Wild Animal Casualties

Statement from the national RSPCA:

"There is no truth whatsoever in the alarming rumour that the RSPCA has changed its policy regarding wildlife animals and that due to the credit crunch it automatically puts every animal it picks up to sleep.

Wildlife counts for a huge proportion of calls made to the RSPCA every year. Our inspectors and officers regularly respond to calls regarding injured or sick wild animals and birds. Every effort is made to ensure that these are taken to one of our own specialist wildlife centres, to a vet or one of the independent organisations that we work with and that they are rehabilitated and released where possible.

The RSPCA takes the decision to euthanise wildlife on a case by case basis, with the welfare of the animal in mind and to alleviate suffering."

On the current situation concerning non-native wild species, see DEFRA's review and the government's non-native species website (neither of these is controlled by the RSPCA).

Seeing Pink Swans

A genuine picture from the East Winch Wildlife Centre's Annual Report to local branches. The swan was from Brundall, Norfolk. The contaminant was never identified, but was incredibly difficult to wash off. Fortunately the treatment was successful, but the swan was in care for much longer than usual before it could be released back into the wild.

The Wildlife Centre's Open day this year will be Sunday 5 July, from 10 am to 4 pm. We visited the Centre a few years ago as a "works outing" for RSPCA Cambridge branch volunteers and it is very well worth seeing. They always need old towels as absorbent disposable bedding for animals, so if you are coming, it would be very helpful if you could collect up your unwanted old towels, flannels and blankets and bring them to donate. This saves the petrol which would be used if towels were donated elsewhere and had to be specially transported to the centre.

East Winch Wildlife Hospital seal release

The RSPCA East Winch Wildlife Hospital is our regional facility for treating injured wildlife. It's paid for and run by the national RSPCA.

To view the video properly, scroll it sideways so that it centres on the page, then hit replay.

The New Hedgehog book

The New Hedgehog Book, by Pat Morris, is absolutely charming, but also packed with useful information about hedgehogs and what is known about their natural history and behaviour. Until his retirement, Pat Morris was a wildlife researcher and academic, but this is definitely not a coldly scientific view, and readers will be delighted by his evident fondness for his spiky research subjects — to the point of abandoning both clothing and objectivity and diving to the rescue when one of them was in imminent danger of a watery grave. 

Without overwhelming readers with information The Hedgehog book gives enough knowledge to enable them to provide real assistance to any wandering hogs which they may come across. It will also promote understanding of the point at which well-meaning help can turn into something that merely prolongs the process of dying if the would-be rescuer doesn't recognise their limitations.

Some aspects of this popular mammal remain surprisingly mysterious. Create a feeding station for stray cats and you'll end up with lots of cats. This doesn't seem to apply to hedgehogs: you may think there are a lot, but it turns out that you may simply have created a drop-in centre for hedgehogs from an astonishingly large area, rather than increasing the number living in your own garden. Food supply doesn't seem to be the critical limiting factor and we don't really know what is, although there are suspicions that tidier, smaller gardens with more fencing and fewer deciduous trees are bad news. 

The book provides an update on the controversy over hedgehogs on Uist and explains why RSPCA wildlife hospitals (like our local East Winch) place so much emphasis on measuring survival rates of treated animals after release to the wild. Careful follow-up of translocated hedghogs was able to demonstrate it was incorrect that removing hedgehogs and releasing them elsewhere was inhumane, and (to their credit) Scottish Natural Heritage were prepared to change their policy in response to the evidence.

The BBC has a video of another hedgehog tagging survey in action.