Animal Welfare Professionals

HI, 

We are currently using a tag system to track cat socialization time with volunteers. The tags are two sided - one side says please spend 20 min with me; the other side says thanks for spending time with me. The tags are 'reset' each morning by behavior team. AWe have had multiple issues with this system and are looking for alternative options. We run a 6500 animals per year shelter so whiteboard and pen/paper tracking is not efficient enough. If anyone has ideas that had worked for them, I would love to hear about it!

Do your vols document their interactions? How does the behaviour team decide who needs 20 mins or is that the rule?  You must have a large staff of vols.

We have 17,000 animals come through per year - over 6,000 are cats. Our dog walking team has been using whiteboards very effectively for years. 

We just recently started an interaction board system for cats - see attached pics. We have 3 formal behavior/socialization programs and the cats who are assigned to them have specially trained volunteers who work with them and document progress. We also have different enrichment types so a magnet just gets put up if you provide that. 

Our goal is to get some type of meaningful interaction for “every cat, every day” and don’t require a specific activity or length of time (we have up to 300 cats & kittens in the shelter at the peak), but we would like to see all cats get something. It’s still a work in progress, but we have food puzzles, scent, visual, brushing, and sound enrichment options for volunteers to choose from. 

We are still fine-tuning this, and have already recently decided to exclude the adoption-ready very friendly kittens from the boards altogether, as it’s a lot of board space and time to write them, and they are usually with us for only a couple days (if that) so we want to prioritize our other cats and kittens instead.

Once we get confident with our board design/layout, we’ll be adding vertical lines to make it more organized and easy to read. 

You can email me at Stephanie.stryker@pima.gov if you would like to see our materials! 

We have a daily printout of our cat population.  Volunteers check this list, as they also note what type of interaction they have received.  That way, they know if a cat still needs any interaction and/or which type of interaction.  E  = exercise/time out of the kennel; M = mental enrichment/play in their kennel or room; S = socialized   We also have a binder where after interactions, if there is something worthy to note, good or bad, it gets noted in there and then we have a group of volunteers responsible for entering those notes into our computer system, so we can track behavior. 

Which computer tracking system are you using for tracking? We are overhauling/updating our feline and canine volunteer program and looking for new ideas. Thanks! 

The software is called Companion Connect, provided by Companion Protect https://www.companionprotect.com/

Thank you. Will check it out!

PetPoint has a module called Care Activity. This can track all interactions, run 'to-do' lists for your volunteers & staff, schedule follow ups/reminders and also run historical reports so that you can use your data to improve your program.