Safeguarding the well-being of cats is essential to the mission of any responsible animal shelter. Environmental enrichment and behaviour modification are often key to this goal. Measuring response to these interventions is essential to ensure strategies are successful. There are often many staff and volunteers involved in these efforts, and a lack of standardised language can make monitoring progress difficult. Phrases like “getting better” or “friendly” are frequently used, but offer little descriptive value, and often differ in definition between individuals. Ordinal rating scales of key behaviours can be a useful way to summarise observations and ensure that common language is used. These scales can enable reliable communication of welfare or behavioural change in response to intervention in shelters, facilitating easier case management and reducing frustration from interpreting qualitative reporting of behaviour. However, it is crucial that these scales have good interobserver agreement and reliability, so operational definitions and training systems are important. 'Beyond ‘Doing Better’: Mastering Feline Behavioural Ordinal Rating Scales' presents a method for evaluating four different expressions of cat welfare on a 0–5 scale: modified Fear, Anxiety, and Stress score; Response to Petting score; and Participation in Play score. All scales showed almost perfect average interobserver agreement (linear weighted κ) and excellent average interobserver reliability (interclass correlation coefficient) in a peer-reviewed publication. These scales may prove useful to other shelters, or any other environment where evaluating response to interventions is important to the welfare of cats, such as research facilities or home environments. The exceptional interobserver agreement and reliability of these scales compared with some others in the literature highlights the importance of standardised training programs. This online course provides a free virtual training module for these rating scales. Proficiency will be assessed after each module.

Sponsor:Toronto Humane Society
Speaker(s):Jacklyn J Ellis, PhD, CAAB, CSB-C

Contact: Jacklyn J Ellis
 Email: jellis@torontohumanesociety.com
 Web: https://torontohumanesocietycourses.thinkific.com/courses/Feline-Behavioural-Ordinal-Rating-Scales