ICAWC

Let’s start with the basic facts!

Dogs go on heat 2 x a year, cats  in the spring and autumn, for three weeks.

Gestation is 63 days.

There are 3 stages of labour:

1. Nesting – do not disturb until young are born
2. Birth
3. Placenta (afterbirth)

Breeders can be either professional and planned or accidental but both pedigrees and crossbreeds can end up in rescues centre.

1 in 5 dogs have perceived behaviour problems and 50% are due to the owner’s behaviour.

It’s vital to socialize animals, between the age of 3-14 weeks (see John’s presentation on the resources page for different key moments in development for dogs and cats). Animals must be introduced to cars, people, outside distractions. Pups cannot pick up any diseases if they are not walking, so carry them at this young age.

When cats reach puberty they act differently, concentrate on bringing them under control. Kittens need to be socialised between 3 and 7 weeks old.

Fear related problems are genetically transferred; all others are due to other factors.

Hand over pups at 8 weeks; it’s your job to let new owners know how to deal with puppies socialization needs.

Your role as animal welfare is to:

• Handle pups gently
• Introduce them to different people
• Examine fee, mouth, ears and coat
• Add food whilst they are eating so they get used to food being handled
• You are the boss, sit in their basket!
• Reward good behaviour and pass advice on to those who rehome and your staff.
• Handle kittens gently in early age. As with dogs make them bomb proof!

Frustration at lack of mother’s milk is a good thing in cats as it teaches them to hunt. But go careful – hand rearing means a lack of maternal rearing and the frustration may lead to your dogs and cats can become aggressive if not done properly!

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Education is important as young people can make a difference.

Firstly, what do you want out of your education programme? Children will pass on your message to family and friends so make sure it is one that will help make positive changes in animal welfare.

Promote your key messages to children. They have great pester power. But remember to keep it realistic, don’t ask them to neuter as they can’t but they can make sure their dog has water every day.

Children can understand only one message at a time. So keep it simple, use resources relevant to your age group to get across your message. Use photos booklets and toys, be relevant. With the very young move quickly don’t linger with older children encourage debate.

In schools you can find out that is important to them what are the issues in their community. If there have been bad experiences change them into positive ones.

Top tips for setting up school workshops:

• Find out who else is visiting these schools, know what is happening where you are.
• Talk to teachers, find out how you can fit welfare into the lesson plans.
• Outline your aims, what do you want to achieve.
• What makes you special, stand out, highlight low cost and minimal involvement of staff
• Are you allowed to take dogs in the school? Take testimonials to show you are responsible and the dog is too.
• While you are waiting to be allowed into schools, investigate, research and plan.

Its not just schools, libraries and youth groups are also places you will find groups of children.

Why do schools like visitors? There are no transport issues! And they can build relationships,  spread the word, tell people you are about and are willing to help. Offer repeat visits, and demonstrate your commitment to education.

Enforce positive experiences; it will be the first time meeting a dog for many, and first impressions are important. Get the kids to the centre, get them involved. Ask them to create a poster as feedback is important!

If you don’t have time train the trainer to get your message passed on.

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Dr. Jeff Young is a US-based believer in early age neutering.

In 1974, Leo Leiberman neutered dogs and cats at between 8-10 weeks with no advers side effects and has continued to do so.

Between 30 – 60% of people who rehome  do not honour the neuter contracts and rehomed pets can be seen years later still entire. The fear that neuter can hurt the dog is wrong.

Number 1 cause of death is euthanasia, not anaesthetic.

20% of dogs are neutered after producing one litter. 8 weeks is the ideal age for puppies and kittens to be rehomed.

We can’t demand from the public what we don’t do ourselves; we must neuter every animak before we rehome even if this causes delays. Many groups are now neutering at 10 weeks or less while vets continue to recommend 6-10 months.

In a centre its essential to neuter before you let the dog leave as owners rarely come back to get it done. Especially with a feral population this may be your only chance to neuter – when they are young.

People don’t adopt cats, cats adopt people.

Uneducated people are not as passionate as you and I and may not understand what we are trying to acheive. Things have changed; 12 years ago very few did this. Hopefully it will now become more popular. Early age neutering does lead to slower growth, so there are more injuries but it can be managed and is not a reason not to do it.

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‘Can you save everything? Sadly no but we try’ was the opening phrase of David’s brilliant presentation.

Organisations have to make life and death decisions every day; you will always remember your first dog dying so decisions are harder as emotions are hard to contain when making these decisions.

The emotional pull of dogs is what effects us when we see a stray dog and makes us want to help.

Many people immediate think: set up charity and solve issue in a few years! Sadly this is not the reality. David showed pictures of dogs in poorly made and unkempt kennels by people who thought they were trying to help by taking the dogs off the streets.

We  (animal welfare organisations / AWO) want to be in a place where all dogs are happy.

Sadly, this may lead you to being in the wrong place. Animals should have appropriate conditions, AWO putting dogs in unsuitable conditions is not helping. Too many start up places without realizing the complexity of running an AWO. The RSPCA and Dogs Trust have exist for over 100 years but have not solved stray dog problem in the UK.

Slovenia has no stray dog problem. Why?

You need to talk to each other and understand the issues.

Street dogs in Jaipur die, on average, within two years as welfare is poor. Neutering stops breeding but doesn’t stop bad practice.

You can see more of David’s ideas by seeing his presentation on the resources page.

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We need to understand animals to get emotional and physical balance right.

EMRA = Emotion, Mood, Reinforcement and  Assessment

Its from www.coepra.org – Dennis just talked about Mood.

Mood state assessment  goes from mania to despair; if you have a depressed pet you tend to overreact and over compensate. Wood Green uses this in rehoming process and it is part of the in house staff training.

Wood Green assesses dogs wearing different clothes and hats to see how animal will cope with life outside the shelter.

It’s all about understanding how the environment affects animals. You need to assess the environment or pet becomes depressed. You can improve mood state by providing good hygiene as stress can effect the immune system.

In kennels dogs have a raised bed, a den to hide in, and a box of toys. Things that replicate a natural environment. It’s also important to realise a breed’s physical needs e.g. greyhounds don’t like slippery floors, so blankets put down on floors and duvets to sleep on make them feel comfortable and reduce stress.

This applies to all animals but a sick animal is more in need of environmental enrichment. In sick bay, get rid of glare and give animals somewhere to hide and do simple things like keeping food away from the litter tray. Good mood helps aid recovery.

Obviously the ideal place for animals is in the home. Dogs are often more comfortable giving birth in a home than kennel, fostered dogs are happier.

Now we’re onto goats! If the animal’s previous environment was not good then there will be problems, particularly for animals not able to display natural behaviours.

Simple things are plants and climbing for cats. Feeding pets takes away fun of scavenging. Hide treats in a garden to allow dogs to display natural digging behaviour. Terrriers  like to disect a soft toy to mimic rat catching!

Educate the public: love does not conquer all.

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Dr. Abdul Rahman’s topic for the day is one that will be of interest and relevant to any animal welfare organization working in a developing country with a street dog issue: dog population control.

75% of the world’s dogs are strays and they are the ones that cause people problems; they can either love them or hate them, pointed out Dr. Rahman. People in India didn’t understand why anyone should help the dogs and not the people!

It’s critical to change hearts and minds by explaining that stray animals are a human problem. Dogs carry rabies, we treat the dogs so that we can eradicate rabies from humans.

People in India loves dogs, but many can’t afford to own one. Dogs are feral, they don’t belong to one person but are they really ‘stray’ if people are feeding them?

Stray dogs come from three sources:

• Irresponsible ownership
• Uncontrolled breeding
• Capacity of the environment – e.g rubbish

In Jaipur there are now no deaths from rabies thanks to a successful dog control programme. The Indian average of rural deaths from the zoonotic disease is 18,000. These are amazing statistics, achieved with amazing work.

It is important to note that control programmes cannot be used in isolation. You need a vaccination programme too, but if you don’t vaccinate 100% of dogs then the programme is not doomed to failure; inoculating the majority can still protect the whole community. 70% of the dogs in Jaipur are vaccinated.

Is this something you’d like to hear more about? Learning from the experiences of people like Dr. Rahman is another good reason to put ICAWC 2010 on your calendar! And don’t forget to visit our Facebook Page for constant updates and snippets from speakers.

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Dogs Trust Head of Communications Charlotte Speedy took to the stage this morning to talk about the value of PR pester power!

She gave a few examples:

Deborah Meaden of Dragon’s Den (whom we worked with on the YooDoo Dog after she supported YooDoo Doll maker Sarah Lu) had a feature in the Sunday Telegraph which mentioned us. To pay for that would be £19k – the PR costs were some phone calls and a few biscuits.

A video of Clarissa Baldwin on the BBC talking about the Canine Charter for Human Health would have cost £700,000. The PR cost was one early morning start for Clarissa, and a few dog treats for her canine co-start Charlie.

Blue Peter: the new show dog was rehomed from us to a presenter. It took nine months to organize but appeared on BBC news as 4^th most popular story of the day. Charlotte showed a video of this.

The media landscape is changing.

Twenty years ago, news was scheduled by a staff of thousands. Today news is instant and mostly produced by freelance journalists who rely on news coming to them – particularly online which works far faster than offline. Stories last forever in archives, and it needs to be right first time as it’s hard to remove or correct.

We need to surf the Google wave – what are people searching for? If we know that we can provide timely, interesting news that is worth running.

We need to create news and think about who were are talking to – it’s not just the media, there are lots of channels. Is it for staff? Supporters? Are we being reactive and waiting for people to come to us or proactive and going to them?

Some story ideas:

• Dogs coming in
• Dogs at centre
• Dogs leaving centre
• 50 other story ideas sown (presentation will be online)
• Seasonal eg, halloweeen, snow, fireworks.
• Abandoned dogs, reason of abandonment
• Positive statements to counteract negative stories
• Change dogs names so that media will like the story, name after celebrities – for example, Maggie the dog became known by her nickname of ‘Ugly Betty’.
• Before and after
• Lookalikes

You’ll find more ideas like these when all the speaker presentations are made available on the ICAWC website after the conference. See the Resources section for past presentations on a huge variety of subjects related to running an animal welfare organisation.

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As you can see, ICAWC is about more than just dogs; it takes in issues relating to all companion animals (and brings together quite a few people!)

Dogs Trust Chairman Philip Daubeny greets a different kind of four-legged friend

A group visit to the Rex Foundation Shelter

Dogs Trust CEO Clarissa Baldwin with a new friend!

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It’s still only 11:20am in Hungary, but it’s been all go over here already!

This morning, Clarissa introduced the conference and  explained the very first conference was held in Hungary and the worry was no one ould turn up but over 100 people did. Thirteen years later we are back still helping as many organisations as we can.

I’ve been making notes direct from the speeches, so forgive me if the tenses are a little jumbled! It’s a semi-liveblog after all!

Last night’s host Peter Kiraly then took the stand to tell over 200 delegates how he was influenced by that first conference to start the Rex Foundation dog shelter. He also told of how he realized that he needed more than just a centre: he needed to change people’s opinions on dogs.

Peter began his journey by talking to lots of people about what he aimed to achieve, and was lucky to get free advertising.

There is also a law in Hungary which menas you can give 1% of your salary to a charity. Peter concentrates on convincing people to give this to the Rex Foundation. Sadly, in persuading people he has sometimes had to use images of cruelty, but tries to keep the focus on the positive results that can be achieved.

Communication is important, as is education to Peter’s mind. He noted that even a small ten minute talk can make difference. To my immense pride, Peter admitted he stole the design for his website from Dogs Trust! Wonderful!

Peter’s lesson: welfare organisations need to adapt to change; a flood in 2002 meant they were rescuing dogs. Using a  lovely picture of a dog they rescued form a collapsed house helped raise vital funds.

Our successful ‘Toys aren’t us’ campaign, has also been replicated with a Hungarian spin. The campaign shows how dogs aren’t toys by showing a stuffed dog and real dog side by side looking identical.

There wasn’t time to take notes from it, but this morning has also seen Dogs Trust Roden’s Training and Behaviour Advisor Steve Goward giving a talk about domestic and captive animals.

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Let’s start with a recap of yesterday! The first day at ICAWC was busy with registrations and the workshops.

I hosted the ‘Building a better website’ workshop and had the ambitious aim of creating a website by the end of the two hour session.

Well that was the plan!

There were twelve people in the workshop who had travelled to the conference centre in the Hotel Helia that day and were understandably a bit nervous – as was I. Once the presentation over we did start to create a website, and though the day had started quietly the session soon picked up and we moved onto create an online petition and other networks. It was great to have a small enough group to go with their interests and create something really useful.

The evening was a trip to see Peter Kiraly at The Rex Foundation (remember that picture posted yesterday?) and the fantastic work he has done there. The centre is absed on our Evesham centre with parasol blocks, but recently he has built an additional brand new block to be able to rehome more dogs.

Peter then put on a  fantastic dinner with traditional entertainment which we all enjoyed.

We then got back on our bus and went back to the hotel to prepare for the main conference which begins today.

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