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Sing-a-long for Christian Aid From December 11th to 13th people from all across the UK will be singing for Christian Aid. Join the campaign and help to raise a note or two for the world’s poor. Register now and you’ll be sent your FREE Sing-a-long Pack with everything you need to make your Big Christmas Sing a huge success. RSPCA Cambridge & District Branch will receive £1 for every pack generated via our webshop. By registering you'll raise £1 for RSPCA Cambridge & District Branch, you'll receive your FREE Sing-a-long Pack and you could be in with the chance of winning a pair of tickets to meet 3 times MOBO award winner Beverley Knight as she performs an exclusive set at the Natural History Museum. Click here to register. Every registration counts!

Visit www.buy.at/RSPCA.Cambridge for more great offers from over 150 top retailers.

Purchases made through www.buy.at/RSPCA.Cambridge are made according to the information and terms provided by the company making the sale to you. Further details on using the buy.at shop are provided on the site.

Foster Carers Needed

We're trying to recruit more people who would be prepared to look after animals for short periods in their own homes. These would usually be cats recuperating after traffic accidents so not yet ready to be put forward for adoption, but we sometimes also need short-term carers for dogs and for socialising puppies or kittens.

Ideally foster homes would be close to Cambridge because many of the cats need to go back to the University Vet School for re-checks on their injuries, but we would be grateful for help from anyone in the general South Cambridgeshire / Newmarket / Royston area.

We cover expenses such as cat litter, food and veterinary treatment and will provide suitable cages or pens for kittens or animals who need to be confined because of their injuries.

If you are fostering kittens or puppies someone needs to be at home for most of the day so they get enough exposure to humans for proper social development.

All homes are visited by someone from the branch before animals are placed there. This allows fosterers to ask any questions they may have and means we can get some idea of how experienced they are, which is particularly vital when we are placing adult dogs who need training in a domestic environment. It also means we can weed out anyone who is taking on more animals than they can cope with.

If you are interested in offering to help as a short term foster home, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Rags, but no bones

If you are a frugal person and wear your clothes until they fall to bits it's still worth stuffing them in a bin liner and bringing them to us because we can sell them on for recycling.

In a typical month, sales of rags bring in £200-£300, which is enough to pay for a dog or cat to have a broken leg pinned via our clinic, so is well worth the effort. Diverting worn out clothes from landfill to re-use also benefits the environment and helps to reduce council charges. It's helpful if bags of textiles that are definitely only good for this can be labelled as rags, so that our volunteers don't spend time sorting through them.

Old towels are useful as animal bedding and we can also sell them directly as cleaning wipes, so it's helpful if those can also go in a separate bag.

All of this is increasingly important to us as potential donors of cash start to feel the pinch. Every pound that we can earn by trading activities is new money that doesn't depend on people being able to spare their hard-earned cash in difficult times.

Please watch out for deer on dark evenings

Would your employer let you run a "donate, don't dump" day for us?

"Donate, Don't Dump" is a concept inspired by Mary Portas and basically depends on the theory that pretty well all of us have something stashed away which we are never going to use/wear, but which is in perfectly good condition or else is old enough to be a curio. Examples might be china ornaments that are just collecting dust; kindly-meant presents of clothes that are the wrong size/colour; boxed games no-one ever has time to play, and so on.

Individually you might feel none of them is worth making a special trip to donate to a charity shop, but if 20 or 30 people got together to pool their donations they might well have a collection of items that would raise over £100 when sold.

Of course, the group doesn't have to be based on a place of work: it could just as well be organised by a school; playgroup; book discussion group—anywhere that people get together.

We need to turn over roughly 100 items a day to meet our target of £500 daily takings at 61 Burleigh Street.

If you might be interested in organising a Donate Don't Dump Day, but would like to discuss it with someone first, email emporium61@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or phone 01223 312 802 (closed Mondays).

Outdoor homes for shy cats

Mr Grumpy, one of the feral cats we treated, neutered and released.

We nearly always have a need for homes for cats who have never lived indoors and wouldn't easily adjust to a domestic environment. They need to go to a location where there is shelter (such as a garden shed, outhouse or barn) and someone who will put down food and check that they are OK.

If you might be able to offer a home to a timid cat, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Support us by shopping via our webshop

Support RSPCA Cambridge & District Branch when you shop online this Christmas and we could win £1000! Beat the traffic, parking and queues and browse over 5 million products at over 150 retailers in our webshop. There’s a donation for RSPCA Cambridge & District Branch every time you make a purchase via our webshop and every purchase could help us to win £1000! If RSPCA Cambridge & District Branch generates more purchases than any other buy.at webshop over Christmas we will win £1000! Our most popular retailers include: Festive offers at Thorntons include 2 for £5 on lots of Christmas treats and gifts. Take advantage of this offer and help us to win £1000. Visit www.buy.at/RSPCA.Cambridge for more great offers from over 150 top retailers.
Purchases made through www.buy.at/RSPCA.Cambridge are made according to the information and terms provided by the company making the sale to you. Further details on using the buy.at shop are provided on the site.

Volunteer Drivers

We always need more volunteer drivers, so if you have the use of a car and are interested in "hands-on" work with animals, please do get in touch by emailing:
rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or
rosemary@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

We need drivers because the injured strays which we take in are generally given initial first aid at private vets and then need to be transferred to our clinic for further treatment or to our kennels for rehoming. Some animals may need to come back to the clinic for check-ups (such as follow-up x-rays).

Because we can't predict when strays will be brought in it's not possible to set up a regular rota for driving, so volunteers go on a list of people who don't mind being phoned to ask if they can help with a particular trip.

Trips to the clinic with injured animals usually involve quite a lot of waiting about at the clinic because we can't jump the queue to be seen unless an animal is desperately ill or injured.

Times when we're most likely to need drivers are:

Monday mornings to transport animals from the kennels to the Vet School for re-checks and scheduled operations.
Monday afternoons to return animals to the kennels from the Vet School
Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday mornings to move animals from private vets to our clinic

Pics from the Mill Road Switch-on

The RSPCA bookshop is just opposite this row of lights.

Romsey Recommends

As part of our contribution to the Mill Road Winter Fair event on 5th December we'll be putting up a window display in our bookshop at 188 on the theme of "Romsey Recommends". To take part, just drop into the shop and fill in a form giving the author and title of your book recommendation and we'll add it to the display.

Feel free to include a photo (of yourself or of the book), or you can be anonymous if you prefer.

Closing date for recommendations November 30th

Why subsidised veterinary care is part of our work

Occasionally people complain that we spend lots of money helping people who really ought to have thought whether they could afford pets, or at least whether they could afford to have so many of them. There are several reasons why this service is essential:

• It's much better to help otherwise good and caring owners to keep their pets than to force them to give them up for rehoming—particularly in the case of older animals who would spend a long time in kennels. There is no point spending even more money just to punish the owners.
• If there is no source of help then people may panic and do irrational things. They may abandon animals, or simply hope that the problem will go away if they ignore it. This can sometimes result in extreme suffering, for example if the animal has broken bones.
• A major part of the "law enforcement" side of the RSPCA involves prosecuting owners who didn't seek veterinary treatment for their animals, or who allowed their animals to breed until they had far more than they could look after. If we are to be tough about enforcing owners' "duty to care" we have a corresponding obligation to make it possible for them to care.

But... I would like to see some of the people we help recognise that our funds are not a bottomless pit. Many of them do take on more animals from a genuine desire to rescue them, but it does put more and more strain on us.

Mill Road Christmas lights switch-on this Saturday!

The Mill road Christmas lights will be switched on at 5 pm this Saturday, 14th November. The actual switch-on will happen just in front of Cutlacks ironmongers, so why not visit our bookshop at 188 before wandering on down?

Shop for Christmas online and support us

As well as our charity shops we have a webshop: basically this is an web page which acts as a starting point which links to sales pages of merchants who will pay us a small amount of commission for all purchases which began from a link on our page. You can see the link collection at http://buy.at/RSPCA.Cambridge

When new customers subscribe to Sky+ HD via the webshop RSPCA Cambridge & District Branch will receive £120! If you are thinking of joining Sky please do so via our webshop so we can receive this huge donation.

Nostalgic children's books at 188 Mill Road

Many thanks for the generous donations of books we've had over the past few weeks. As you can see from our window display these included lots of very nice children's ones.

Animal Welfare Statistics for October 2009

During the past month our clinic treated 419 animals - 266 dogs, 137 cats, 10 rabbits and 6 miscellaneous small furries. We neutered 13 dogs and 11 cats and issued 24 vouchers for emergency treatment at private vets. Six dogs and five cats were terminally ill and had to be put to sleep to prevent suffering.

We rehomed three dogs, eight cats and a rabbit, and took in another six injured stray cats.

Christmas is coming!

Christmas cards and logo gift items now on sale at 188 Mill Road and 61 Burleigh Street, including these smart T-shirts and our very own photo-mugs with pics of animals rehomed by the branch. Emporium 61 in Burleigh St also has the 50/50 range of new clothes and accessories created by our talented staff.

Mole and Ratty

This is Mole looking out of his house a little apprehensively. He needs a home together with Ratty, his brother. They were both left with a friend by their previous owner, who never returned to collect them.

For some reason this seems to happen a lot with rats, possibly because it's more difficult to get permission to keep them than for other small animals, or perhaps because it's more likely that the person left holding the rat gets fed-up and contacts us than it would be if the pet was a hamster. Rats get a bit of a bad press, but most of them are actually much less inclined to bite than hamsters (who are solitary and have fewer inhibitions about inflicting summary chastisement on humans who prod them without being properly introduced).

Turn out your wardrobes!

Do you have any clothes you don't wear any more, or maybe unopened packets of underwear you bought when you were a size smaller?

All of them can be used to raise valuable funds at our charity shops at 188 Mill Road, 61 Burleigh Street, Cambridge and 156 High Street, Newmarket. Even worn or damaged clothes can still be sold for recycling and ones that are in good condition but old-fashioned are surprisingly saleable at the moment.

We can also sell "quirky" items such as musical instruments, old cameras and 1950s wireless sets, as well as ornaments, pictures and books.

188 Mill Road specialises in 2nd hand books and 61 Burleigh street in vintage clothes, but either of them would be delighted to receive your donations and we will arrange to transfer them to the appropriate shop if needed.

We would also be grateful for donations of old towels for use as washable animal bedding.

188 Mill Road and 156 High Street, Newmarket are open Monday-Saturday and 61 Burleigh street is open Tuesday-Sunday.

Should the RSPCA campaign for veganism and abandon Freedom Food?

This was put to me as a serious question and I think it deserves a serious answer (as always, please remember that these are my personal views and no-one else is responsible).

Firstly, I believe there's a substantial moral issue about the desirability of trying to bring about a future in which no animals would live in association with humans. This would mean substantial disruption even for some wild species which have adapted to live in a landscape which has been modified by human activities (such as keeping grazing animals). Some domestic animals would become extinct; in some cases this might be better for them than continuing to be kept inhumanely but this wouldn't always be the case. Some would possibly survive as feral populations, bringing further questions about the justifiability or otherwise of human control of their numbers. Unless we reintroduced large carnivores, it's likely that populations of some wild animals such as deer would still need to be limited by human action. Members of some species would have significantly more uncomfortable lives if they had to live in a feral state.

Secondly, there's the practical question of whether an RSPCA campaign in favour of veganism might overall do more harm than good. My answer to this is that it might do good provided it remained one element of a range of activities that were generally acceptable to the broad mass of the animal-loving public. If anyone is doubtful about the possibility of doing harm, they should look at the reaction to Lord Stern's advocacy of vegetarianism as a means of reducing climate change.

On the whole ordinary animal lovers are quite sympathetic to other people who don't eat meat because they care about animals and they would probably be happy, or at least unconcerned by, a campaign to increase the number of vegans. In any case, reducing the total consumption of meat is almost certainly the only realistic way to make high-welfare systems viable; otherwise the pressure to for intensive farming will be irresistible.

Once campaigns get more radical than that, suspicion begins that the campaigners don't really care about animals but are "political". At worst, a substantial campaign in favour of veganism might be used to justify claims that RSPCA investigations of cruelty to animals are part of a plot to destroy animal farming.

There has already been a petition on the number ten website asking for a government enquiry into the policies of the RSPCA apparently with the intention of removing an alleged bias in favour of animal rights. In fact the government petitions site demonstrates exactly how oddly the RSPCA is viewed (by both friends and enemies) as no other charity attracts remotely similar numbers of demands for the government to do something about it. Topics include one asking the Prime Minister to tell the RSPCA to abandon the Freedom Food scheme (rejected on the grounds that this was nothing to do with the government.)

Thirdly, of course, there are legal limitations on the way the RSPCA can campaign. With the introduction of a more rigorous public benefit test for charities it is likely that more campaigns may be challenged in the future, particularly if they appear to have political aspects.

The main objections made to the Freedom Food initiative appear to be:

• That it may make agriculture more acceptable to people who otherwise might demand that animal farming is ended altogether.
• That it operates on the assumption that farmers basically want to do the right thing and need technical advice about the best ways to improve welfare instead of assuming that people will be cruel to animals unless they are carefully watched.
• That it does no good because the only people willing to spend more on high-welfare products are those who would become vegans if they were only pushed hard enough.
• That the RSPCA could stop all use of animals if it wanted to.
• The objector in fact dislikes something else that the RSPCA does (e.g. campaigning for a ban on hare-coursing) and Freedom Food is just a convenient weapon.

But if it is assumed that most people can't be trusted to treat animals humanely it becomes difficult to explain how closing Freedom Food could be expected to produce a net increase in the number of vegetarians and vegans. In contrast, there is at least some evidence that people who are not prepared to become vegetarians are willing to pay more for higher welfare.

Freedom Food is by no means perfect, but anyone who believes it should be abolished needs to prove it would be preferable for welfare certification schemes to be controlled entirely by commercial interests. My own view is that it is better to have an imperfect scheme which is continually under pressure to improve.

Twitching kitten

This kitten was found wandering in the street and taken to a vet by a member of the public under an RSPCA log number. She's very pretty and friendly but seems to have some kind of nervous system problem as she's unsteady and has trouble getting into her litter tray in a hurry. As the pic shows, there's nothing wrong with her appetite and the vets think the best plan is to wait and see whether the unsteadiness gets worse or better.

She was full of worms and fleas, which we've treated, so crossed fingers that an improvement in her general health will help with the other problems.

More on pet neutering

The Regional Board this Saturday agreed another year's matched funding for help with pet neutering in Region East and there was also an interesting discussion on aims, achievements and how we measure effectiveness.

We've got records of activity going back over the past century and we can demonstrate the effectiveness of neutering in transforming a situation where every female cat in Britain gave birth each spring and her kittens were almost all killed to one where every healthy kitten born can find a home.

At first sight it might look as though if we could do even more neutering we would reduce the cat population to the point where we could guarantee a home for every unwanted adult cat too.

But it that true? In the 1900s killing of very young kittens was essentially a method of birth control—people like the author Henry Salt cared just as much about their adult cats as we do today. Neutering probably hasn't decreased the population of adult cats—in fact we know it has increased; probably because cats are more suitable than dogs for families where both parents work outside the home. By providing help with neutering costs we are probably ensuring that some people neuter who otherwise would be deterred by the costs, but some of them would probably have got their cats neutered anyway.

There's possibly an optimum equilibrium position where putting more money into neutering is subject to the law of diminishing returns and would be more usefully spent elsewhere (for example on veterinary treatment so that more adult animals with injuries can be rehomed).

Blog Action Day 2009: Did you know?

Buying secondhand from charity shops and donating unwanted items instead of chucking them in the bin is a way to reduce your carbon footprint.

In the UK, between 4 and 5% of domestic waste is made up of clothing and other textiles. About 25% of this is recycled by charities and their associated trading companies.

The Salvation Army Trading Company recently sponsored research to find the energy used by reuse/recycling of textile items and whether this resulted in net energy saving benefit (and hence reduced carbon emission).

The energy footprint of textiles was estimated using a streamlined life cycle assessment which was restricted in scope in order to target specific aspects of the footprint, in this case energy consumption.

Taking into account extraction of resources, manufacture of materials, electricity generation, clothing collection, processing and distribution and final disposal of wastes it was shown that for every kilogram of raw cotton replaced by use of second hand clothing approximately 65 kWh is saved, and for every kilogram of polyester around 90 kWh is saved. Hence, reuse and recycling of donated clothing results in reduced carbon emissions in comparison to purchasing new clothing made from raw materials.

(Life cycle assessment for reuse/recycling of donated waste textiles compared to use of virgin material: An UK energy saving perspective Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 94-103. Anne C. Woolridge, Garth D. Ward, Paul S. Phillips, Michael Collins and Simon Gandy)

Where we are in Cambridge City


View RSPCA in Cambridge in a larger map


Map showing the location of our clinic and shops.

Donate, Don't Dump

Would anyone out there be interested in organising a "D-Day" event at their place of work? The basic idea is fairly simple:

On a designated day, a business will host a donations drive. Staff will be encouraged to bring in to work one good quality item they no longer want or need, which will be given to a waiting charity representative. These goods can then be sold through charity shops to raise money for charities. In the current economic climate, some shops have found they are running out of stock as people are more likely to buy than to give; this is an easy and fun way of getting more donations into stores, where they can be sold for maximum profit.

Why should people only bring in one thing?
There are three reasons why this is a good idea:

• It is easier for someone to carry only one piece of clothing, record or book into work than to carry a bag full. This means people are more likely to do it.
• People can choose the one best thing to give away. Donations are often of better quality if they are picked out in this way.
• A lot of people bringing in one good quality item means a lot of donations. Of course, people can bring in more donations if they want to!

The Association of Charity Shops website has lots more information about organising a Donation Day at work.

In fact, textile items which aren't quite good enough to sell in the shops can still make quite a bit of money for us if we sell them for recycling, so don't let the emphasis on high quality donations put you off. Also don't be discouraged if some donations look rather old-fashioned—this is a feature, not a bug, as 50s, 60s and 70s clothes are popular at the moment.

If you're interested in running a Donation Day at work, please email emporium61@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or camshop@rspcabookshop.co.uk

And on Goldfish

Slightly indignant query from my ardently animal-rights neighbour about RSPCA policy on goldfish as prizes. I vaguely thought this had been banned under the Animal Welfare Act, but she says there was a fair nearby where fish were being offered as prizes and a mutual friend complained to the RSPCA and was told it was still legal. They clearly felt this was a pretty poor show & somehow our fault, so I assured her we certainly do have a policy against it and, in fact, had tried quite hard to get a ban into the Act.

I've done a quick search and found the exact legal position on the e-petitions website:

"The Government considers that goldfish can be given as prizes provided the welfare of the animals is met and that suffering is not being caused.

The Government understands the concerns felt by some that animals should not be given as prizes. That is why the Animal Welfare Act 2006 (the “2006 Act”) restricted the law on giving animals as prizes to people aged 16 years or over. The Act makes it an offence to fail to provide for the welfare needs of animal. The maximum penalty is a fine of £5,000 or 6 months imprisonment, or both. It is also an offence to cause an animal any unnecessary suffering. The maximum penalty is a fine of £20,000 or 6 months imprisonment, or both. The 2006 Act applies to goldfish given as prizes.

Under the 2006 Act anyone can take forward a prosecution if they think they have the necessary evidence or they can report it to the relevant body (local authority or RSPCA).

The law prevents children, unaccompanied by someone aged 16 years or over, obtaining an animal as a prize The Government believes that responsible adults should be able to decide for themselves whether to enter into a competition where an animal is given as a prize."

Which unfortunately doesn't spell out that the RSPCA can't simply issue a ban by fiat — it's necessary to produce evidence that the fish are not having their welfare needs met (over and above the welfare implications of being in a plastic bag). And incidentally it means the mutual friend will probably never support the RSPCA again even though it's not really a reasonable reaction.

Further thoughts on funding veterinary help

In some ways this is a vicious circle. The harder we work to raise more funds so we can do more than offer a painless end to animals whose owners can't afford their treatment costs the larger our annual income becomes.

This might sound very silly and obvious, but the "viciousness" comes in when potential volunteers and people who need help from us start to imagine that the RSPCA is so wealthy we could afford virtually anything. On the one hand potential volunteers and donors often feel they'd rather support smaller organisations who "really need" their help, even though they may be handling only a fraction of the numbers of animals that we do. On the other hand, the reaction when they hear we've turned down a request for help is very often: "If the RSPCA say they won't pay for X because they haven't enough money, I'm never going to give them another penny!"

It's significant that hardly any of the local veterinary surgery staff are RSPCA members and that conversations with them often leave me feeling that they think I'm being mean when I don't agree to pay the full cost of patients' treatment up front with no discussion.

Emergency treatment costs

I've taken four requests for help today on the branch emergency contact number. Three of these related to animals who were already registered at our clinic, which means that they are eligible to be seen by the vets who provide our subsidised out of hours cover. The fourth was a dog who'd never been seen at our clinic, so had to go to a commercial vet.

I keep banging on about registering with our clinic before an emergency happens if you are on a very low income (defined as being in receipt of state benefits, including working tax credit). The costs involved in getting these four animals treated show just why this is such an issue for us.

Two of the registered dogs had gastric problems, involving the owners in a £30 out of hours surcharge, plus the cost of drugs. One had a nasty wound which required surgery, at an all in cost to the owner of £200 (a struggle if you are on benefit, but not impossible).

The dog who went to the commercial vet had a similar wound which cost us £200 simply to get him seen and given antibiotics and pain relief and will probably cost another £200 (which the owner will be expected to pay) when he goes to the next available session at our own clinic.

If the commercial vet had stitched the wound we would be looking at about another £600, which simply is not a realistic proposition for us to pay.

It's all very well to say: "In that case, you ought to be running a subsidised out of hours service that will treat animals who haven't been pre-registered," because that would cost money we don't have, just as much as providing unlimited help via private vets does. (Because our service provider would charge us more for an unrestricted service).

Simple arithmetic demonstrates what I mean. The RSPCA overall gets roughly a million calls each year, which are either dealt with centrally or forwarded to the relevant branch. The National RSPCA's income is roughly £100 million and the combined branch income no more than another £50 million, making around £150 million available each year for everything we do.

Divide that £150 million by a million and you get an average of £150 available to deal with each call and you can see why we need to keep praying that a reasonable percentage of them won't need anything more than some advice.