Cats! Help urgently needed

We have just been notified of the existence of a large colony of cats who may need to be moved because the site where they are living is due to be re-developed.

We'll have more details when we've had a change to speak in depth to the person who contacted us, but it's likely that we will need:

• Suitable sites (e.g. stables, barn, large garden) for pairs of neutered adult cats who have been used to living outside.
• Foster homes for kittens needing socialisation.
• Volunteers willing to help with trapping cats and transporting them to the vets for neutering.
• Help with funds to cover the costs.

If anyone had doubts that there are problems with some pedigree dogs

Take a look at this news article about a Shar Pei who needed surgery to cut back the folds of skin which meant she couldn't see. This dog appears to be a very extreme case as the more common problem is that puppies have eyelids which "don't fit properly" and cause the lashes to turn in and rub against the cornea of the eye. The writer seems a little confused about the distinction between problems like this, where the fault lies in the breed requirement for excessively folded skin, and those caused directly by the process of inbreeding between dogs who are too closely related.

There's more information about the procedure known as "tacking": stitching the eyelid so that it rolls away from the eye, and, as always, sensible comment from vet Pete Wedderburn.

What is the sense of paying £500 for a puppy who is going to need nearly £1,000 of surgery in less than a year to correct the genetic defects for which you paid your £500 in the first place?

Branch animal welfare statistics for September

During September our clinic treated 272 dogs, 125 cats, 9 rabbits and 3 miscellaneous "small furries." We rehomed 2 dogs, 7 cats and 2 rabbits. Neutering figures were down—only 11 dogs and one cat—which may be a danger sign that people are trying to economise by waiting longer to get kittens neutered.

In the year to date we've provided a total of  3,258 low-cost veterinary treatments and rehomed 88 animals.

Next Volunteers' meeting

Thursday 21st October, 7.30-9.30pm at our Charity Shop, 61 Burleigh Street.

Anyone interested in the work of the RSPCA is very welcome to come. There will be a discussion on planning our fundraising timetable for the coming year, so please be prepared to put forward any suggestions for events and activities you would like to see.

Homeless animals and homeless people

One of the major reasons for animals becoming homeless is human housing problems. Families may be forced to give up their pets if they are unable to find rented accommodation which will allow animals, or sometimes pets (generally dogs) may end up living on the streets together with their owners. The Dogs Trust maintain a list of shelters for the homeless with facilities for people with dogs. 

In many ways "street life" is not a dreadful hardship for dogs, unless they are either very young or very old,  because contact with their human partners is the most important thing in a dog's life. Disaster may strike if the dog is injured, perhaps through fighting with other dogs in a hostel, becomes pregnant, or is too young to be protected by vaccination. If a dog does need veterinary help it may be difficult or impossible for a homeless owner to organise transport from a hostel in Cambridge City Centre to our clinic's location in the housing estates in the North of Cambridge. This is another urgent reason why we need to raise enough funds to re-start our help at private vets for owners who genuinely cannot manage to get to the clinic.

Sore eyes

Star waiting to alight from the catmobile

One of the regular visitors to our clinic is a lovely lady with a little dog, who also feeds all her local stray cats. As she has mobility problems and no transport she gets very upset if any of them are poorly because she really doesn't have any easy way to get them in a basket and take them to the vet herself. She's also a bit of a worrier, so my heart rather sank when I had a phone call around 10pm on Friday.

In the past she's had me out on searches for at-risk feral chickens, possibly injured muntjac deer and various cat and dog problems and the weather was absolutely chucking it down outside, so I was relieved that this time she seemed to think the morning would be good enough.

Got there just before ten and kitty was obligingly waiting to show off his eyes, which were indeed looking sore, so I popped him in a basket and off to the clinic. He really is an extremely laid-back cat and let the students take a blood sample with no problems at all. He's thin, although he's been eating ravenously, so he may be hyperthyroid; we'll have to wait for the blood results to come back and in the meantime he's in my spare cat pen with a prescription for eye ointment.

He is neutered, so someone obviously was looking after him at one point, and it is possible that he does have a home and was only looking for extra food because he has a medical problem.

Sickening Story

The Daily Mail has a really upsetting report on a woman who drowned eight cats and tried to excuse herself by saying she didn't have enough credit on her mobile phone to call an animal charity to try to get the cats rehomed.

In this case,  she doesn't even seem to have tried to ask for help, but whenever we do turn people away there is always a nagging worry that they will simply leave the animal to suffer or deliberately do it harm.   

There are the owners who insist they won't contact any of the vets local to them because none are any good—my cynical alter ego says they've run up debts with all of them and know they won't be seen.

One of our inspectors gave me some very wise advice: "Always remember it is ultimately the owner who is responsible for an animal. We did not create the situation."

We have an obligation to give what help we can, but we can't let ourselves be manipulated into feeling we are responsible for everything and we must never say no. 

If we go down that route we will either go under because we run out of money or wind up taking in every animal and putting most of them down because we think no-one but us can be trusted.

It comes back once again to prioritising urgency and getting it right. There are owners who just need a small amount of help, or a reminder of their responsibilities, and there are those who simply are not capable of making reasonable decisions and whose animals need to come in to our care. Identifying which is which is what RSPCA Animal Welfare Officers are trained for.

Shops' Progress

Daily profit of our Burleigh Street shop

To get a feel for how we're doing I worked out the average daily profit for the Burleigh Street Shop over the past three months. August was pretty depressing, but this is probably only to be expected because it's the last month of real summer. Most people have got all the summer clothes they want until next year, but it's too early for them to feel like buying for the colder months.

Profit for the a month is now hovering round the £1,000 mark — enough to cover half of our usual bill for boarding animals until they can be rehomed or half the monthly cost of running our clinic. If we can get it up to £2,000 we can feel secure that the clinic is on a safe financial footing and hope that the future Newmarket shop will fund our animal boarding. Ultimately that should free the money raised by the bookshop to be used to pay for emergency help at private vets. 

Matt Brash video available via VetPulse

Wildlife crime: badgers (warning, some upsetting photos).

The Lost Dogs

This is the story of the 48 dogs rescued as the result of a raid on a dog-fighting breeding establishment in Virginia. The case was something of a cause célèbre due to the fact that one of the owners of the kennels was a highly-successful American Football star and, as part of his plea-bargaining arrangements a considerable amount of money was made available as "restitution" to be used for the rehabilitation of the dogs.

Without this financial resource it's unlikely that the more timid or dog-aggressive animals could have been saved—and in fact from a British viewpoint it's rather shocking that all of them might have been put down with no attempt at evaluation and before the case had even come to trial simply because the police had no funding to keep dogs long-term.

The cash windfall made possible what was effectively a trial project into the rehabilitation of dogs seized from fighting cases. The results are fascinating and in some ways it's a pity this write-up is so firmly aimed at a popular animal-loving audience. I hope some more in-depth studies will appear later.

Within its limitations this is a book with lessons for anyone interested in the "status dog" phenomenon and in rehabilitation of abused dogs. (A very clear lesson is that it can only be solved by dealing with the problem of young male human status aggression, not by regulating particular breeds of dogs). 

One  very surprising finding was that fearfulness was enormously more of a problem for the majority of the dogs on their journey towards normal life than aggression towards other dogs.

Volunteers' Meeting this Thursday

Next informal volunteers' meeting is this Thursday, 7.30-9.30pm at our charity shop, 61 Burleigh St. All welcome.

There's free parking after 7pm at the Adam and Eve St. car park just behind Burleigh St.

So... why isn't the whole of England and Wales a no-kill community?

The ten "No-Kill Equation" recommendations     MAWS

1. Feral Cat TNR Program 

2. High Volume/Low-Cost Spay/Neuter                3. Welfare Neutering

3. Rescue Groups 

4. Foster Care 

5. Comprehensive Adoption Program                    2. Rehoming

6. Pet Retention                                                 4.  Assistance with Veterinary Treatment 

7. Medical and Behavioral Rehabilitation              1. Animals accepted into branch care

8. Public Relations/Community Involvement 

9. Volunteers

Compare these with the Minimum Animal Welfare Standards and you'll recognise that their core principles are identical. (MAWS doesn't specifically mention neutering feral cats, but this is RSPCA policy). Items 3, 4, and 9 are already inherent in the voluntary nature of RSPCA branches.

To an extent the answer is that England and Wales do manage to save a higher proportion of stray and unwanted animals than some other similar countries. In the 1990s we were enthusiastic that this proportion could be increased quite fast, but over the two decades since then we have been barely holding on to the gains made then.

Why?

Item 8 is perhaps the key. 

We've not succeeded in attracting the amount of sustained community support needed to maintain ongoing services at the necessary high level of activity. So long as people and companion animals live together there will always be situations where animals need to be rehomed—just as there will never be a situation where we all have such perfect health that the NHS isn't needed. It's probably inevitable that this work is less immediately attractive than crusades aimed at abuses that can apparently be ended once and for all and we have to solve the problem of "selling ourselves" to gain more support from a wider active community. 

I wonder whether there's not also a degree of difficulty caused by the fact that this is a campaign that doesn't really have any "enemy" most of the time. Some of the animals we rehome have been intentionally abused, but the majority have come to grief because of accidents, poverty or inadequacy, not deliberate cruelty.

The Minimum Animal Welfare Standards

Because of their relative autonomy from the parent society, RSPCA branches have always done their own thing to a certain extent, which is one of the reasons why services available vary so much between different parts of the country. In the very early days, all that was asked was that they should raise the funds to pay the salary of their local inspector. Gradually other facilities evolved, often because of individuals with a special interest in particular aspects of animal welfare (for example oiled seabirds). 

Periodically there are attempts to agree a certain amount of standardisation, usually via consultations at the Branch Officers' Conference or the Branch Animal Welfare Conference. I was one of the Cambridge branch delegates at the Branch Officers' Conference where the MAWS statement was  originally agreed (in the 1990s) and can vouch for it being a somewhat non-ideal meeting of tired individuals who had traveled long distances on Saturday morning after a full working week in their day jobs.

MAWS falls under four headings:

1. Animals accepted into branch care

• Branches should be able to provide advice or assistance to animals of all species, even if only by referral to specialist organisations.
• Animals taken in by the inspectorate, and in need of accommodation, should be seen as having first call on the branch's animal welfare resources. The branch with this responsibility for the animal is the one in whose area the animal is found.
• Branches should aim to accept all companion animals offered to them for adoption, although this may not be achievable in the short term.

2. Rehoming

• All dogs and cats should be micro chipped before rehoming in line with current Society policy.
• Where an animal is offered for adoption and a pre-home visit is required in accordance with the rules, the potential adopter should initially be contacted within 48 hours and the visit itself should be conducted within a week. 
• All animals for rehoming should be neutered, in line with current Society policy, (except where there are over-riding veterinary reasons for not doing so). In the case of animals that are too young to be neutered at the time of adoption, a neutering voucher should be issued and the branch should attempt to ensure that it is used.

3. Welfare Neutering 

• All branches should establish a welfare neutering policy and budget. 
• Support with welfare neutering of their animals should be offered at least to people on the following benefits: income support, working tax credit, housing benefit. 
• Owners who fit the eligibility criteria should be offered a minimum contribution toward the cost of neutering their animals (suggested to be at least £10 or 10% of their bill)

4.  Assistance with Veterinary Treatment 

• All branches should establish an appropriate veterinary assistance policy and budget. 
• As with welfare neutering, help should be offered at least to people on income support, family credit or housing benefit. 
• All people asking the RSPCA for assistance and meeting the eligibility criteria should be offered at least a contribution sufficient to ensure that their animal is seen by a veterinary surgeon (i.e. at least the cost of the consultation fee).

Branch animal welfare statistics for August

During August our clinic treated 257 dogs, 115 cats, six rabbits and two "small furries" and neutered eleven dogs and three cats.

We took in one dog and eleven cats who had been signed over to our local inspector for welfare reasons, and nine unowned sick or injured cats referred to us via the National Control Centre. We also took in two dogs and a cat whose owners were unable to keep them and had a previously rehomed dog returned to us due to his adopters being posted abroad.

We rehomed seven cats and one dog, however August is usually a slow month for homing because people are away on holiday and September's figures are already looking better.

Charity Shops Pt 2

So, now you have a shop, all kitted out with rails, hangers and shelves. You hope that people will start bringing in donations, and you will probably have done at least one collection so that you can open with a decent-looking amount of stock.

Customers are weirdly blind to new happenings on a familiar street. Even a year on people are still wandering into our 61 Burleigh Street shop in Cambridge and saying: "Ooh! I didn't know there was an RSPCA charity shop in Cambridge." There are people living on Mill Road who have never noticed our second hand bookshop at number 188 (after it's been there for 6 years!).

One of the reasons why I started this blog was to try to attract more publicity for our shops and other fundraising efforts. 

People don't look up—so the very nice signs above shop windows seem to be almost useless as a way of telling them we are here. So far the most effective signage seems to be A-boards (facing shoppers' direction of travel at roughly eye-level) and decals stuck at eye-level on the glass doors.

People no longer expect to push doors—and will conclude that a shop is either closed or being used as a display space to avoid the street looking full of boarded-up premises unless you keep its door open or install an automatic opening sensor system.

So, you achieve your initial target of selling roughly 100 items every day, around an average price of £3.50. Your  takings are £350 and you pat yourself on the back, BUT...

Around £200 of the £350 will be needed to pay rent, rates, staff wages, heat etc. Allowing for Sundays and bank holidays, you may hope to see a fairly steady £3,600 profit in a month. 

When you consider that our kennelling bill is at least £2,000 each month, veterinary services to our clinic average £6,000 and charges at private vets £2,000 you can see why we need several shops and must run them to make the maximum profit possible.

Charity Shops!

As there really seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for the proposed new shop in Newmarket I thought I would write something about the process of operating a charity shop from the point of view of a branch committee—there is a lot of frantic activity in the background and it is not simply a matter of finding an empty shop, paying some rent and moving in.

First find your shop:

Potential income from sales has to be balanced against costs, particularly rent. A smallish shop in a quiet area may cost about £11,000 in rent. Something similar in a busy shopping area may be more than three times as expensive, but may pay for itself by attracting a far greater number of shoppers. Very few people will make a special journey to a charity shop if there is nothing else in the location that they need to visit.

If you decide to go for a shop in a busy location you will need to achieve very high volume of sales to make it pay. It may be necessary to organise "trawling" (which is where you distribute collection bags one week and pick them up the next—filled with saleable donated items, you hope). To make a profit will need to sell at least 100 items daily; which will involve a hefty amount of physical work sorting donated goods, cleaning, pricing and putting out on the shop floor. Unless you can field at least two reasonably able-bodied volunteers six days a week it will be impossible to keep up without employing some paid staff. Even with the low sales volume at the old Newmarket shop it nearly finished off the two volunteers who wound up doing the bulk of donation processing in the evening and at weekends.

Once you settle on premises that seem suitable there will be protracted negotiations with the landlord's agent and solicitor. Their job is to get the best possible deal for their client—which means that, if they can persuade you to agree to take on expensive repairs or to ignore that suspicious stain on the ceiling, they will. You have to grit your teeth and rely on the experience and advice of your own solicitor and surveyor, and not let yourself be persuaded that being careful is unnecessary delay. Unlike a residential property commercial landlords have no obligation to pay for repairs unless this is specifically agreed in the terms of the lease.

The amounts of money involved are pretty scary: shop rent is typically paid three months in advance, so for a £20,000 annual rent £5,000 must be found up front. Many landlords will require another three months' rent as a deposit. Unless the shop is already equipped with suitable rails and shelving, there will be at least another £10,000 to pay for fitting out, so £20,000 may have been spent before the shop even opens.

Once you have an agreed lease, two committee members must sign it as "holding trustees". This means they agree to take responsibility for ensuring that the rent is paid and the terms of the lease adhered to. A shop lease is not like an ordinary tenancy of a flat or house—if things don't work out the charity can't simply give a month's notice and leave. I've been one of the holding trustees for three of our branch shops so far, and am not yet bankrupt, but none of this is something to do lightly.

The major attraction of shops is their potential for generating regular income that can be increased by simply working harder. Virtually all other sources of income are at the mercy of the whims of public opinion.

Pioneers at Bath Cats and Dogs Home

In England and Wales, the term "non-destruction" is normally the preferred term for what would be referred to as "no-kill" in the US and Australia. I hope BCDH won't object to me reproducing the following timeline from their website:

1937

• Three local animal charities unite to become RSPCA Bath Branch.

• Bath resident Mrs Bayntun gifts five acres of land and £4,000 (equivalent to nearly £200,000 now) enabling the new charity to set up a dog shelter.

1948

• John and Mary Hobhouse join the Bath Branch committee.

1953

• John Hobhouse becomes chairman of the Bath Branch (until 2000).

• After considerable arguments, the City Council concede that stray dogs can go to the kennels for re-homing rather than being destroyed.

• The Bath Branch is the first RSPCA branch to implement a strict non-destruction policy.

1955

• John Hobhouse is elected to the RSPCA National Council.

1960

• John’s five-year battle to form and chair a ‘Homeless Animals Committee’ is finally realised.

1962

• The Homeless Animals Committee persuade the RSPCA Council to spend £100,000 to build or rebuild an animal centre in each major city. Within a year these new kennels were saving the lives of 10,000 dogs that would otherwise have been destroyed.

1969 – 1975

• John Hobhouse elected as chairman of the RSPCA National Council. 

1986

• The Friends of Claverton is formed. A separate registered charity, the Friends raise funds through membership and legacies.http://www.friendsofclaverton.org/

1995

• After three generous legacy donations totaling £500,000 the Home plan a redevelopment of the dilapidated 50 year old buildings with modern facilities. 

2001

John is elected Bath and District President

2002

• The first two stages of redevelopment are completed, including four kennel blocks and runs, a cattery, vet suite, administration offices, visitor facilities and a new sewerage system. The cost of £2.2 million had been raised solely by donation and fundraising.

2006

• The third stage of development is completed, with two circular kennels. The cost was paid for by the fundraising efforts of the Friends of Claverton. 

2009

• John Hobhouse dies peacefully in Frome Hospital, Somerset, on Thursday 24 December, aged 99.

There's some more information about how BCDH works with the local authority dog wardens in this article. 

Further thoughts on licences and dog wardens

I suppose attitudes to this are very dependent on whether your view of the role of dog wardens is that it's primarily for the benefit or detriment of dogs.

The majority of calls about uninjured stray dogs that we get at evenings and weekends are from people who've found a dog and want it to be collected and taken somewhere safe to be cared for until the owner is found. Their main concern is usually that the dog may get run over if left. Legally these calls should be the responsibility of the local authority, but very few of these employ dog wardens outside normal working hours.


We get some calls demanding that we come and collect a dog who has bitten someone or savaged another dog and these are really the responsibility of the dog's owner or the police. It's comparatively rare for us to be called about loose dogs because someone feels they are a threat.


If your view of dog wardens is that they are a positive element for animal welfare you will want more cover. If you see them as roaming the streets "seizing" dogs who would be safer where they were you will want less.


It may be helpful to look at some of the material on the website of the National Dog Wardens Association and, in particular, their comments on an earlier government consultation on introduction of  a compulsory microchipping and insurance system which for practical purposes would be similar to a dog licence system (part of the DEFRA consultation on Dangerous Dogs).

[Q27: Do you think that requiring all dogs to be covered by third-party insurance could have a significant financial impact upon individual dog owners? Why?]

It is estimated that 25% of car drivers in the UK have no insurance, so you would have to assume that 25% of dog owners would not adhere to any licensing requirements.  If this were to be so, any dogs seized and not having a license would only be released back to the owner after the dog had been licensed (the statutory government charge for stray dogs would be waived to enable registration to be carried out for a year) A lot of dog owners leave their seized dogs at the holding kennels rather than claim them because they begrudge paying the fees, this shows that possibly it is better for that particular dog to not be with such a person. Where an owner’s dog is involved in an incident and he is found to be uninsured, this would constitute a serious offence (as with cars). We would support reductions for pensioners and multi-dog households,

[Q28: Do you think that requiring all dogs to be covered by third-party insurance will have a financial impact upon welfare organisations/dog homes? Why?]

Why would it?  If a stray dog is rehomed by a Local Authority to an animal welfare charity, when that charity rehome the dog, they should have a legal requirement to make the new owner fill in the registration form for the area they live in.  Example being, a person is adopting a Labrador and they live in Manchester, the new owners come to collect the dog and they have with them the Dog License complete with insurance. Dogs’ homes/charities should have insurance for the whole premises rather than for individual dogs.

[Q29: Do you think that all dogs should have to be microchipped? Why?]

Yes but microchipping of all dogs is not the be all and end all it is made out to be!  Dog Wardens average about 40% of dogs with microchips handled by them having out of date, incorrect or no details at all on the microchips?  Who would enforce any discrepancies regarding microchips……Local Authority Dog Wardens, not Petlog, not the animal welfare organisations or even the police?  Do Local Authorities have the resources to carry out this work in the current climate with Local Authorities cutting the size of Dog Warden Services or downgrading the important work they do? Compulsory microchipping would work well in conjunction with the insurance requirement (see above Q.25), otherwise it is difficult to enforce on it’s own as most people who move or give away/sell their dogs forget to change the details

[Q30: Do you think that all puppies born after a specified date should be microchipped before the age of one year? Why?]

As Q29. I think microchipping/insuring puppies is important and, with this proof of ownership, would help to combat the puppy farmers and irresponsible back-street breeders. Puppies should be insured and chipped before they are sold – there could be a specific clause that allows transfer of ownership with the insurance policy for puppies that are intended for gift/sale; this would apply to private as well as commercial breeders.

[Q31: How do you think such a requirement could be introduced and enforced?] 

Who would enforce it, hard pressed Dog Wardens who as this consultation document points out varies from highly motivated, well trained and knowledgeable to poorly trained ones.  Many Local Authorities fail to appreciate the important role that Dog Wardens play in community safety and those who have downgraded their services to stray dogs being dealt with by Pest Control Officers/Community Safety Officers for example are not going to have individuals who are spending 100% of their work day dealing with dog issues. Any enforcement needs to be carried out by motivated, well trained and knowledgeable Dog Wardens who are fully supported by their Local Authorities and properly funded. Again, works best in conjunction with insurance where insurance companies would run the database. It would tend to be enforced only when a problem dog comes to light that isn’t insured which is why the penalty for non-insurance should be an adequate deterrent. Yes, this would initially require extra enforcement by Police/Local authorities but could ultimately reduce enforcement.

and:

[Q39: Do you think the government needs to do more to raise public awareness of the existing law and what to do if you are aware of a possible breach?] 

I think the public are aware of the existing law but they are also hopelessly misinformed with regards to dog behaviour and responsible ownership. The government need to lend more support to Local Authorities who should be at the forefront of public education. Instead, more local authorities are cutting their dog warden budget or outsourcing their stray dog contracts.

Relocating control of dogs to the "Pests" department is not likely to improve their care!

I think there's a more general problem about the public view of animals being "seized" (by RSPCA, Police, dog wardens etc.). Most of the time this is reactive, as a result of a call from a member of the public asking someone to collect an animal, because it's thought to be ill, injured or otherwise at risk in some way. Sometimes an animal may not have been seized in any meaningful sense of the word: for example where the animal's carer has asked to sign it over to the RSPCA. We've had situations where a third party referred to us "seizing" a dog when we'd in reality been asked by an owner to take the dog for rehoming as an alternative to euthanasia.

Books by members of the family dog project

Dog Behaviour, Evolution and Cognition


If Dogs Could Talk: Exploring the Canine Mind