Uploaded November 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago
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.
Speaker: Jacklyn Ellis, PhD, Director of Behavior, Toronto Humane Society
What you 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
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.
Speaker: Jacklyn Ellis, PhD, Director of Behavior, Toronto Humane Society
What you 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
