The Association Blog

Perhaps the first organizations to have a Chief Behavior Officer will be the first to have truly recognized that behavior is a core component of animal health—and community welfare

A relationship breakdown.

Have you ever listed that as the reason for an owner surrender?
A family relinquishes an animal and says: 
Moving–can’t keep. 
Cat keeps getting pregnant. 
Can’t keep dog contained.

This is all code.

Often, if we were to really explore why an animal is surrendered, we would supersede the superficial.
We would instead find out: 

• My dog is always mouthing and jumping up at me. It was so adorable when she did this as a puppy, but now as a teenager it hurts. And moving right now is the best opportunity for a clean break from an animal who acts like that to my family. My old dog would never do that.
• My cat is constantly destroying my furniture, so we keep her outside. Except now, she’s always coming back with babies. I can’t keep taking care of all these babies.
• My dog can open any door and escape. He learned how to do that around the same time he started getting so big and strong we couldn’t take him for walks anymore. But now he just unlatches the gate and runs away.

What’s missing here?

Behavior Literacy. 

Behavior literacy is the knowledge and skill of recognizing, understanding, and interpreting an animal’s behavior; understanding the function and context of that behavior; and providing appropriate opportunities and support for the animal to express behavior that meets their behavioral needs. 

Behavior literacy is species-specific, and becomes increasingly specialized; from understanding broad, species-typical behavior; to the behavioral characteristics and needs of particular groups, breeds and, ultimately, to individual animals.

Can you say your community is Behavior Literate? Can you say your organization is? 

Is behavior literacy inherent in the culture of how you adopt out animals into homes?  Is behavior literacy part of how you keep animals in homes?

In animal welfare, we speak so much about cultivating “a healthy community of animals.” Are we purely talking about physical health care? Are we talking about breeding standards? (Yes, breeders will breed.)

Or: Are we also talking about the behavioral health that only comes hand-in-hand with behavior literacy?

A healthy community of animals is one of those phrases, such as “work ethic,” that we all use–yet it can mean almost entirely different things depending on the user.

I’m recommending in this writing that we understand that behavior health is a core component of health. 

Being behavior literate, though, does not require one to be a behavior professional. 

Community members, kennel attendants, veterinary technicians, shelter managers, CEOs, and groomers alike can all become behavior literate, and increasingly so, without needing to learn the full depth and skill of a Certified Dog Trainer or Behavior Consultant. Yet, all need a degree of behavior literacy to best cohabitate, be a guardian, be humane, and make decisions for animals and humans alike.

Greater behavior literacy addresses these common issues:

• Misunderstanding animals
• Misreading or not reading signals of animals
• Mistraining of animals
• Mistreatment of aniamls in the community
• Mishandling of animals in the shelter
• Mismatching of animals to adopters

A lot of ‘misses’ there.

For community members, those misses can lead to that relationship breakdown, one that does not necessarily need to occur. In the earlier example of a teenage dog who continually jumps up and mouths the guardian now giving them up, we hear what the guardian was never taught:

• Puppies will grow into teenagers, then on into adults, who do what they have always done; the dog will not understand why an action was okay at one point and not at another. The jumping and mouthing was cute to the family as a small puppy, and so it was reinforced–it’s who the dog is now.
• Dogs need outlets to be themselves. Repressed, they will come across “hyperaroused”–when in fact, they may merely be lacking any appropriate and frequent outlet to express dog-specific behaviors.

Isn’t keeping the family together what we say our mission is? Not providing comprehensive training of canine and feline behavior to our staff and making behavior education a focal point in our communications, publications, social media, and even course offerings for our community–when we know our community will benefit from them–is not keeping the family together. And we should know that when our community benefits, so do we. You shouldn’t need a P&L to do that math.

For the organization, those misses are what can often lead to mislabeling, misprescribing, and mis-outcoming an animal. An organization may not be sure what they’re looking at; they may be talking about differing aspects with misunderstood terminology; and they may be misappropriating resources. 

Combined, the outcomes of these misses include behavior euthanasia, compassion fatigue/staff and volunteer burnout, kennel stress, and repeatedly cycling through the same adopted animals.

To be clear, necessary behavior euthanasia to keep the community safe will still occur–but if we can help prevent an animal from ever even becoming a severe danger through better teaching of behavior literacy to our community, we will have done our job so much better. 

So, invest. Invest in building out your Behavior Teams. Invest in advancing your Behavior Teams into Certified Dog Trainers and Behavior Consultants. A KPA CTP, CPDT, or CDBC is intellectually relevant to strengthening your organization and its behavior literacy.

Certified trainers and consultants have done the work, have been rigorously tested, and have embodied the commitment towards operating at a higher level behaviorally. 

Advancing your team into these certified trainers and consultants will inform your entire organization’s approach to animal care, marketing, advertising, adoption counseling, customer service, admissions, and of course, your own actual behavior and training programs within the organization and externally. They will transform your competency level in your Humane Education department or humane ed outreach. And they will inspire programs within your community dedicated to keeping the animals in the home, and preserving the relationship between humans and animals. It starts with that investment.

Perhaps, the first organizations to have Chief Behavior Officers will be the first to have truly built out the program that behavior warrants. The CBO would sit right next to the COO, the CFO, and the CVO. We would clearly see that behavior is regarded as a core component of animal health and community welfare to that organization; that it is indeed an enterprise-level discipline, not an optional add-on.

Because Behavior doesn’t fall under Operations. Behavior falls under Behavior.

Behavior falls under deciphering releasing stimuli for what it is, rather than superficially clocking reactivity.  Behavior falls under teaching your community the practice of harmonious cohabitation with animals, rather than obedience, or even good manners.

Behavior falls under recognizing zoochosis, rather than calling it attention-seeking behavior. Behavior falls under curating and customizing habitats in our houses, yards, communities, and regions to meet our animals’ needs, rather than seeking and expecting constant behavioral suppression and restriction.

Investment in behavior and its cascading infrastructure will exemplify:

that a robust framework and programs are in place for your staff to become its most knowledgeable;
that the animals in your care are best prepared for adoption;
that your adopters are their most prepared for success;
and that your community is best supported in becoming its most humane—and in preventing those relationship breakdowns in the first place.

Or in other words: that all of the above are behavior literate.