Animal adoption organizations can add this to the “conventional wisdom is often wrong” list: Shorter posts aren’t always better on Facebook — at  least, depending on your definition of “short.” Facebook is a powerful tool allowing shelters and rescue groups to get pets adopted, recruit foster homes and volunteers, reunite lost pets with their families… Learn More

Most of us know dogs put a lot of store in how things smell, their noses are legendary for their sniffing ability. It’s not as widely known that the smells in a cat’s environment are a critical part of what makes a cat feel safe and free of stress, whether the cat is living in… Learn More

Problems related to urinating and defecating outside the litter box and living with more than one cat are among the top reasons people surrender cats to a shelter. Is that worse for cats who have been declawed? The average number of cats per cat-owning household is 2, indicating that multi-cat households are very common in… Learn More

Feline herpesvirus is probably one of the most common causes of feline respiratory disease. How can animal shelters and rescue groups best treat it? In a recent study published in the August 2016 issue of American Journal of Veterinary Research, authors looked at the anti-viral drug famciclovir. Because of unique characteristics of the drug itself,… Learn More

Can something as simple as more frequent cleaning of food bowls and changing of water in a shelter cat’s housing get them adopted more quickly? A study soon to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science suggests that it is. The study was conducted in Austria, where it’s illegal for shelters to… Learn More

Shelter cats are happier, more playful, friendlier with each other, and less stressed when they have more room — 4 square meters, or 43 square feet, per cat, to be precise. In a study published in the June 2016 issue of Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Swedish researchers tested the play, mutual grooming, and inter-cat aggressiveness… Learn More

Did a recent study really suggest animal shelters stop evaluating dogs for temperament and adoption? Not exactly. The study, authored by Dr. Gary J. Patronek of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts and Janis Bradley of the National Canine Research Council, was published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior in August. Its central… Learn More

There’s renewed interest in identifying shelter dogs not by breed but by their physical and personality traits. What’s prompted that, and is it an idea whose time has come? The idea itself isn’t new. Some adoption organizations did away with breed labels long ago, with some simply calling them “All American Shelter Dogs.” In fact,… Learn More

Is not knowing what we don’t know hurting the animals in our care? Recently, APSCAPro published a blog post, “We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know.” It was about how shelter dogs pegged as having “behavior problems” often didn’t have those same behaviors in a foster home. They turned out to be shelter-specific behaviors, and… Learn More

Why would we tell you not to think about the animals? Because as counter intuitive as it may seem, you’ll probably find that spending less time thinking how to do a better job helping animals and more time doing and thinking about nothing in particular can create space for the very insight you need to… Learn More