Episode 17: Inside ASPCA's Animal Behavior Research

What if understanding the intricate dance between human psychology and animal behavior could transform how we care for our pets? Join us for an insightful conversation with Dr. Maya Gupta and Dr. Miranda K. Workman from the ASPCA's Applied Behavior Research and Animal Welfare Team. Dr. Gupta shares her compelling journey from clinical psychology to animal welfare, sparked by a poignant encounter with domestic violence and animal cruelty. Meanwhile, Dr. Workman delves into her extensive background in sheltering and applied animal behavior, anthrozoology, and her critical research on multi-species families.

Ever wondered why some cats get adopted faster than others? Miranda's fascinating study on Petfinder reveals the subtle yet powerful factors that influence cat adoption success, such as the cat's age, gender, and even the presence of toys in photos. Our guests also shed light on innovative approaches to understanding dog-cat interactions in shelters, using mechanical cats and olfactory cues to better assess compatibility. We discuss the challenges in animal welfare research, including financial barriers and the crucial role of open access publications in democratizing knowledge.

Language shapes perceptions and, ultimately, the fate of animals. We explore the transformative power of terms like "community cats" over "feral" and how these shifts can positively impact animal welfare. Our conversation touches upon common behavioral issues in cats, such as house-soiling and shyness, and the importance of addressing these to prevent owner surrenders. You'll also hear about the promising research into cooperative care for cat grooming and the use of pharmacological aids to improve feline well-being. Don't miss the valuable insights from Dr. Gupta and Dr. Workman as they help us build a more compassionate world for our animal companions.

Transcript

Kristiina WIlson: 0:00

Hi and welcome to Hiss and Tell a cat behavior and more podcast hosted by me, christina Wilson, animal behaviorist. My guests today are Dr Maya Gupta and Dr Miranda Workman, two directors of the ASPCA's Applied Behavior Research and Animal Welfare Team. We're going to talk all about how and why the ASPCA values research so much, publishing grants and the actual cat research itself, which is super cool, stuff like house soiling, adoptability, grooming, feral cats and so much more. Let's get started here we go. Hi and welcome to another episode of Hiss and Tell. I am your host, christina Wilson, and with me today are two directors of the ASPCA's Applied Behavior Research and Animal Welfare team. With us today are Dr Maya Gupta she is the Senior Director of Research and Dr Miranda K Workman, director of Shelter, behavior, education and Outreach, and later on we might have a guessing game about what that K stands for. Welcome, maya and Miranda. Hello.

Dr Miranda Workman: 1:01

Thank you, thanks for having us.

Kristiina WIlson: 1:03

Why am I clapping? You are so welcome. Thank you for being here. So do you guys want to introduce yourselves a little bit? Talk about how you got to where you are, what your education backgrounds are, and we'll just kind of go from there, I'm going to tag you in to start first, maya, all right.

Dr Maya Gupta: 1:22

Well, my training is as a clinical psychologist, so actually more on the human side. But I always figured that I would do clinical psychology in my work life and do animal welfare in my extracurricular. So, for example, senior year of college in New York, I moved off campus into a tiny studio and fostered kittens, and then was preparing to go to graduate school and do something with relationships or maybe dating violence. But I never thought that Twain would meet. I was sitting on the one and nine subway one day, knowing I was going to take a gap year after college, not really knowing what I was going to do, and my eyes lit on a poster for a domestic violence crisis line and it asked about a number of warning signs for partner violence. And one of the questions was has your partner ever threatened or hurt your parents? And that was my light bulb moment that I wanted to do something with this the rest of my life.

Dr Maya Gupta: 2:18

I called every national animal welfare organization I could think of, including the ASPCA, and said, hey, do you need folks to do more research on the intersection between animal cruelty and domestic violence?

Dr Maya Gupta: 2:30

And they said yes. And so that was how I focused the early parts of my career, did research on the topic and wound up involved with a nonprofit program in Georgia which was where I went to graduate school and where I live now that assisted the human and animal victims of domestic violence in finding safety together. So some years later I wound up moving into kind of broader topics in the realm of human animal interactions and the human animal bond, got involved with teaching for Canisius College, which is how I first got to know Miranda, and we've even gotten to teach together and join the ASPCA in this research role. That lets me plug into a much broader array of topics in animal welfare. So for an organization that is just animal welfare, not the human piece. But we all recognize that we influence animal welfare through the humans who are connected to those animals, and so I would say that the human animal connection is still super relevant in the work.

Kristiina WIlson: 3:34

Absolutely All right. Thank you so much for that, Dr Workman. I'm going to kick it over to you.

Dr Miranda Workman: 3:40

Yeah, absolutely. That's a tough act to follow but I'll do my best. So I have been kind of on parallel yet scenic paths between sheltering and animal welfare and academia. So I've been in sheltering for almost 25 years if that ages me a little bit but really started to work on the applied animal behavior side first and in sheltering and had some leadership positions in IAABC or the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. I was the cat chair for their feline division for a while. I was president of the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers and then I started realizing that there was a need to build bridges between the applied and the academic and so I took that opportunity to jump into academia.

Dr Miranda Workman: 4:37

My bachelor's degree has nothing to do with what I do now. I did get a master's degree in anthrozoology and went on to teach in that same program, as Maya mentioned. That's where she and I connected and it's been a beautiful friendship ever since. But I really started to both teach in the animal behavior program and in that same anthrozoology master's program, really starting to do some research about cats, so particularly how people are viewing cats online. So you know, pet Finder was kind of one of those early websites for people to see what was available as far as you know, who they could go adopt and add to their family. On that, with a Pet Finder paper, collaborated with a colleague on how dogs respond to cat-related stimuli, because we know so many families now are multi-species households, and that kind of also leads to my research on multi-species families.

Dr Miranda Workman: 5:34

So my doctorate is in sociology but I focus on what I call the human-animal environment entanglement and kind of how they all work together. So my doctoral dissertation is on multi-species families and then my other passion projects really focus on behavioral euthanasia, decision-making and impacts. So that's kind of where it all happened. And then, as I was taking those parallel journeys between the applied work and sheltering and the academic work, then I ended up joining the A and so there I work in the behavioral sciences team but I have my toe dipped in research still and so I kind of work on that kind of that entangled interaction between the human and the non-human still, and so between that and doing a few other fun things, I'm on the ICAT Care Feline Wellbeing Expert Panel. So love that international network I get to work with. So I kind of, just like Maya, found a place where they meet at the ASPCA, and so I am here and let's take the journey.

Kristiina WIlson: 6:45

All right, I love hearing it referred to as the A. I've never heard of that before. Like, is that just shorthand you guys use there? Or is that something like? I'm just out of the loop and everyone calls ASPCA the A now and I'm a dummy? No it's internal, okay, okay. So it's like what sense do you sense you talk about? Like I'm not hip to this new cool kid lingo that you guys are talk about like good point but it's a lot to say, aspca absolutely the american society, oh my gosh yes, that that makes total sense.

Kristiina WIlson: 7:20

so I, I totally get it. I just, you know, I I had to make sure that I wasn't missing out on some type of relevancy that I need to know Because, you know, at 46, I need to really remain relevant, the kids. So, that said, do you guys want to talk a little bit about the ASPCA and how the ASPCA values research and just kind of what's going on over there with you guys and your team?

Dr Maya Gupta: 7:42

Sure, well, how about I start, miranda?

Dr Maya Gupta: 7:44

You can add any context that I missed, perfect, all right.

Dr Maya Gupta: 7:50

Well, because the ASPCA was really founded on the belief that animals are entitled to kind and respectful treatment by humans.

Dr Maya Gupta: 7:59

We have discovered that by doing and fostering the doing of high quality research that is a critical tool to understanding how we can most quickly and effectively make that vision and that belief a reality. And so we have found that research is a key element to understanding animal welfare issues, informing our work and the work of other stakeholders on animal welfare issues and really promoting action in the field. And this is where it comes back to our work being so applied. We're always thinking in our research about how it will get out across what we call the research to practice gap. In other words, if we just put our research in a journal where maybe some folks who subscribe to the journal read it and nobody ever does anything about it, we tend to not be satisfied with that. We really want to get in the hands of shelters and animal behavior professionals and veterinarians and lawmakers and the public and really the full range of stakeholders that touch or have the potential to inform and influence animal welfare.

Kristiina WIlson: 9:04

So to that end and then we'll jump over to you, miranda Do you guys tend to like to try to publish in open access? How do you handle publications? Because I know for those of us in academia there is that stopgap for people If you're not in academia, if you don't have licenses to read a lot of these journals, you don't have access whatsoever to a lot of interesting research that's coming out, and I think it is really important for people who don't have access to be able to get their hands on stuff for more than the like two week, you know, non embargo period that you have to let people see it. So that's a long winded way of saying how do you guys at the A handle publishing your research? Absolutely.

Dr Maya Gupta: 9:47

We have increasingly been tending to publish our research in open access publications or publications that have an open access publishing fund for researchers outside the ASPCA who may not have funds in their budget to publish their research in open access, so that we can promote that. In a very few cases where we have target journals, that really that is the right journal to reach the key audience who we're trying to inform or whose behavior we're trying to change through the research.

Dr Maya Gupta: 10:25

We might publish something that isn't open access, but then we will wrap around it by creating a one pager to explain the research on our website aspcaproorg by creating job aids, tools, tips, all kinds of things, presenting at conferences, giving webinars, so that we really help ensure the research reaches the field, which is also why we conduct an annual research forum, which is an opportunity for researchers in animal welfare to get their research straight into the hands of animal welfare professionals, including shelter pros. Miranda, what would you add to all of this?

Dr Miranda Workman: 11:00

Well, you did an amazing job covering a wide range there, maya, so well done, I would say too. Another thing is we are always continuing to make connections with researchers beyond the A2. And so, as Maya talked about the research forum, but also our research grants, where we are supporting people who are doing that.

Dr Miranda Workman: 11:20

So there's an applied research grant. Maya knows way more about all the different options. I know a lot more about that one. But also, I think too, is making those other informal connections that we have in the wider industry and things like telling people how can you access some of these things. And it's obviously, as she said, pro. And we now have a new platform called ASPCA Learn, where there's an opportunity to learn about some research that's been done, because they have things like the Shelter Medicine Conference. It's held every July and so they record those sessions and are able to provide those back to the wider industry.

Kristiina WIlson: 12:03

So there's a whole lot of really fascinating things Also for listeners who may not know about the publication process, that it is kind of a pay to play operation right? So for people who are listening, who may not know, there are often not always, but often a lot of fees associated with publishing your work. That can be really cost prohibitive for a lot of people. So I just wanted to put that out there for people who are listening and who may be. Like, what are they talking about? Why are we paying money to publish our research? You're not getting paid to publish your research, like actually. No, it's the reverse. You are paying money so that you can publish the stuff you've been working on, often for years and years and years.

Dr Maya Gupta: 12:40

Christina, great point that the general world of animal welfare research is underfunded in all ways right, which goes back to why we have our research grants programs to try to at least place some filling in in that gap. But yeah, it's way different doing research on improving the lives of animals in shelters what your funding opportunities are, compared to doing biomedical research.

Kristiina WIlson: 13:06

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Dr Miranda Workman: 13:09

And I'll add to that, too, that we know that that system also limits the voices that have access to the funding for those, and what's great about the ASPCA is we value those diverse voices. So we, you know, that's why we have things like the open access grants and other grants that we provide through our research arm, because we know that we want to raise up those marginalized voices so that we get a really more robust view of the world by listening to them. So that's really important too.

Dr Maya Gupta: 13:54

That's you know the challenges of the pay-to-play system, but there are certainly ways that we are trying to dismantle the access challenge one-pagers about our existing research or clicking where you can to our published papers. You can visit aspcaproorg slash research and find everything there.

Kristiina WIlson: 14:11

All right, thank you. So perhaps the two of you could talk a little bit about how you guys each came to your work in the cat space. Miranda, you want to go for?

Dr Miranda Workman: 14:20

it? Oh sure, yeah. So how did I come to the cat space? I think, as maybe some portion of cat people started out in the dog world and that was me I definitely started in the dog training and behavior space first and then in my work in sheltering. I really came to understand that at that point and again, this was 25 years ago there wasn't anyone paying attention to cats and their behavior. There really wasn't a robust network of individuals looking at that, and so I kind of made the decision and I can remember where I was sitting the day I did in the shelter going I'm going to be the cat person.

Dr Miranda Workman: 15:04

And so for me, I just jumped into all things cats. I'm a voracious reader, so I was reading everything, I was talking to people, really trying to understand that. And then when I came in from the sheltering side, bridging that gap into academia, I said how do we make more cat people? And so one of the cool things I was able to do when I was at Canisius in the undergraduate program, I actually created a program called Kittens on Campus and it was a course all about learning theory and training and behavior. But most people think of dogs when they think of that and I said, no, we're going to talk cats. And so we actually fostered kittens from our local shelter and we applied all those same things right to training with cats. They learned to run a little agility course.

Dr Miranda Workman: 16:00

Their final behavior in the course was always to enter a carrier, which we know is one of the reasons people don't take their animals to the vet right their cats. It's so stressful for the cat and the human. So we were trying to combat that and these cats would go into a carrier on cue and it was just wonderful, really kind of told me how important cats can be when we give them the spotlight, because they would schedule campus tours when class was in session. And it was an open classroom so there was a glass wall where you could watch everything we were doing.

Dr Miranda Workman: 16:36

So kind of came to it there and then, when it came time for me to really kind of dig into research cats let's do cats so really kind of like I kind of just kind of from that first moment at the shelter and then just kind of rode that theme all the way through into teaching and then into research and maintain that in my applied settings that I was working with too. And so even now we have a shelter behavior apprenticeship that we're working on. That we've been developing. It's an amazing program, but I was always a champion there has to be some cat focused stuff in there. So I'm like the lead for the cat module in that program and so it's really. It's just kind of something that I made a decision. I've decided to just kind of keep that thread going through my entire career.

Kristiina WIlson: 17:26

That's awesome. I think until so recently, like cats were just seriously underrepresented and underserved in the research space and just just kind of in general that people get dogs and I guess because you walk dogs and you have to take dogs out, where they have to interact with other animals and people when there's problem issues they really have to interact with other animals and people. When there's problem issues they really have to be handled. But people are just kind of like, oh well, cats just exist in my house and like whatever you know, or yeah, there's feral cats, whatever they just aren't haven't been historically given the same kind of especially behavioral importance that dogs are given, and so I love seeing the space change. I think it's really exciting and like finally, finally. So thank you for your years of service, most welcome.

Dr Maya Gupta: 18:14

And Maya. What about you? I think I came into it much less proactively than Miranda's well-considered pathway. Literally, I became a cat person because my parents were not animal people and when I was four a cat showed up on our back porch and on day three my father finally said feed it. And you know the use of it rather than him. So then we had a cat and there was no question of having additional animals in the household. So that cat was my exposure, my connection to animals as a young child.

Dr Maya Gupta: 18:50

So while I will quickly say I love and admire all animals and I do have other species, I am definitely in the cat lady sector, and the point of commonality that I have with Miranda's story is that I too felt that cats got short shrift in the animal welfare space. Even before that, when I moved to Georgia for graduate school in the very early 2000s, I noticed that there were a lot more resources for dog rescue and adoption in the community than there were for cats. The municipal shelter in our town only took dogs. Cats were sort of on their own. There were cats all over campus, not in the way Miranda had them on campus, but living in the drain pipes and so on Right around here I would just find kittens all over the place like under my truck, oh gosh.

Dr Maya Gupta: 19:48

So I founded a cat rescue because I guess I didn't have enough to do during graduate school. But it was a welcome relief writing a dissertation.

Dr Maya Gupta: 19:56

Yeah, you know talking about sort of the, the academic and the applied I would write horrible animal cruelty and domestic violence all morning and then run to the municipal shelter this was in the next county over. They had no rescue partnerships and so my local veterinarian, who was the only vet nearby who accepted the discount spay and neuter certificates, she and I teamed up and built a foster network and would just, you know, pull whatever we could from the shelter. And you know what? College students, many of whom, at the University of.

Dr Maya Gupta: 20:33

Georgia live off campus so they could have at least small animals in their apartments. They made a fabulous foster network because a lot of them were missing their pets from their parents.

Kristiina WIlson: 20:43

That's amazing. Good for you. I love that story. That's super cool. Good for you. So, Miranda, do you want to tell us a little bit about that Pet Finder study that you did? Oh?

Dr Miranda Workman: 20:55

yeah. So that was, this was one of my master's theses, because I did two, because I'm also like yeah, why not?

Kristiina WIlson: 21:04

Let's just do more yeah.

Dr Miranda Workman: 21:06

And I'm, yeah, I'm, I'm a glutton for punishment, I guess. And so my quantitative project was really looking at Petfinder and what about what is correlated with adoption success? So we looked at all sorts of different things, right, we looked at age, because age is always reported on Pet Finder, right. So we're looking at the age, we're looking at kind of what information is provided, whether it was male, female. We looked at how are they looking at the camera? Is it direct eye contact? And there's some really awesome additional research kind of related in that space from the University of Michigan. They have some really fascinating how we relate to pictures of animals looking directly at us, and so that came a little later after my research. So it was kind of confirming to see that we also were looking at.

Dr Miranda Workman: 21:57

You know, what color is the cat? Right, there's always this black cat thing, right? Right, we actually found that that might actually be something. And we also looked at is there a toy? Should we put clothes on the cat? Uh, you know. So we're looking at all these different things and and correlating what was presented on pet finder with what we call the length of availability. So we didn't talk about length of stay, um, because that that. That, then, is really how long were they available to the public Right? At what point did they go home? So we were really kind of looking at the again. This is where Maya and I's our anthrozoology pieces we're always connecting that human animal and looking at how can we represent cats, especially those that may be underserved. Right, that that you know aren't the flashy kitten that you know is the color point, right? How do we deal with that 10-year-old black cat? How can we improve their chances? So have them look directly into the camera Providing a toy, even if they're not interacting with it, was important.

Dr Miranda Workman: 22:59

We found that was significant. And then we did some follow-up a bit later and looked at. You know, we asked some of those people well, you know, how important do you feel that pet finder experience was in your selection? And most people said it was. They felt it was impactful and influential. So that's really where we kind of went with that. And so we looked at the dog cat interaction piece and we're looking at how dogs respond to cat related stimuli and that one was a lot of fun.

Dr Miranda Workman: 23:29

So we didn't use a lot of cats. That's not ethical, and we were trying to figure out okay, how can we? How can we start to build something that shelters can use to identify cat friendly dogs? And so we didn't get as far as we wanted.

Dr Miranda Workman: 23:44

But what we did find was that there were two particular instances that jumped out in our research. So we had a mechanical cat and we had dogs from the community. So these are dogs, we know their histories with cats, and so we started there, and so we had cats or dogs that were friendly and interactive with cats. We had ones that just coexist with cats. We had ones who had actually injured cats in the past. So we really needed to have a wide sample and we had that.

Dr Miranda Workman: 24:10

So we had our mechanical cat that meowed and blinked and switched its tail and do all the things. We actually gathered urine from cats pre-surgery, and so we had an olfactory condition, also a troll condition. It was really so much fun to do this, and what we found in that particular paper was that there were two things jumping out. One is that dogs do pay quite a bit of attention to olfactory cues, and the reason that we thought that is that in the control condition, which was a pillowcase that also moved, so they had a toy in it that would move around and we put the olfactory like the urine on that they were going, whoa, this smells like a cat, but it's not a cat, and so the amount of time they were spending investigating, trying to make sense of that cognitive dissonance was really kind of fascinating and statistically significant.

Dr Miranda Workman: 25:02

The other thing is we found is that dogs that had a history a not positive history with cats in the past that when we did auditory conditions so the sounds of cats meowing, you know all those things versus control condition of coins dropping, what we actually found is the dogs that had experienced inappropriate interactions with cats in the past, maybe had killed or injured or chased right, Not in a fun playboy. They spent a lot more time trying to find where the cat was in that auditory condition. So again, even though it's a dog-cat, we were trying to improve chances for cats here.

Kristiina WIlson: 25:43

Sure.

Dr Miranda Workman: 25:44

Hopefully being able to identify some cat-friendly dogs. And so it's not. It wasn't an end all be all. There's still more work needs to be done there. But again, it's like Maya was saying, it's all these connections. If we're doing research about cats, we need to look at all the interactions with cats, and that includes other species.

Kristiina WIlson: 26:00

No, absolutely. And I am wondering also if Maya and I'm putting you on the spot here so you can totally just say absolutely, not. Um, if with your psych background you can speak a little bit to the piece of the eye contact and uh, the toy being important to people is that you know that that eye contact I know we, we value that so much. Cats do not care for eye contact. That's actually aggressive in cats but but we like it. Um, it's something I have to explain to my clients all the time, like please don't look your cats right in the eyes all the time. They think you're really being a jerk. And then the toy also. Are we just signaling that that's fun? Like what's going on with people needing those things?

Dr Maya Gupta: 26:37

You know, my friends over in the cognitive psychology realm have done a lot of cool research on human attention to facial features and you know human attribution, about photo interpretation, and so I can't speak for all of that field of research because it's really big and really cool and there are a lot of, you know, computerized paradigms that can actually scan where the eye gaze goes. So they're really looking at information processing. Eye gaze goes so they're really looking at information processing.

Dr Maya Gupta: 27:10

But you know, thinking about the eyepiece, we know from good old Bowlby, this is a basic, you know human-infant attachment you know parent-infant attachment research, that you know that's been evolutionarily adaptive for parents and infants, mothers and infants to have close eye contact with one another. So, who knows, maybe this comes directly out of our own evolutionary wiring. As for the toy piece, I'll give you more of a speculative answer than a research informed one. But I can't help but think about advertising and how. If you put, you know, a sports car in the ad with the product that you're trying to sell, then well, that product must be really cool. Or, you know, that guy must be somebody I'd want to date because look at him, he drives an awesome car.

Dr Maya Gupta: 28:03

And if these are implicit attributions and not something that people would articulate for themselves, if seeing a toy in there with a cat sort of connotes, well, that cat likes to play.

Kristiina WIlson: 28:15

Absolutely.

Dr Maya Gupta: 28:17

Miranda, do you think that there's any value in that?

Dr Miranda Workman: 28:20

speculation, I do, and there's some really interesting stuff. And there's some really interesting stuff. I don't know if this was ever published, but a colleague of mine and my doctorate program was looking at how often pets were in commercials for anxiety medication. And so I don't know if they ever actually published, but I remember when they were looking at this and really trying to understand, like you know, why are we signaling right?

Dr Miranda Workman: 28:46

And there's so much in the research and it's cherry picking it, but still that you're right Pets improve our happiness and our wellbeing and so if we can, you know almost a classical conditioned effect, right, if we compare those pets with the anxiety meds, then maybe you know people will will take them. So I do think there's something to that, but I think we probably need a bit more work to actually land on it. But yeah, I think the speculation has some foundation there.

Kristiina WIlson: 29:12

So, to that end, should we be advertising cats on Pet Finder with sports cars and pictures of like hot ladies in bikinis as well, or like with beers, like should we be putting extra stuff in their kennel cards, like in the picture, you know, should we just be really loading them up?

Dr Miranda Workman: 29:30

I want to go. No, I think cats probably have their. Uh, they can do just enough on their own, I think that's, that's fair but I think a sad missed opportunity for Photoshop.

Kristiina WIlson: 29:42

I think um would be fun to put you know a cat and like a really corny red Corvette, but I digress. So can we talk a little bit about the house-soiling and shy cat study as the reason that shelters are told that cats get surrendered? This is not a surprise to me. As a clinical behaviorist, I'd say at least 60% of my clients come to me because of house-soiling. So this is obviously a huge problem for people and I think generally with cats people will just ignore things until it really affects them right, and house soiling you really can't ignore.

Dr Maya Gupta: 30:19

So absolutely so. We were building a multi-year behavior research plan for the ASPCA and this was one of the opportunities that I had. Miranda wasn't with the ASPCA just yet, but so I had to be the one in the corner saying remember the cats, cat research in the portfolio, because of course we do a lot of cool dog behavior research, even some equine behavior research now, um, in our work with horses for adoption and trying to promote equine adoption in general. But, um, in order to inform what we really ought to be doing, we said, yeah, what do we think the biggest need is? And we all assumed that how spoiling was tip top of the list.

Dr Maya Gupta: 31:06

But we did a really quick needs assessment, or environmental scan, if you will, did a poll of the shelters that subscribe to the aspca pro newsletter and said what's the number one reason cats are coming into your shelter? House soiling, thousand shelters. And the majority said house soiling. And then we said what's the number one reason they have a hard time getting adopted? And it was because they're shy and they're hiding, whether they're hiding in the foster home or they're, you know, hiding at the shelter.

Dr Maya Gupta: 31:37

Maybe we gave them a hidey box, but they're always in it, so nobody ever really sees them or they're simply cowering in the back, not looking very photogenic for that matter, but let alone what somebody is coming through. So we started with the house soiling study and we're partnering with the Wisconsin Humane Society on that. We're just about getting to wrap up data collection, although the challenge is always getting the follow-up data from people who have adopted cats. So we're looking at three time points. We're looking at what people who are relinquishing cats to Wisconsin Humane for house soiling reasons are saying about the house soiling. Does the cat display any house soiling behaviors while in the shelter? And then, for cats that are adopted from that shelter, do they display house soiling in the new home? And so what's going to be really interesting in the data analysis is to look at whether there's consistency right across the time point. So if you have the hypothesis that at least a decent chunk of house soiling is environmentally, driven then we might not see so much consistency.

Dr Maya Gupta: 32:44

but of course we labyrinths of interrelated issues, right including veterinary issues and other sort of medical problems, and as a psychologist I should say we know the medical and the physical sorry, the medical and the psychological can be closely interconnected. So what we haven't done with this one is do sort of extensive veterinary workups with each of these cats, extensive veterinary workups with each of these cats and that was a decision that was we were really at hand being able to really look at lower urinary tract disease, crystals etc.

Dr Maya Gupta: 33:24

Might have helped inform our understanding and on the other hand, most shelters don't have the resources to do extensive veterinary workups on each cat, so we went with the existing level of workup that that shelter is already doing. So some basic urinalysis, figuring that that would help make the and any recommendations that we can derive from the findings a little bit more translatable for shelters to put into practice. So a little too early to have concrete findings yet, although it is looking from early data analysis like we might be right that a lot of that behavior is situationally bound. But stay tuned for the rest of the scoop.

Kristiina WIlson: 34:02

I'm ooh the scoop. I like your pun.

Dr Miranda Workman: 34:05

Good job. Love them. She's always good for good puns.

Kristiina WIlson: 34:10

Are you collecting any data? I know this is probably not possible for you to do for animals who have been surrendered, but I personally would be very interested in looking at what the litter box setup is like in the home that they were soiling in, versus, obviously, what it's like in the shelter, versus then what it's like in the home that they go to. What is the substrate? How many boxes are there? Where is it located? Are there other cats that are bullying that? You know all of the different environmental issues that can contribute to this, but also you can learn so much just from the pattern of soiling. So much of that can tell you what's going on. That that would also be interesting to learn. But obviously you wouldn't have those data, I'm assuming, since they've just been relinquished to the shelter and people probably aren't coming in with Excel spreadsheets like I keep on our cats and their bathroom behavior.

Dr Maya Gupta: 35:07

We did try to strike a middle ground of all of the data we would like to have with what the shelter was already collecting on the survey form. We are trying to get a little bit more data at follow-up, though about all of the variables you've learned, part of the challenge being that now we have, I believe, 300 variables in a data set. So for any fellow research geeks listening, this presents a challenge, because more data is not always more.

Dr Maya Gupta: 35:40

Right, Data reduction is the name of our game a lot around here, especially since a good chunk of the behavior research and research in general that we're able to do at the ASPCA uses leverages, I would say existing data sets from the hands-on work that we're doing, which is so cool to have such a goldmine of data we can extract insights from, but sometimes knowing where to start is the biggest challenge.

Dr Miranda Workman: 36:08

I can imagine we want all the things, but sometimes all the things, makes it a very diluted message, and so sometimes, yeah, it's hard but necessary.

Kristiina WIlson: 36:18

Can you guys tell me a little bit about the Davis Nail Trim Research Grant?

Dr Miranda Workman: 36:24

Yeah, so I'll take this one. And this was a group from UC Davis is headed up by Carly Moody, who is an assistant professor there, and she had responded to our RFP for the Applied Behavior Research Grant and was awarded the grant. And so what they're looking to identify is can they create a step-by-step protocol that will reduce the stress for both cats and the humans?

Dr Miranda Workman: 36:54

for nail trims right, something that is necessary. It incurs handling, so all those things that often create in those moments. And so can we create a protocol that is simple, that is effective, that can be taught to anyone. So, volunteers right, so we don't have to just go to the medical team and do nail trims right, because that's often whether that's in the shelter or at home, people go to the vet. Can you trim my cat's nails's nails?

Dr Miranda Workman: 37:27

well, can we make this better for everyone, and that's really kind of what they're looking at. So they have, uh, kind of three groups that they're looking at. So they have, um, one group that they get some kind of pre-nail trim handling work. So, um, and I won't go into all the details, but basically teaching some consent so the cats can say, hey, let's step onto a mat, let's, let's start interacting, let's do this. There's also a handling only protocol, so they don't actually do the nail trim, they just do the handling. And then there's also kind of a control group where it's just the nail trim, right. So none of this, this pre handling work.

Dr Miranda Workman: 38:05

And so what they're looking at is, if we are inviting cats to engage in cooperative care, is that going to improve welfare? Is it going to reduce stress? And so they're really trying to understand that. And then, can this be incorporated into enrichment programs in shelters? And again, whether that's in the shelter, in a foster home. And can we, right? And if we can start kittens off this way, like right, it's kind of where I was going with my kittens on campus, right, like getting into the training, going into the carrier, this is another version of that things that we need to do so.

Dr Miranda Workman: 38:41

Jennifer Link, who is the PhD student working on this particular project, has been spending her time going into the shelter and just doing all this. So they're in them, they gather data, they're at the point where they're going to start doing some coding of the videos because everything is videoed and so, again, as Maya was saying, stay tuned and hopefully we'll get some recent research clips haha, nail trims my own fun coming up soon about the effectiveness of the protocol. So, yeah, I'm excited to see what the results.

Kristiina WIlson: 39:18

Yeah, I'm excited just to hear that somebody's doing research about cooperative care in cats, because that again is something that I don't feel like we hear a lot about of care and cats, because that again, is something that I don't feel like we hear a lot about.

Dr Maya Gupta: 39:31

We're really glad to see more research on grooming in general with cats and animals.

Dr Maya Gupta: 39:36

You know this is something that the ASPCA has invested some of our own service resources in recently. So we hired a groomer, started doing grooming for free to the community in conjunction with vaccine clinics. What proportion of the very, very severe cruelty cases we work with in New York through the partnership with the NYPD, just what a high percentage of those animals had some grooming related issue, whether it was extremely severe, strangulating hair mats, not to be gross, but sometimes, you know, even to the point of self amputating the limb traction, alopecia, etc.

Dr Maya Gupta: 40:15

which isn't to say that you know Fluffy and Jane are going to get to that stage, but the more that we can do preventively, which really raises the question of can we also teach some kind of adaptable strategies for cat owners who may not have any behavior expertise? Since we also asked well, what have been the biggest groomers? Sorry, what have been the biggest barriers to, you know, having your animal groomed or grooming your animal yourself, and it won't surprise either of you that behavior was one of those big factors.

Kristiina WIlson: 40:50

Absolutely. Yeah, I was going to bring up using pharmacological intervention, sometimes with animals, especially around going to the vet or, in some cases, around grooming or other things. I like to use trazodone, but I know a lot of vets like to recommend gabapentin and I just wanted to talk to you, miranda, about your research around gabapentin.

Dr Miranda Workman: 41:11

Yeah, so it's actually not mine but one of a colleague, a colleague of mine, so actually a colleague of mine on my team at the A and a colleague on Maya's team at the A.

Dr Miranda Workman: 41:21

The two of them actually teamed up to look at a very specific population, which is cats from hoarding cases. And in that particular study what's really fascinating is we do know, especially we're seeing, at least anecdotally I believe, more and more of these types of cases, because we do know during COVID there was a gap in care for spay-neuter et cetera and the ability to get that done for many reasons, and so now we're seeing, maybe, some of the repercussions of that. So, as we're taking in these large hoarding cases often they're resource-rich cases, right, the cats stay in the shelter, they have a longer length of stay, they are some of those that are, right, often fearful, and so what can we do to not only decrease the stress but improve their opportunity for adoption by getting the meds on board and then doing some behavior mod. And so, Maya, at that point I'm going to turn it over to you to talk about kind of some of those results of that study and where this might go.

Dr Maya Gupta: 42:30

Yeah, super exciting. So what Bailey and Karen found together our respective colleagues was that a daily dose of gabapentin, and they did this at 10 milligrams per kilogram every 12 hours. So, doing that dose of gabapentin for these cats from the hoarding environment, first of all, it improved the behavior modification score. First of all, it improved the behavior modification score. So doing this as an adjunct to behavior mod Reduce the time latency that it took for cats to emerge from hiding after everybody left at night and reduced urine suppression. In other words, these cats peed more in the first three days in the shelter than the placebo cats, which was good right, Because some research shows that cat stress and urine suppression are correlated. And then, with the post-adoption surveys, okay, same challenge as I was describing with the house soiling right, it's hard to get that follow-up data because people who are happy are like I'm not going to respond to a survey.

Dr Maya Gupta: 43:38

I'm good, right, and sometimes people who are unhappy are like I'm not going to respond to a survey because I am ashamed, or maybe I don't have the cat anymore. But at any rate, while they didn't have enough post-adoption surveys completed to really be able to compare the treatment, environments were reported in the data that they did have to show either social or super social behavior in that home at one year post-adoption. So we're looking at a lasting effect which is really cool.

Dr Maya Gupta: 44:06

We want to look at the welfare and shelter, but also downstream in their lives right, absolutely.

Kristiina WIlson: 44:13

I love to hear it. So I'd love to talk to you guys about the feline spectrum assessment. I can talk today. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is?

Dr Miranda Workman: 44:23

Yeah, so this actually is some kind of the historical research that we have done, so historical in the sense that it has been a while, but still impactful. And so the Feline Spectrum Assessment was a series of papers out of a project where we were trying to understand what kind of factors, what observable behaviors can we look for to identify whether or not a cat is feral, and that's kind of how they went into the project. So what they actually used were cats that were from homes, so they didn't just go straight to the shelter population. There's several steps in this study that looks at, you know, cats in the home, so we have behavior histories on them. Then we looked at cats in the shelters and looked at cats in the home after that.

Dr Miranda Workman: 45:11

So there's a whole lot of data and basically what this comes down to is, yes, there are some behaviors that can actually identify cats who are social. So it kind of like actually flipped the coin there. So this is the whole thing about science, right? Is that you go in with a great question and you design and you use your methods, both in your research design and your analysis, to answer the question, and sometimes the answer you get is not what you expected. That's the whole point of asking the question and I think this is a great example of that. So they identified a small list of what they call one and done behaviors.

Dr Miranda Workman: 45:54

So these are behaviors, that you see this in the cat, you're done. Yes, this is a cat who is socialized to humans, so it doesn't mean they're roly, poly, super snuggly. It means that they have a history with humans and so they have some ability to understand interaction with us. They also identify kind of a subset, which is called the four or more behaviors and that group. You need to see at least four of those behaviors to come to the same conclusion. And what's nice is they actually have.

Dr Miranda Workman: 46:23

They repeated this? So it wasn't. This isn't a one point in time. This means, as the animal is adapting and habituating to their environment, we know behavior changes right, Especially cats who are so environmentally sensitive. We've mentioned that before. So if we do this at time A and then we do it later in the day at time B, and the next day you know similar time for the third one and we can do this. They did it over three days. So four presentations and that's what they found. So I think that's really, really cool. Now, what this has done is spurred more interest. And how can we do some some feline behavior assessment in the shelter? So even though they were asking is this cat feral? Um, they weren't their, their data.

Kristiina WIlson: 47:12

What didn't wasn't able to do?

Dr Miranda Workman: 47:13

that, but what it can do is help us with the other side, and that's still really great info. So now there are some other researchers who are in this kind of practice to research gap. Dr Ellis from the Toronto Humane Society is one, and she can find some of her cool things on ASPCA Learn. She spoke at Shelter Medicine Conference for us last year and she really has done a lot of her. Most of her doctoral work was on feline behavior assessment in shelters and starting to say, okay, well, what is the purpose? This has really driven us to look at not just what can we know, but what is the application of what we know, and so she is another one that has some really great things to say.

Dr Miranda Workman: 47:55

Like I said, go to ASPCA, learn it and I'll let her speak for herself about food line behavior assessments. But she also authored a chapter in our shelter behavior textbook, which we shelter behavior for veterinarians and staff, and there's entire sections on cats, right, this is the thing that excites me is that we had a question. We just did really good designs. We didn't get the answer we expected, and so we are still working on this, but what we do know is there is clearly we talk about feral. We talk about that as a species level thing, right.

Dr Miranda Workman: 48:29

But then, individuals can feralize, and so all of this is kind of it's wrapped up in levels of analysis, all these cool like data things, but in general, what we've learned is cats will tell us stuff, they will give us information about how comfortable they are interacting with humans. We need more research to keep refining that as we go, and that was really foundational in starting that journey for all of us.

Kristiina WIlson: 48:57

So how would and I'm asking this for everyone who goes on the internet, who's listening who may have at one time commented that's not a feral cat, or this cat is feral, right? I feel like I see that all the time online. Whenever anyone says that a particular cat is feral, there's like a whole bandwagon of people jumping in with their opinions. Does the ASPCA have a definition of what is a feral cat and what is not a feral cat?

Dr Maya Gupta: 49:26

That's interesting. We've moved away from even talking about feral and not feral cats and we've moved to talking about community cats, along with a chunk of us, and so we say a definition of a community cat is one who is unowned, outdoor and free roaming, meaning that they can be socialized, de-socialized or unsocialized. And we have found that that approach has been more helpful for us in some of our community cat work, our shelter work and our work in policy, trying to, you know, get better policies in communities that will allow for high intensity trap, neuter, return and monitoring to try to decrease community cat populations over time, or policies that will allow for people to monitor feed, care for outdoor cats in their area without getting in trouble with the law.

Dr Maya Gupta: 50:23

And then similarly on the shelter side, where, you know, in our work with shelters we often observe cats that come from known groups of community, cats that are perfectly friendly and socialized, and so using this more individualized cat by cat assessment has just been way more helpful to us than sort of blanket definitions of what's feral and not.

Kristiina WIlson: 50:46

No, I completely see that and I think that we kind of forget how much weight language carries and what kind of stigma comes along with that language or definitions that we may place on animals, people, things, and what kind of consequences that may have for those animals, people, things, et cetera. So I think that's really wonderful to hear. I love the idea of just using community cats because I think when people hear feral they just kind of their hackles go up and they think, oh no, that cat's gonna claw my face off. I don't want anything to do with it, when in reality that's often not the case. So I think that's that's wonderful and I hope that that message really spreads and we can stop using, uh, this kind of like out outdated language around cats.

Dr Miranda Workman: 51:38

So language, and I am so like I'm a side sociolinguistics person, and so for me it's also what is contributing to the meaning of a word.

Dr Miranda Workman: 51:49

Right and so feral is often circumstantial. It's based on circumstantial evidence, right, that they're not in a inside of a home, right? Um? And so there's a difference between looking at circumstantial contributors to a meaning versus behavioral contributors to a meaning, and there's some really fascinating I'm just going to throw a tidbit out there really fascinating research that was featured at the shelter medicine conference last year from dr malini Suchak about the concept of bonded cats, and that one, I think, is groundbreaking, and so you know that word alone and the impact that that word has.

Dr Miranda Workman: 52:25

I'll leave that as a tease for another moment. But again, it's that how we're using our language around cats is also incredibly important and it impacts their lives, and so we should. I think we really should take care to think about how we're using the language when we're talking about cats, and that's why changing from feral to community cats is important, looking at what are behavioral indicators of things versus circumstantial or environmental indicators of things. So I think that's important. I agree, I agree, and we've already seen so much research in dogs, I think that's important, I agree, I agree, and we've already seen so much research in dogs.

Kristiina WIlson: 52:57

I feel like, to this end, about, especially about dogs and shelters, like removing you know breed specific uh names from you know kennel cards and and all that kind of thing, like things that are suggestive language that may make people not want to adopt certain dogs. Um, so it's nice to hear that maybe we're getting there a little bit with cats, so more power to that and going more into adoption for cats. Can you talk a little bit about fee-waived cats and how you've moved the needle in that field?

Dr Maya Gupta: 53:30

This work predates our time at the ASPCA, but colleagues who came before us really started the trend in ASPCA research to use research to debunk what we thought were probably myths in the sheltering and welfare more broadly. And so certainly one of the big beliefs, you know, sort of accepted truths was that if you give away an animal for free from your shelter, all sorts of horrible things are going to happen All the way from. Those animals are going to be less valued, less loved to, they are going to be targets for, you know, horrible maltreatment at the hands of humans. And so our predecessors did some research to look at whether that was in fact true. So had a shelter voluntarily be willing to eliminate adoption fees, and so this involved, you know, recruiting shelters that were willing to try something new, perhaps with a little bit of a financial incentive for the costs that might be incurred in doing so.

Dr Maya Gupta: 54:39

Because, let's be real, that's another very real worry is shelter funding. So if I'm going to waive adoption fees, where's my revenue going to come from to take care of the other cats in my care? But we found that indeed, attachment from the shelter that we used for the study did not decrease at all when fees adoption fee and really the implication here is that free programs, fee waived programs, could help save thousands of cats in shelters who would otherwise either be euthanized or perhaps languish in a shelter for months on end. And so I would say this research has been, along with the Feline Spectrum Assessment, some of the most impactful in moving the needle in the field, because we've seen more and more shelters take up this idea, give it a try themselves and be willing to see that ultimately it does improve outcomes for the animals overall in their care.

Kristiina WIlson: 55:47

That's great to hear. All right, so because we've already talked a lot about pee, let's take a question from a listener, which was my cat peed on a wall because I was late feeding her dinner. Is this really the reason why? And so, miranda, perhaps you would like to give your opinion about this pee-pee problem?

Dr Miranda Workman: 56:07

Yeah, Well, I don't have nearly enough information to answer whether or not this really is the reason why, but what I can say for listeners to think about is that we know that a lot of times when we're talking about peeing on a wall, so that's what we call spraying. So it's not the same as eliminating on a horizontal surface and a full urine void.

Dr Miranda Workman: 56:34

So this is kind of a little like marking thing what's interesting about this is that there are so many social and environmental factors that can contribute to whether or not this happens, and usually it means there's some sort of stressor in the environment, so something that as is creating some uncomfortableness, um, for the cat. Now, whether or not the cat was hungry because they didn't have dinner and it was late, I don't know. That's probably not the likely outcome for most cats. But again, there's always outliers too, so I can't really say if that was why the cat did that. But I would certainly be looking into what might be stressing the cat in that environment and see if we can either remove or at least kind of devalue or, you know, the stressor, make it a little less impactful.

Dr Miranda Workman: 57:26

So look around your environment, look around your interactions. Oftentimes, if there's a multi-cat situation sometimes we see this or a cat dog situation, or you know, there's all sorts of things I've seen where, like, there's been outside noises that stress the cat, right, so we see those cats. If you're in an environment where you may have outdoor cats who come around and you're indoor cats, so it could have been that, just that timing happened to be what it was and so the human went oh, I'm going to connect these two things together. They may not have been connected at all in the cat's mind. So I would say I don't know is my answer, but those are all the things to think about.

Kristiina WIlson: 58:07

Yeah, I would say cats don't generally do things out of spite. I think as humans, we think that cats do a lot of things out of spite because humans do things out of spite. Animals really don't do that. And also I would ask has this female cat been spayed? Because a female cat spraying is pretty unusual. So I would say have they been spayed? If not, let's get that done, because we don't want pyometra or anything like that happening. You also don't want more spray. And then also I would really go along with what you said, miranda Is there another cat outside that this cat is spraying in reaction to? That's often the most likely culprit, or a raccoon, or something else that the cat's like.

Kristiina WIlson: 58:47

Nope, I don't like this. Or you know a lot of noise, something, something like that. And then also go look at the litter box, see what's going on.

Kristiina WIlson: 58:55

Is it dirty? Do they not like the substrate? But I don't think it's because you were late feeding her dinner and it's like a spite pee. That would be really, really, really way down on the list as far as my concerns would be. And then the last question before I let you guys go is just really quickly, does changing the flavor of a cat's food disrupt their routine? Is just really quickly.

Dr Miranda Workman: 59:17

Does changing the flavor of a cat's food disrupt their routine? Ah, you know, this is a fascinating one, because there actually is some research surrounding this question and what we do know is that cats, when they're fed early, is often the protein source that they prefer. So in those first few weeks of life, right, then if they're only experiencing chicken based foods, then if that's all they know, and then at five years old you somehow give them that they need to have salmon or something else, yeah, that's going to be a bit of a change for them and that is something that can disrupt their routine, especially their feeding routine, and their feeding routine is related to their activity routines and other things. So, yes, it can. So, ideally, right, we want kittens to have a wide range of experience within reason of the types of protein sources, and since cats are obligate carnivores, they need to have meat as their protein source. So, thinking about that, it's often it's not necessarily flavor all in it's flavor related to the protein source. That is kind of the kicker here. So we do know that early experiences again affect those later experiences here.

Dr Miranda Workman: 1:00:35

So, can it yes, will it always? No, some cats just have a wider palate, just like some humans. Right, I was a very small palate person for a long time. It took me a while to go. I'm going to try Thai food and then I'm going to try that right. So you know, that's true of a lot of species, but definitely with cats as obligate carnivores. That's important.

Kristiina WIlson: 1:01:00

All right. So I just want to say thank you so so much to Miranda and Maya for being on the podcast today. It was so interesting. I hope to be able to have you guys back for a part two next season, because there's so many other things to talk about. I would be really excited to do that. And just thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about the A and all of the A's research and for being so punny. Yes, we had a blast. Thanks for having us. Thank you guys so much. It was wonderful to talk to you. We had a blast. Thanks for having us. Thank you guys so much. It was wonderful to talk to you. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode or any of the episodes, please like and give us a rating. Also, feel free to share with your friends. We'd super appreciate it if you shared on social media or really anywhere For cat behavior consultations go to catitude-adjustmentcom. You can follow us on social media at hiss and tell podcast music provided by cat beats.