This Program Teaches Shelter Cats How to Give High Fives to Help Get Them Adopted!

If you were considering adopting a new best friend and went to go visit your local animal shelter, wouldn’t you fall in love with a cat that gave you a high five as a greeting? Or what if the feline demonstrated other adorable tricks such as jumping through a hoop? You’d be smitten, admit it. Jackson Galaxy, famed cat behaviorist, and host of the television show My Cat From Hell, would be too. That’s how through The Jackson Galaxy Project, a program of GreaterGood.org, the Cat Pawsitive program came to be.

Animal shelters tend to be stressful environments for animals, and cats will often shut down due to the loud noises, strange faces, and odd smells. As Jackson Galaxy preaches, a mentally stimulated cat is a happy cat. By incorporating behavior enrichment techniques and physical activity into shelters, cats also become much more adoptable! 

Cat Pawsitive works with shelters across the country to adopt the program’s positive-reinforcement clicker training to enrich the lives of shelter cats, build new skills for shelter staff and volunteers, and promote the human-cat bond. 

Kitties become confident and their stress levels decrease, all while showing prospective adopters that they are fun and playful. 

 Seems like a win-win to us. High-five to that! 

To help encourage more animal shelters and rescues to incorporate positive reinforcement training with the cats in their care, The Jackson Galaxy Project has teamed up with the Petco Foundation and Halo Foods for the first ever Cat Pawsitive National High-Five Day Shelter Contest. From now until National High Five Day on April 19th, you can share your favorite high-five photos with your feline on social media with the hashtag #CatPawsitive and the tags @TheJacksonGalaxyProject and @HaloPets. After April 19th, five finalists will be announced. For more information on the contest, click here.

Besides giving high-fives, you can also help shelter cats find their forever homes by opening up your home to a foster animal. Being able to place animals in foster homes frees up room in shelters, allowing for more animals to be saved. It also helps give the cat a place to de-stress from the chaos of the shelter. For more information on fostering, click here.

If you love the idea of teaching cats tricks like how to give high-fives in order to help get them adopted, be sure to share this article with your fellow feline lovers!

Image Source: The Jackson Galaxy Project/Facebook