F a s stands for fear, anxiety and stress. So here is the spectrum of FAS. And down here, we start with an FAS of 0. You can see the body language. And then we escalate up to an FAS of 5 with the associated body language.
What this scale does is it removes subjectivity from evaluating a dog or cat. There’s a cat I’ll show you in a second. There’s a cat poster as well. Or scale. It removes the subjectivity instead of saying that the dog is a good dog or a bad dog or a caution, that doesn’t really tell us anything. When you’re describing behavior, you want to use neutral, objective terms like the whites of the eyes are exposed, they’re panting, the ear position, the tail position, the body position. Are they really firm in their stance where they loose and relax? So this helps translate observing a dog’s behavior into an objective scale that we can all use. So when I talk to a coworker and I say, hey, we’re gonna go see this dog, he’s got a fast 2,3, in their mind, they know what the body language looks like. They know what the dog is doing and they can think of an appropriate mitigation system to help that dog with their FAS. That’s what Affairs is.
And then here is the kitty cat FA scale. You can see the really interesting thing about cats is I feel like they experience this whole range of emotions in about 3 minutes or less. So we can start here and quickly get up to here and then come back down. So they’re kind of unique, whereas dogs seem to be a little bit more committed to their level of FAS from start to finish.