Thank-you, Dogsblog!

Since we registered with Dogsblog our rate of dog rehoming has dramatically improved - particularly for the older or more hard-to-place dogs. Ghost now has a home booked, after nearly a year in our care.

Internet Resource on Trusteeship

The Suffolk Association of Voluntary Organisations (SAVO) has produced an online Trustee training site for anyone interested in becoming a charity trustee. The members of an RSPCA branch committee are all trustees of that branch, and most branches (including Cambridge) are always looking for new committee members. 

The SAVO site contains general-purpose information about the responsibilities of being a trustee and isn't specific to animal charites, but it is well worth working through.

If you might be interested in joining the committee of RSPCA Cambridge, please email secretary@rspca-cambridge.org.uk 

RSPCA Peterborough branch is also in desperate need of new trustees. If you might be interested in helping them, please email their Branch Development Adviser.

More cats

Another un-neutered tom waiting to be transferred from Lida vets to the kennels.

A thin black and white female at Swayne's. She's tested FIV/FELV negative and they may have a possible home, which will be very welcome.

A young tortie/tabby female who was reclaimed by owner, but may involve us in a small bill for treatment up until the point where the owner contacted us.

Hissing Sid fortunately turns out to have normal thyroid hormone levels, and we hope he'll put on weight with regular meals and less exercise.

More cats

Sid is another entire male, very thin, but fortunately FIV/FeLV negative. We're awaiting results of a test for hyperthyroidism, but with any luck it may turn out that he's just underweight because he's been spending summer roaming in search of females instead of eating properly. Nicola*, our main volunteer driver, collected him from the Whittlesford vets and moved him to the kennels yesterday.

Sadly, another tom-cat handed in at the Arbury Road vets wasn't so lucky. He had awful abscesses and the blood test showed that he was FIV positive (which explains why they had got so bad, as FIV - Feline Immunodeficiency Virus - eventually destroys the cat's immune system and means that infections won't be thrown off as they normally would in a healthy cat). As the abscesses were so bad the vets advised that we should agree to having him put to sleep. 

*Congratulations to Nicola on her first ever motorway journey since passing her test!

Watch out for deer on the roads

The clocks have gone back and now many wild animals will be at their most active during the high-traffic period when people are driving home. The videos below from the deer collisions project illustrate the problem. We usually have a surge of domestic animal traffic casualties around this time of year as well - again probably because of the change in time of greatest traffic flow relative to dusk.

Justgiving three month trial

We've just signed up for a three month trial of the Justgiving fundraising site. This is similar to Charities Aid Foundation, but has more functions (although its fees are a bit higher after the initial trial period). 

One of the options which Justgiving offers is fundraising pages to allow our supporters to raise money for us. This makes it possible to have online pages for sponsored walks, or to raise targeted funds for particular projects.

Online introduction to Justgiving from Lee @ Jg on Vimeo.

Speaker meetings - any interest?

One of the discussion items at Saturday's Regional Board meeting was the question of why attendance at the Society's AGM is so poor. HQ recently sent a questionnaire to a fairly large sample of members and regular donors and from the answers, it appears that there's a fair amount of interest in hearing more about what the Society does, but that a large proportion of people are quite limited in terms of possible travelling distances.

Would anyone out there be interested in speaker meetings which were organised at the other end of the scale (so to speak), purely for supporters (and anyone else interested) in our own local branch area?

The rather low attendance at our branch AGM suggests there's little or no interest in the purely administrative/organisational aspects of what we do, but would there be any support for periodic meetings with a speaker (probably from the inspectorate or one of the animal hospitals) as a chance for people from the branch to get together?