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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