The Australian Animal Welfare Strategy or AAWS (pronounced ‘aws’) is an initiative of the Australian Government’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, with input from state and territory governments, industry and community. The AAWS and has the goal for producing a national strategy for animal welfare in Australia.


Today was the first day of their first ever conference, put together to give the opportunity for all stakeholders to have input into the way they will shape new national legislation in regards to animal welfare.


Disappointingly, although well represented by the RSPCA and the AWL (the latter using the opportunity to present to these influential parties their new national strategy which includes the Lort Smith), noticeably absent were – well, pretty much all the other rescue groups bar a couple.


Sure, a function like this can seem beyond the reach of independent rescuers, but if you’re part of an industry about to get a facelift with new government imposed legislation, you should probably be having input.


I’ll blog about the content of the conference over the next few days, but lets hope there’s enough people speaking on behalf of rescue that we get the result we need to be able to continue to do the work we do.


Sadly though, it looks like we’ve left these very, very vital decisions in the hands of the rest of the animal industry. And rest assured change is in the air.

From a brilliantly written piece by Christie Keith over at Pet Connection blog

I’m amazed, for instance, at how many people who are horrified by collar jerks and scruff grabs in dog training keep doing the same thing to pet owners.

I mean that mostly metaphorically, of course. I’m not aware of an epidemic of shelter workers and volunteers actually throttling pet owners. But there’s one thing I’ve noticed while working on this story: not much click and treat, lots of punishment.

Often there’s a feeling that there aren’t many good homes available for rescue pets; but rescuers also brag to each other “I’m very choosy as to who my pets go to”. If potential pet adopters don’t meet our high standards we reject them – my inbox is overflowing with emails from people who have been refused a rescue for the smallest things. Seems this drive to find ‘perfect’ homes sees many, many perfectly adequate homes are going begging.


Which is fine of course if we’re happy to see these adequate owners then go elsewhere; pet shop, newspaper, internet… but we also criticise people who take this option for being irresponsible!


We can’t have it both ways. We either choose to save lives by matching pets with owners regardless of their skill level and work with them to help them become better pet people. Or we remain happy with the relatively small number of people choosing to adopt, accept that the rest will continue to buy pets elsewhere and the pets in the shelter die waiting for a home.

Positive training for adopters

Just as we wouldn’t smack a dog who’s never lived indoors for not knowing how to be a good house pet, we shouldn’t chastise owners for being inexperienced or having wrong ideas about pet ownership. Rescuers need to put away the big stick that we use to try and influence people and start engaging them with the level of help and expertise we can offer.


Rather than putting up hurdles to overcome, we should be working with potential adopters to make the adoption happen. Stereotypes of what makes a good or bad pet owner thrown out and adoption criteria based on not the worst case scenario, but the best potential outcome.


We’re the experts in positive pet relationships; we should be working to having the same positive relationships with our public. We do this by using rewards based training – and the first behaviour to ‘click and treat’ will be the fact they’ve come to rescue.