from a litter we've successfully nursed um there's 11 in this litter so we're up
to like 23 babies right now just babies popping out of everywhere so you can't really see the litter that was born yesterday they're still resting but this is from the litter of 11 we've successfully nursed after the mom got sick who we also successfully rehabilitated from a pretty debilitating uh illness so a lot of little wins lots and lots of little adorable wins i love it uh tracy hansen i'd love to come over to you to share your win would you mind unmuting and telling also folks where you'r
e from and what you do and sharing your win yeah i'm from um ellie's legacy pet rescue in minnesota and our kitty i don't know if you can see in my background oh wow his name is hans he had a freak accident when he was a baby so he will be getting his hind leg amputated next next monday and our goal was to set for a thousand dollars for his medical care and we've reached almost at least over half of that in just a few days for his after care and pain meds and all that stuff that's pretty excited
about that that's amazing tracy my initial dog dad reaction was gonna be like you got a wheelchair for his han's legs right not just his hind legs sorry i had to do it lindsay don't shake your head at me uh danielle bates let's go over to you what are you excited about sherwin i'm going to share that the state of maryland banned declining of cats recently the second state so that is going to help all sorts of cats and shelters aren't going to be getting in uh those declawed cats that don't want
to use the litter box well danielle thank you for always being an amazing cat advocate and while we have you uh do you want to tease a little bit about the focus on feline's job alike and tell folks about it and i'll grab the link for you yes i would love to do that the focus on feline's work group has launched a feline job alike so we had our first one last month and uh our second one is going to be this week it is on thursday it's uh 4 p.m eastern time whatever that time zone conversion is be
cause we have trouble figuring that out in our group um and we're gonna be talking uh about um pathway planning for cats uh dr heather kennedy is gonna lead that discussion and and share some great tips on how to evaluate the cats when they're coming into the shelter not just from the cats but also um from the people who are bringing them in and what you can learn from those people not just what they say but what they're doing so it's going to be very very informative and fascinating and we woul
d love to have um more of you cat people join us i love it danielle thank you for being such a hero in not only the cat space but also in the haas space you've been such an advocate for collaboration and uh folks if you have not had an opportunity to to join one of the job-like meetings uh they're so much fun you're learning from your colleagues and your peers and it's a good way to meet people doing very similar work let's share one more win irene let's go to you oh thank you well um good morni
ng everybody one of my friends at um our office space found a litter of kittens like in a hole at the mall across the street security said they hadn't seen parents for a long time so she took them home she's bottle feeding them and i don't know if folks know i love the sight or by nothing group on facebook whatever everybody says about facebook i love the buy nothing group and um my friend reached out to see if i could find hit uh one of the kittens at home she found homes for the other two so s
omebody stepped up we're gonna do the transfer this weekend or this week and i don't i if if anyone has a pet food express in their area i learned that they have free kitten saver kits they give away like a free bottle of milk formula a syringe a bottle a fleek home so i picked that up too for the new adopters that is amazing it looks like there are a lot of fans of the buy nothing based group so are they are the is this like one national one are there like regional pockets tell us all about thi
s magic i mean yeah it's just it it started out i think as this uh more like bigger movement and not that that had to break up into you know your local region so i'm on the west side of where i live the town i live in because it's just based on like what's easiest for people to pick up from you know for people to pick up for each from each other so um it helps build community and also uh prevents things from going into the landfill all around i highly recommend it i love it so it sounds like you
have a look this is like a peer development right now based off of by nothing maria i would love to call on you please introduce yourself what you do for your organization what gets you excited about what you do and then and then talk about uh your buy nothing experience as well that's a lot of questions um so i'm maria salcedo i'm the gis analyst with pets for life at hsus this is my first time on the call i just found out about it so i was curious to see what it's about um trying to think of
a win um so i don't really do anything with animals but i just made a whole bunch of maps for a bunch of different presentations so that was fun amazing and by nothing um your neighborhood has a really good buy nothing group so all the neighbors have just gotten to know each other and people share things give stuff away um i think i mentioned in the chat that i got a bunch of supplies for one of my foster dogs from neighbors just giving away stuff they didn't need anymore so it's been pretty fun
to meet people and share things instead of throwing it away well we're so excited to have you and i'm gonna say you do not give yourself enough credit for helping animals because it really is analysts like you that are looking at the data and finding the data and evidence into helping us with our strategy for not only helping pets but helping the people that love them have better successful lives so kudos to you i'm so excited to have everybody here before we get into our presentation let's ope
n this call up for national updates well i will start them off because it is the first monday in may it is a new month for a chance to enter the maddie's community conversation giveaways i will drop that link in the chat and just remind your colleagues that every uh person at your organization can enter if they join online or view on demand thank you thanks irene are we giving away money next week yeah we're gonna do the drawing this week and then next monday we'll make the announcement hey bobb
y it's lindsay um i don't know who else from hsus is on but a huge shout out to everybody that came to expo or watched virtual sessions at expo it was a really really awesome uh ripping the band-aid off of being back in person a little overwhelming to be around thousands of people um but thanks for everyone who sent staff or had to cover because other staff from your organization came it was really amazing thanks lindsay and excited to hear you present today as well hey sharon would you like to
unmute and ask your question i think it's a very important question and we still have about three minutes left so over to you good morning everybody um i'm just curious uh the previous uh to irene the woman who spoke um said this was her uh first meeting just found out about it so it prompted me to think being a marketing person um how did you find out about it and how are others how did anyone who joined this call how did you first find out about it we're curious because we want to invite more
people feel free to unmute or put it in the chat and also i'll throw one more thing out there one we'd love to hear about how you found out about it two if any of you have ideas on how we could find more folks or any places that we should be marketing this call we'd love to hear that as well had an aco tell folks about it lots of stumbling on it from the website so shout out to sharon and her seo search engine optimization and all she does for marketing there co-workers at best friends oh i like
that market on pet finder cornell university hey roy since we have a minute roy williams uh we'd love for you to unmute and and say hello and tell folks uh just how long you've been with your organization and what gets you excited about the work that you're doing hi can you hear me yep hi i'm roy i've been with the spca texas about uh 10 years i'm currently managing uh the animal rescue center we have in dallas uh i love rescuing animals and you know getting them into great homes that's why i k
eep doing it awesome well thanks for being here roy great well thanks sharon so last call for national updates we'll give it another minute all right folks well let's get into it so i know that we previously talked on calls that our goal is to really mix up the cadence and switch how many presentations we're going to have and when we need to have deeper discussions we'll do one longer presentation and today is one of those days you all had an opportunity to hear from lindsey hamrick the director
of shelter outreach and engagement for hsus when she was talking about hsus expo but we're also incredibly excited to have her as our main presenter today i know many people have been having the conversations about the influx of adoptions that we had during the pandemic and how somehow it seems like things are slowing down or we're going through some sort of correction but what is better than someone having just one pet in their home getting more pets so we have lindsay here to talk about integ
rating shelter pets into homes uh with resident pets so over to you lindsay thank you bobby um yes let's turn all of our adopters into people that have like 12 animals that's the goal of the presentation it's not how i thought about it coming in but that's a good way to put it um hi everyone lindsay hamrick director of shelter outreach with hsus um my passion for this started probably 10 or 12 years ago before i worked for hsus i was a chief operating officer at a few of our shelters here in new
england and much like many of you we were seeing a lot of animals come to us who quote unquote didn't get along with the resident pets or had never had experience with pets before and then fast forward and i had a few animals of my own that required let's say just a little bit of management and training to be able to live successfully with other animals and i think that if we were just talking about a handful of shelter pets who were restricted from living with other animals we wouldn't even ne
ed this conversation we'd be able to find the volume of adopters that we needed for them but i think that the number of animals that we are restricting far outweighs the available homes that don't have pets so my goal for today is to just sort of make the case that we can't keep restricting everybody and how to actually do something about that in a safe way and i want to be clear here that anything that i say in this presentation is stuff that i used to do i have no judgment about the fact that
we use restrictions in sheltering and it is very much a trauma-based response because many of us have had whether in our own personal animals at home or whether it's shelter animals that we've placed in the past we've had bad stuff happen and so we try to control that from happening again and restrictions have sort of become the default way to do that so i'm hoping to empower you to think about which animals currently at your shelter might be able to find a new way and do it in a safe enough way
that our nervous systems don't completely freak out on us so um on the right is kira she was a golden retriever that i had for about nine years and even though she looks precious and perfect as all golden retrievers do she was super dog selective she had barrier aggression and while she was incredibly human social and food motivated she had a pretty moderate prey drive i would describe meaning that she posed at least a little bit of a risk to small creatures like cats and small dogs and jazz wh
o is next to her was an 11 year old cat when she was surrendered to the shelter because her mom had passed away jazz had never lived with other pets before and for both of them they very easily could have been animals who were restricted from living with other pets and through a whole bunch of trial and error on my part i figured out how to help them just essentially get so bored with each other that they weren't gonna fight or chase each other or do crazy crap and truly if there was a thesis to
this presentation it's how to make pets be so incredibly bored of each other that they don't start crap with each other so that's the thesis here and so here's the issue um when we restrict and this presentation is meant for both cats and dogs but you'll hear me talk a little bit more about dogs because dogs in particular aren't living in a bubble like they have to be outside of our homes and engaging in certain ways but any of this applies to cats as well um when we restrict animals from livin
g with other pets we are truly looking for kind of a needle and a haystack for um the adopters that are available so we know that somewhere between about 55 and three-quarters of americans are currently living with other animals which is awesome right like we want the american public to be excited about pets the way that we are this is why adoption the percentage of animals who are adopted adopted as the way that they were acquired has gone up over time um but it means that you have fewer and fe
wer and fewer families that don't have any animals at home and then you add on top of that that many of us who have pets have more than one we have a cat and a dog or we have three dogs and chickens or we have seven cats or whatever the combination is that lives in our house and so one of the biggest pieces that i hope that you walk away from this presentation with is that adopters need our help doing these introductions with animals who we think might be a little bit more problematic problemati
c and i am going to make the case that for some of these animals we can do successful introductions not just with one cat or dog in the house but with multiple animals because the process is exactly the same and it takes longer because you need to create little pairings of animals that aren't going to hurt each other um but it is completely possible and for the record anything that i say today is probably stuff that you all have been doing for years because you probably have multiple pet househo
lds you probably foster you are probably constantly integrating animals into your house and really what my goal is is to take our collective knowledge about how to do that safely and apply it to the general public and we do that by teaching them with hands-on approaches as opposed to sitting in an adoption room with them for 20 minutes and saying hey use a baby gate for a week and then take it down and that stuff makes us really stressed because it isn't actually that's that's straightforward an
d simple um in addition of the families that don't have a pet so that category of adopter that you're looking for the older we get the l less likely we are to acquire another pet and that can be for a million reasons it can be that folks have health concerns or they're retiring and they want to travel a lot um maybe there's economic reasons not to acquire another animal so when you have a a doctor come into your shelter who is able to adopt a pet that's been restricted you have either found the
very rare unicorn family and the reason that they're the reason we know they're rare is because length of stay for the pets whoever who are restricted is incredibly high right um the animals that you are posting on social media or on your adoption pages those are the animals that have taken a while to be placed um you're not many of you are probably not posting animals that are super highly adoptable can go home with other pets because they're probably getting adopted relatively quickly from you
r shelter but these animals with restrictions are waiting longer and so if you're lucky you've found that little percentage of people who don't have an animal and who don't want a second animal um or you're finding very brand new pet owners who are starting out on the pet ownership journey and they're ready to get their first cat or their first dog that's totally fine i'm all for younger adopters um however i think that for some of these animals the reasons we've restricted them is because we're
looking for someone who has a little bit more experience and so that may not be your brand new pet owner who's never had a dog before and then we sort of layer on what we're really good at in animal welfare which is thinking that we can control all of the things which i've been around for like 20 years in this industry and i really wish that i can control everything and it appears that i cannot so while we throw these restrictions on animals for not living with other pets um we're doing it from
a place of good we're trying to prevent future stressful or even unsafe situations but even if you are not implementing the sort of adopters welcome approach that hsus encourages which is a really conversational based adoption approach no home checks like not trying to like have a yes or no application even if you are trying to control the situation by checking out somebody's home you're looking for people who own their house or who have a fence and people move on average every five years and s
o i have moved i don't even know 14 times in 16 years um and so the american public is getting more and more um sort of transient moving across the country especially with remote work the ability to live where we want to live and so if maybe you're having some semblance of control at the time of adoption but you're very unlikely to be able to control what that person does for the next 10 or 15 years of living with that pet and we sort of know that of course that's common sense but i think that w
e're in when we're in the moment and we're operating from a place of trauma because we don't want this dog to hurt a cat or we don't want a dog fight to break out in an adopters home and we sort of think we can control things that we we definitely can and one of the stats that was really interesting to me was about a third of americans live with a roommate um who is not a college roommate or a partner and so i can envision when i um had a lot of roommates in my life most of them had pets most of
them wanted to go out and get a dog or a cat and so there was a lot of sort of movement of animals in and out of the spaces and of course we know that companion animals particularly dogs are going to interface with other pets for the rest of their lives um and i am going to argue this fourth bullet point that i don't have research to back up but in my experience the more of a bubble we have put an animal in where they have no experience being around other animals i think that when management br
eaks down when somebody's out walking their reactive dog and a loose dog is in the neighborhood um i think that there's more damage or more chaos that happens than if that animal had lived for a few years or 10 years with a pet in the home in a safe sort of managed and controlled fashion so um by putting them in this bubble i think that we're sort of robbing them of this ability to be i don't even want to say socialize because it's not quite the right word but desensitized to being around other
animals and learning coping skills and how to remove themselves from situations where they're annoyed etc and one piece that i want to say here is of the animals that i am advocating that we think differently about i'm not advocating that we try to place or even should place animals who have a serious history of harming another animal or killing another animal um i'm going to give you some categories next of animals that i think we can sort of rethink on but it's not that category of pets so the
se are all the reasons that i think that we tend to restrict pets from living with other animals certainly if a dog or a cat is coming to you with a history somebody's surrendering because of a history of injury um between animals i think that that's a critical piece of information right um however i do think that a number of animals are returned or surrendered because quote unquote they don't get along with the other animal in the house so your ability to understand and ask the owner about what
does that actually look like like are they just annoyed are they just miserable because the dog keeps chasing the cat and the cat is frustrated and hiding under the bed like that might be a reason for those two individual animals not to live together anymore if there's not other opportunities to modify those behaviors but it does not mean that that cat who comes into the shelter needs to go into an only home it just means that the dog in the previous home was kind of an and there's probably a n
ice dog out there that this cat could live with so we all know that animals are individuals and what i want us to sort of think about is how can we look at each animal in our shelter look at why we've restricted them from living with other pets and think about if we expanded the adopter pool and we provided some more resources to adopters could we get away from those restrictions anything that happens in the shelter environment so let's say that you take in a lost pet who isn't reunited with the
ir family and there's a dogfight in the shelter or the dog seems really interested in the cats in the adoption room um which just for the record i'm sure you've heard this in other presentations but the whole like trying to test prey drive in the shelter thing um in my experience it doesn't work either way so i have seen many a reactive shelter dog usually an adolescent young kind of idiot dog um i say that with love i love the idiot dogs they're not smart enough to get in my garbage um who are
tweaking out at the cage where the shelter cats are which also totally stresses out your shelter cats right um who then go on to live beautifully with cats in the home and i have had a dog just speaking for my own professional trauma i've had a dog who truly showed not even a remote interest in other animals at the shelter who went home and about a week later killed a sleeping 18 year old cat who was in a windowsill um so sleeping meaning the cat wasn't even moving should not have even triggered
a prey drive response um and so i just lost faith in our ability to assess this in the shelter environment in both directions and that then said to me well then we just need to be doing slow introductions regardless of what we think we just need to have animals meet each other in a thought well thought out um managed and safe approach with the ultimate goal that management won't be a long-term solution to the to the issues because they'll just get so bored with each other that they do okay or w
e get to a point in the introduction phase where we don't think we can get rid of management where that baby gate is what's making us feel like danger or an injury isn't happening um or a basket muzzle we're just not comfortable taking it off and then we have enough information to say you know what i actually think this animal could cause severe damage and in this situation we're either going to restrict this pet or we're going to rethink what the adoptable environment looks like for him or her
um i've also seen cats in particular who come in with behavioral challenges litter box issues um that the owner believes is tied to the other pets in the home totally could be true the owner you know we need to take owner's input seriously here however um litter box issues can be caused by a whole ton of things and so can we work on and especially for a cat who's been surrendered for this issue they already have a little bit of a marketing pr issue and so can we expand the adopter pool and then
work with folks to do this introduction and see if if that's truly what the reason was that they were surrendered any kind of reactivity prey drive resource guarding in the shelter environment again i think that we need to safely see where this goes in the home environment unless animals cause damage in the past to another pet and then the last three i think are really interesting and are probably the low-hanging fruit here so we get a lot of senior animals now cats and dogs and i almost always
see the same bio which is like poor old fluffy came to the shelter and we all feel really bad for fluffy because she's 13. and like we would love for like this beautiful retirement home for her where she's never bothered by another pet um and i really think that we need to start uh rethinking where old animals should go and it shouldn't be in our shelter for six months waiting for a home without other pets right um yes i have had cranky old cats who are not particularly excited about living with
my three dogs but guess what they're fine like they will get over it they're fine because really what they need to do is feel safe in the environment that they're in um and then i've also just seen like huskies can't live with cats or small dogs or like this breed or perceived breed is an animal that we don't think is going to do well because they have a sort of breed stereotype of prey drive um and i think all of us know an individual of a breed of dog who doesn't present the way that their br
eed is supposed to present and we see that every day in our work so um i think there's lots of reasons here we restrict that we could probably be rethinking and bobby i am not watching the chat so if there's any pertinent questions as we go along i'm happy this chat is lit lindsey people are so excited about this conversation uh i think if you want to touch on actually let's keep rolling we can do questions at the end because there's just too much good content okay so you are going to say to me
lindsey totally we have way too many restricted pets we want to be able to do behavioral assistance in an adapter's home and also we might be able to do some of this on the front end where we help somebody with their animal animal issues in their original home so that the animal doesn't ever have to come to the shelter to begin with we would love to do that but a we have no staff we're completely in a staffing shortage we don't have a behavior center um this scares the crap out of us because ado
pters don't always know what they're looking at in terms of body language 100 so i am going to ask you to be thinking about how your organization can shift resources from like trying to keep animals sane in your shelter environment where they have to be for months waiting for this kind of home to a place where those resources are used in an adopters home to help them with the introduction process and i don't for a second want any of you to feel guilty that you can't like leave this presentation
and start like introducing like a hundred of your current shelter animals this way um any good reallocation of resources or programming starts with like one or two animals that have been on your adoption floor where you think that with a little extra support they might be able to go into a home with other pets so don't let perfection be the enemy of good here start super small because what i really don't want to have happen is you take an animal who you've been really nervous about you try this
but you can't quite put all of the time into it that you wish you could something bad happens you get traumatized again and then you start the restriction process all over again i want the at least the first like dozen experiences to go as perfectly as possible so start small and so this is what it looks like first of all there's a lot you can do in the shelter environment that sets a dog in particular up for a really awesome introduction process when they finally have to meet either another dog
or a cat in the resident home so you've heard a lot about behavior tracking how to be objective about it that could be a whole like week-long series but at the least just remove policies that say that pets who didn't get along with one animal can't live with any animals unless there was actual damage that was done and of course huge proponent of um asking your veterinarians um in your network in the whoever you're using in your community about whether medications might be able to take some of t
he edge off so that it's not this like total combustion of behavior when you're trying to find out what's going on with this dog in the shelter what i would love to see so when i'm introducing a dog to my house i'm absolutely using management to begin with which means crates it means tethering and i'll show you a picture of what that means tethering in the house it means baby gates it means x-pens it means barriers between that animal and the animals that they're meeting crate training can start
in the shelter you can put a wire crate or a plastic crate into the dog's kennels leave the door wide open put a nice bed in it the more the dogs get used to crates in the shelter the much it'll be much easier for an adopter to use that as a management technique when they get home and then one of the most important parts of introducing animals cats or dogs is the ability to get their attention if an animal is staring into the soul of the other animal and i'll show you a video at the end where u
h that escalates in behavior for one of my dogs it's interrupting eye contact that stops most issues when it comes to introductions and we can do that in the shelter environment by using every time we take a dog out of the out of the kennel having them look up at us and rewarding them with high value treats and so that the adopter when they go to say look the dog already knows what that means they're already keeping their eyes on them instead of thinking about how they're going to murder the res
ident cat and playing games with their body the equipment other equipment that would be really helpful particularly for dogs larger dogs is training to a basket muzzle they're not the most comfortable thing for dogs to wear they're totally safe they're the ones that dogs can breathe through and can eat through um but just get them desensitized to it because probably when you go to introduce the dogs that you're concerned about you're gonna want some kind of protection um so that you don't feel l
ike there's gonna be a grab or they're not gonna be able to you know sort of have a very fast movement that you can't control and then you're gonna hear me shout from the rooftops about gentle leaders i 100 agree that they are a pain in the butt to the dog themselves it feels really weird on their face for those i'll show some pictures too if you haven't used them but they're essentially head halters like you would use on a horse and in my experience this is the very best way to control a dog's
head which is again how we're trying to keep them from having sustained eye contact that will lead to the prey drive sequence or a reactivity outburst but gentle leaders take a while for dogs to get desensitized to just get them used to that in the shelter environment walk them on them etc i'm like 4 11 and a half that half is super important i can handle like a 80 pound dog on a gentle leader i cannot handle more than 50 pounds on a collar or a harness because all they're doing is pulling forwa
rd right and then of course you all know you're doing this every day to try to manage stress in your shelter environment in terms of where the animal is living how their cage whether their cage is next to another reactive dog and if you can't help it if you've just got a whole adoption floor of like screaming dogs just use those opportunities with high value treats and gentle leaders to get them used to walking past other dogs as best as you can we can only do so much in the shelter environment
lindsay you might be 411 in real life but you're bringing about 611 energy to this presentation right now strong work oh the dad jokes they're just on point every week um so you've probably heard much better presentations about adoption bios uh i would really love for us to get rid of the template that says like fluffy is blah and like fluffy is this years old and this is why fluffy came in and also she can't live with anything ever like never approach anything else in her world because inevitab
ly your adopters are like does she get along with dogs does she get along with cats so let's try to like create adoption bios that talk about the highlights and hopefully if you're able to help with some introductions you don't actually have to put the restrictions in the bio you can do more of a learning about the adopters pets at home in doing case-by-case assessments of whether they're going to be the right fit um i very much believe that the resident pets have everything to do with whether y
our introduction and hopefully your permanent placement for the shelter pet whether that will go well or not um i'll just use kira as an example because she was kind of a female who was reactive she did really well with like those nerdy boy dogs like the boy dogs who don't realize they're about to die and they're just like oh my god you're so cute and like she was just like oh you're not even worth my effort because you're just an idiot so that pairing is what worked for her she lived with like
four of those dogs i fostered those dogs i never fostered the other females because the two of them would just make up and get in fights all day long and it would require extra management so how you pair these animals up is really critical if somebody has a 13 year old lab at home and you're trying to place a cat who's never lived with dogs probably going to be just fine but we have to know who these resident pets are before we can make a judgment about whether the the two together will do okay
um and i don't want to do stereotypes here it really is critical to talk to adopters um they also are probably have some history of managing their own multi multi-animal house before so if all they've ever had are like perfect animals who never got into trouble with each other they may need to learn a few extra tips before they take home an animal that's more sensitive but if they've dealt with like two dogs who used to fight over bones and you're just trying to figure out if this this sort of n
utty adolescent dog in your shelter is even will even have any issues with dogs that actually might in the long run once that dog is comfortable may actually be easier than the two dogs they used to manage before so find out what their experience is and frankly what their tolerance is um i don't know about you all but uh i've dealt with enough behavior issues at my house that the older i get the less i want to do that but there are some people i don't know why but there are some people who are l
ike i know how to do this so i would do it again um [Music] and then you have this amazing adopter who's come forward and he or she or they have like another dog or a cat in the house and you're trying to figure out what can we do before we actually get this shelter animal into the home so i think that introductions at the shelter if that's if that's the only thing that you can do to get like a little bit of a gauge of how these two dogs are going to do together maybe it's helpful i also think i
t can show you completely the wrong stuff because that shelter dog has probably been at your shelter a while has been used to cortisol levels that are pretty high when they come out to the yard it's always like a lot of energy and so if at all possible try to choose a different off-site neutral space for these dogs in particular i'm not saying for all the dogs in your care um i am going to continue to emphasize the need for exercise through this entire process if dogs are bored and they have all
this pent up energy because they haven't had an outlet or enough of an outlet in the shelter environment or even at home the more exhausted they are the less likely they're going to have energy to start crack with each other so before the adopter brings their resident dog ask them to do more than they usually do so if they usually just take their dog for a regular walk ask them to do like a one and a half hour like sniff fest where the dog gets to choose where he goes he chooses whatever he wan
ts to smell and he gets a brain toy in the morning same thing for the shelter dog do something different than you've done before and this is where volunteer help can really come in and that way when you actually come in to gauge a little bit about how the two dogs might do um the dogs are a little bit more exhausted and not quite so pent up now this first introduction is not nose to nose um this is like maybe 50 feet from each other in a park where you're like hi or you're on your cell phone bec
ause you're so far away from the person that you have to like talk about what's happening next um you want to be far enough away from each other that you're not eliciting reactive responses if you are getting reactive responses you're too close for this initial introduction um or you the session has gone on too long like this is not the time to have like 30 minutes of conversation this is like maybe five minutes of the two dogs like seeing each other across the yard getting lots of treats and po
sitive reinforcement for not engaging um and if that's not going well then you back up you end the session early you start again now if this doesn't go terribly you might be able to go into the next phase that i'll walk you through or the adopter and you might say you know what let's do this again in two days let's come back in a couple days and i know that this sounds like extra work you guys but the alternative is that our animals are waiting in the shelter for just as much time so we can spen
d the time caring for them every day or we can spend the time trying to figure out how to do these introductions in a way that helps them get used to each other and board um in parallel walking i think most of you know what that is but it's where each dog has a handler you are as far away from each other as you need to be without any reactivity and you're literally just walking down either a quiet road or some space that you have enough room um in a parallel fashion the dogs are not meeting they
're just kind of walking next to each other okay so here's the tofu of the presentation and i'm gonna go through this kind of fast um i also have a handout for you and i'm gonna share this presentation i hope you said that in the beginning so this is what in-home introductions look like for me um think about it as like stage one is like that really annoying boss you had that micromanaged everything that you did and phase four is like the boss leaves you alone and lets you do your job um phase on
e is the safe room thing you all tend to cancel this already for cats like put the cat in a in a bedroom or a bathroom awesome keep doing that um the same can apply to a shelter dog particularly if they're already used to a crate um or if there's a way to set up the house where there is a truly separated area for that shelter dog to be these four phases can happen in 48 hours i've introduced animals that quickly in my house i would say the longest it has ever taken me for a reactive dog and a fe
arful cat which is a hard combination is about six weeks so these four phases it really depends on the animals who are in the home um this is the part that's going to scare you because you're going to be like okay lindsay you want us to send like the adolescent reactive dog home to the adopter and tell them not to let the dog meet their resident pets and we have to trust the adopter not to let that happen and you're right and i'm going to show you how to support the adopter in maintaining that s
o that everybody stays safe the second phase is your controlling interactions you're doing essentially what you did with the dog dog intro in the last slide where there's two handlers or somebody from the shelter who's in the home with the person helping with either the dog meeting the cat for the first time or the dog meeting the other dog or two cats and so this is phase two i think is where the bulk of our resources need to shift because this is a tricky one where you're managing the actual i
ntroduction and then the third one is things are going pretty well you don't need quite as much management in the house but you're watching so if if the owner is distracted if they're cooking dinner if they have to go out and run an errand everybody goes back to being in their own space but if they're supervising and they've got a plan then they can sort of intervene if things are looking a little sketchy um or let things be if they're not and then phase four is the goal that there is no managem
ent um i set a goal for myself years ago that i needed to be able to walk out of my house not put a baby gate up not to put an x pen up and not worry when i was away that something would happen and so that's the goal if you cannot get to phase four and the adopter says to you i'm you know i don't i can't manage this for the rest of my life that's a totally appropriate reaction i mean now you have enough information about the animal to know for sure what kind of home they may need so this is wher
e i think that the shelter can really support folks that day that they bring the particularly for dogs that they bring the reactive dog home this is where i think we can do a lot of good so asking about the adopter setup and going to their house to walk through and say this would be a perfect safe room i'm going to set up the the baby gate right here i'm going to help you install a tie down into your baseboard in the living room because you're going to need that later making sure that they have
all the equipment that they're going to need for the introduction and also this is not a home check we're not fans of home checks super invasive this is like what the professional dog training community would be doing so picture yourselves as a professional private dog trainer who's gotten a call about two animals not getting along in the home what would they do first they would go to the home and check out what the setup is and then provide the management that's needed to sort of bring the cort
isol levels down make sure that the environment is safe and so i would advocate that at least a volunteer goes with the owner the first time the shelter pet goes home and gets them set up in the safe area for them probably even takes them for a really long walk before they do that so that that first night that the shelter pet is home they're not like howling and screaming from the home which is not a great first night and then this first couple of weeks i think keeping that shelter animal exerci
sed is one of the hardest parts for adopters because i think the reason we rush the introduction between the resident pets and the shelter dog is because we feel bad that the animal is in a safe room and that they're not getting the exercise and enrichment that they need well you all have amazing volunteers who have been walking these dogs for months just to sign a volunteer to be sort of that dog's ambassador if i knew that someone was going to come to my house a few days a week and take the sh
elter dog for hike and then when they came home they were tired and we could work on an introduction together with parallel walks it would change the game for people who live by themselves or just don't have the animal handling skills that the rest of us do you can also just drop off enrichment stuff for adopters make sure that they have what they need to keep the shelter pets sane during that period of time where they're in a safe room um and then when you're ready to do that phase two and phas
e three where animals are actually physically meeting um there's a lot to be said about video footage i'm asking you to actually go into the adopters home a handful of times i realize that that is time intensive there are times where you can back up a little bit have them text you a video of what they're seeing between the baby gate so that you can read the animal's body language and the adopter doesn't have to try to interpret it themselves this is exactly what private dog trainers do all the t
ime they have their clients message them with the behaviors they're seeing and then they give consults over the phone and then if things aren't going well if you're like oh gosh i see what you're seeing and i'm a little worried about him finally meeting that cat either go back to help with that introduction with a basket muzzle on the dog or talk about whether this looks like it might be a good match and whether the animal would need to come back this whole providing free day care piece that was
one of my favorite ideas during the pandemic was the shelter that had some empty kennels and they offered free daycare for the shelter dogs to their foster parents so that the dogs could come back and get exercise enrichment while somebody was working during the day there's all kinds of ways that we can support adopters um in keeping these pets like engaged and exercised this is so much information you guys i could literally teach this for a whole week about how to do the actual introduction so
the last thing i'm going to say is when you're thinking about where to start a start with cats because cats can be see as your bigger dogs who need like a gentle leader on and a basket muscle in the whole thing bobby did i freeze just for a second so if you want to just start at the top of that slide that'd be great okay um cats are easier because they can be in a safe room and you just need a baby gate so if you have cats that are restricted on your adoption floor please think about introducin
g them into homes with either other cats or other dogs and of course animals who have lived successfully with other animals in the past like if they have a history of success then then let's not have them restrict restricted and then as far as dogs go the things that are most helpful is that a dog be food motivated right i've talked a lot about training a lot about redirecting their attention on to us it's difficult to do that with a large dog who does not care about you not saying they shouldn'
t be adopted there's harder to do with this process um and young animals in particular they need they're going to have like 10 or 15 years of life where living with another pet and a safe environment is going to give them incredible skills to live in our world whereas sending home an 18 month old dog who's never going to live with another pet puts them in a bubble that i think causes some risks in the future and if you're thinking to me this sounds like a lot of money and time you're right howev
er i think it's going to be cheaper than us taking care of those animals for months on end in our shelters waiting for someone to come along who doesn't have other pets so if you're trying to sell something like this to your leadership just calculate your daily care costs by how long your average length of stay is for the pets that are restricted in your shelter and whether you could pay a professional trainer to help with some of this whether you have some really experienced volunteers who woul
d lead on this or maybe there's one staff person who's really good at integrating animals and this becomes part of what they're doing and you pay for some of their other duties to be done by somebody else was that the fastest that i have ever spoken well that was amazing are you this you want to go to q a lindsey yeah i do and yes i do i have some videos but i would love your questions well i mean to me i just want to point out a couple things that really resonated with me one i think that the r
elationship with adopted pets doesn't end that the moment the adoption contract is signed i think this whole concept of a case management approach and supporting people post-adoption not only helps those pets stay in their homes it really helps build uh a relationship with that adopter which hopefully then could turn into a volunteer which hopefully then could turn into a potential donor which then uh turns into that really cool covet buzzword that we keep talking about which is sustainability r
ight uh dr carly i saw you uh chatting it up in the chat i'd love to get your thoughts on this hey there yeah i echo everything you just said you just summed it up in a perfect package but um yeah this was a great presentation lindsay i think that anybody working in adoption should definitely be um aware of this presentation the step-by-step process is wonderful how you set it up and those are the ways that i have processed adoptions in the past so thank you so much for this presentation i think
again this should be shared pretty widely i didn't even pay you to say that thank you you did not pay me i love the collaboration uh kelly doer may i come to you i really appreciated the comments that you put in the chat i'd love to get your thoughts as well yes uh so sorry um so my my question is um for the the um do you think that we so um if you look at the pets all the pet people in america if you say 25 of americans don't have other pets that's 80 million people which is a huge amount um b
ut so do you think that that that it may be possible that also our marketing has something to do with the fact that we have trouble um placing pets who can't be with other pets yeah i mean i think we don't the data isn't clear on how much of the 25 percent of people never want pets i mean there is some weird portion of americans who don't want animals um so we should assume that some millions of them are never going to have an animal but i do think that because we're so short staffed and we're b
usy we create adoption profiles that are just like a checklist for an animal instead of a hey we're going to have a conversation with folks about what your lifestyle looks like what your household set up in your resident pets are like and i think you can put that in the intro like we're trying to figure out what kind of good friends this dog should have and we'd love to chat with you about who you have in your home and see if they might be a good match and just pick one or two you guys i know th
at the reason you don't do that is because you don't have time to feel like a jillion uh adoption inquiries when there may not be a good match in there so pick one or two and try it with them and devote a little bit of extra time to those conversations thanks lindsay i was going to go back to dr carly for another thought but something else i wanted to mention kelly dewer has been my guru related to anything related to foster and foster marketing so kelly if you don't mind putting some of your pr
esentations in the chat as well i see a lot of folks are going to be sharing this presentation with their staff and i would highly recommend sharing some of kelly's as well thanks uh so i just wanted to note that this presentation really represents what um some research that dr segerson and i have done looking at behavior programming across the country and noting that in our results we're seeing um more in shelter support than out of shelter support so i really like the approach especially with
incorporating volunteers getting them trained up and that post-adoption support and community support in general because our data shows that there are programs like that and um and shelters but also that the majority of them noted that they need improvement in their programming so i think this presentation again uh supports some of the research that dr segerson and i have recently conducted and um thank you again thanks dr carly um lindsey i think what we would absolutely have time to watch one
of your videos uh if you wanted to pull one up uh the one other thing that i would mention as lindsay is prompting that up is i know we also often think like how do we even know the adopters or fosters that need help there's just so many people we can't call everyone we don't have the opportunity or the bandwidth to do that there are so many ways folks that you can automate these touch points within your shelter softwares whether you're using postmaster jobs through chameleon other things you ca
n set up really basic surveys to say hey three days after a pet goes home send an automated survey that just checks on how a pet is doing don't have it be really long questions that people fill out where you have to actually read all of them make them one through ten and if someone is struggling and they're you know they're a one to five those are the folks that you reach out to if they're a seven and up those are the folks that you reach out to and tell them to leave your review on yelp or goog
le because you also want to make sure that you're increasing your brand awareness online lindsay back to you so um real quick kk is the black and white cat he was 11 years old when i adopted him he was returned to the shelter for not getting along with the resident dog i don't know what that meant the shelter wasn't quite sure what that meant um the video i'm going to start with he has spent two or three days in my foster room also known as a bedroom but for me it's a foster room um and finn wit
h the gentle leader on um in the other videos he is my senior dog who has what i would consider moderate prey drive um he's killed some robins uh awkward um and he would murder a chipmunk if he actually could catch one when we were hiking so he's got decent prey drive so this is phase two where i've moved kk out of the safe room and he's in my office where i'm sitting right now i've got an x-pen as a barrier and you're gonna see that that was a good plan on my part so kk super shy he was not a r
eally confident cat which does make it a little bit more difficult finn who's laying on a pee pad because he's a weird dog uh is watching kk and i want you to watch finn's ears here and even for me as i'm trying to videotape i'm not watching closely enough and you'll see at the end of the video that finn decides to have a good time oh and so these two dogs do not have prey drive in the back they are sound asleep they could care less that this cat exists see if the ears are coming forward i shoul
d have interrupted here lindsay currently we just see the list of all of the videos so maybe you're showing it on a separate screen [Music] how about now perfect cool okay so watch finn on the p-pad and his ears are coming forward i'll show you where i should have interrupted him with treats and i would have tossed treats behind finn if i had caught this early enough but i was staring at my phone and kk is like what is happening and then everything was fine he didn't totally charge the gate but
that was my bad um and then i want to show you it's okay dog trainers mess up all the time too guys and then this is just a couple days later we've done a bunch of those sessions where i was better at um doing what i just told you to do and i actually did it myself and so this is in the room they're now able to share space don't mind all the clutter and so finn can now watch kk move around something that should elicit a prey drive response without moving and that's because of lots of treats that
he got and then i'm going to show you the funniest video i've ever taken in my life so this is maybe four weeks later so black dog on the bottom this foster dog who hates the camera so she won't look at us um finn has learned to be bored and then nova who's the tan pitbull who has lit truly zero prey drive but is he she knows that the cat is annoyed at life so she's trying to um keep her space on the side of the couch she's like i'm not looking at you i'm not looking at you and the cat is like
i'm gonna give a shout out to peter wolfe lindsay because at the beginning of this he said the presentation should actually be titled how to teach your pets how to be furniture for other pets and i think you have map this is the master class of that this is amazing so kk is not happy you guys like like he absolutely would have loved to live in a house with other pets but he's also fine and he lived here for a few years before um he passed away and i think that was a much better option for him th
an waiting in the shelter forever i'm gonna end on that adorable video of couch potatoes and on that note folks it is 8 59 lindsay i would love to toss it to you again just to give us any final thoughts on your presentation yeah do what you can you guys i totally know why it's tricky and hard and your understaffed don't feel guilty about restricting animals just pick an animal today and see if you can put some more resources into them and and what you can do to find a new adapter thank you so mu
ch lindsay it was such a such a pleasure i'm just going to echo what everybody else said this is much needed i personally am going to share this with our adoption team as well as lindsay mentioned look for those low-hanging fruit folks every single day is an opportunity to learn and get better as mary smith would say lean in with love and i hope that you all have a wonderful week take care you
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