IAABC in June

A Writing Mentorship on UK time!

If you’re in the UK and you’ve been thinking about taking our Writing Mentorship with Eileen Anderson, now’s your chance! This session’s weekly video call will be at a convenient time for people in the UK. 

(Don’t worry, she won’t go through your writing and take all the “u’s” out of “colour” and “behaviour” — she’s fluent in British and American English!)

This Writing Mentorship will give you the tools to write with confidence, clarity, and style. Whether you want to craft compelling client handouts, regain the joy of writing fiction, or just feel more self-assured when you send an important email!

Weekly video chats with Eileen and your fellow students will give you chance to learn from each other in a warm and supportive environment. Full studentships and auditing are available. Click below to learn more and sign up. 

IAABC Members - $449 full mentorship; $150 auditor
Non-members: $499 full mentorship; $150 auditor

TLC reminder: Your videos are in your IAABC members account! 

The IAABC Journal is looking for videos of positive reinforcement! Particularly, we’re looking for reinforcement for different species, or situations that call for some creative treat delivery!  Toothless cats? Picky parrots? Send your video to journal@iaabc.org before July 1st and you could be featured in our next “Reinforce This!” compilation! 

Here’s the last edition, featuring everything from fish to porcupines:

More Online Courses Starting Soon

Beginning Behavior Consulting Mentorship with Sarah Filipiak starts September 14th

How do you want to develop your career into 2021? If you’re thinking of taking on behavior modification clients — any species, online or in-person — Sarah Filipiak’s Beginning Behavior Consulting mentorship is a great introduction. Sarah covers both the behavior and the consulting, with tips on creating great relationships with clients, documentation, and knowing when to refer to a more experienced professional peer, as well as techniques for working with some of the most common issues you’ll be asked to help with as a new behavior consultant. 
Learn more and register here. 

IAABC & KPA Members - $439 full mentorship; $279 auditor
Non-members: $549 full mentorship; $339 auditor

New Animal Behavior Consulting: Principles & Practice start dates: September 10 and September 20

Twelve weeks of lectures from more than 27 industry leaders, and video chats with your course mentor and fellow students. Animal Behavior Consulting: Principles & Practice goes far beyond the basics of how animals learn and how we can teach them, with modules on neurobiology, pharmacology, genetics, ethology, business skills, and much more. Here's the details of what you'll learn, your mentors, and weekly meeting times.

IAABC & KPA Members - $2295
Non-members: $2700

Feline Behavior Solutions with Katenna Jones starts October 18th

Hoping to start working with cats, or add cats to your existing behavior consulting business? Then this is the course for you! Katenna Jones will take you through using clicker training skills as a foundation for all kinds of feline behavior modification. Sign up here.

IAABC & KPA Members - $249 full student; $159 auditor
Non-members: $324 full student; $199 auditor

Self-study courses and webinars

Here's our latest full list of self-study options, many of which are free for IAABC members:

Science Corner

How effective is education in changing childrens' attitudes to dogs?

Educating young children about being safe and kind around dogs is important, and dog trainers and behavior consultants potentially have a great role to play. This study evaluated whether two different workshops had a measurable impact on what 7-11-year-old British children thought and felt about dogs. The researchers found that gender and socio-economic status significantly affected a child’s answer to questions about dog welfare. Both workshops were effective at least in the short term, but more research will be needed to learn whether they were successful in making lifelong positive changes in the participants’ values around animal welfare. 

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Shelter-based behavior evaluations could help cats find the right adoptive home

While temperament testing and behavior evaluations in shelter dogs continue to be a hot topic for debate, it is much less common for shelters to do any specific evaluation on shelter cats at all. A new study shows that for a battery of behavioral tests, cats tended to show clusters of responses that could be labeled as “behavioral syndromes” and identified as useful information for adoption and fostering. 

"The tests were designed to be easily implemented by shelter staff, and were short and low cost and intended to simulate common situations in a pet cat’s everyday life. We found consistent (stable) individual differences in the cats’ behaviour on all five tests, as well as correlations between their behaviour across tests. This suggests that such tests may contribute to reliably characterizing the “personality” of individual cats and so help increase the rate of successful adoptions."

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