Gift aid starting to pan out

After some initial teething trouble, I think we've now basically got the hang of running the gift aid system in our charity shops, and the first actual funds should appear in our bank account 6-8 weeks from now.

If you donate any items for sale and you are a UK income tax payer, please do complete a gift aid form, as it means an extra 28 pence for every pound raised when your donation is sold at no extra cost to you.

The process works on a bar code system. We take a sheet of bar code labels, all labels on a sheet having the same unique number. One label is stuck on your form and the others go on the price tags we put on your donations. When a donated item is sold, we scan the price tag at the till and the amount and donor number are recorded. During the night the till "phones home" and uploads details of everything scanned that day.

Once a reasonable sum has been recorded against your donor number, we print out and send you a letter telling you how much has been raised, and checking that you still wish to donate it to the branch. 24 days later (to give you a chance to demand your money!) we can put in a claim to HMRC for an amount equivalent to the tax you paid on that amount of income.

The need for the letters seems quite wasteful, but unfortunately they are a legal requirement if we want to operate the system, and there is a facility to avoid printing any which would cost more to post than the amount we would gain if we put in a claim.

It all sounds very complicated, but the degree of automation means it's actually harder to explain, than to do. Once the system has been running for a reasonable length of time, it should generate a steady amount of additional income as the gift aid forms come in and our claims go out to HMRC.

Injured cat

I've just been contacted by the 24hour emergency vet to let me know one of the Animal Welfare Officers has brought a cat in for first aid there. She'll have pain relief and emergency care overnight then one of our volunteer drivers will transfer her to our own clinic for further treatment in the morning. They say they're pretty sure she has at least one broken leg, but I should have more details, including a description, by tomorrow evening.

If a cat goes missing it's important to phone round vets—including the emergency out of hours vet, who may be some distance away—as injured animals are normally taken to the closest available private vet for first aid. Depending on how busy they are and whether the cat is found during the middle of the night, there may be some delay before the local branch is notified.

After a fracture repair operation cats will normally need to be confined for several weeks to avoid putting further strain on the repaired section of bone, which could cause the ends to move out of alignment. They also need to come back to the clinic for periodic re-checks. We are always in need of foster homes where they can be kept during this recovery period as it's a waste of funds and a drain on the kennel staff time to put them into our cattery, and it's also much more pleasant for the cats to be in home-like surroundings where they can have more attention to help pass the time.

If you might be interested in fostering cats for the branch, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

UPDATE:
Sadly she deteriorated in the next few days, and the vets took the decision to put her to sleep as they did not think she would survive an operation to amputate the leg with the worst injuries.

Do you know this cat?

She was reported to us as a possible poorly stray, but examination showed that the fur on her throat had been recently shaved—most likely in order to do a blood test for hyperthyroidism as her thyroid gland feels enlarged. She's very thin, which is why the finder was concerned and phoned us, but this is probably due to the thyroid condition. As she obviously does have an owner who is attending to her medical care, we released her again, exactly where she was picked up. 

If she's your cat, or you know who owns her, we'd be very grateful if you could let us know whether she's returning home regularly for her medication. If not, we can arrange to catch her again and bring her to you.

Good news on Riley

Her real name is Roxy and she's insured, so her owner is able to take on the cost of her treatment. We managed to get a definite ID as she's chipped, although there was some delay because they'd moved since registering the chip and the phone number listed was no longer active.

Let's hope Roxy makes a full recovery—she'll certainly be more comfortable in her own familiar home surroundings than in a cat pen in a foster home.

We always need to recruit more foster carers for animals recovering after treatment. If you might be interested, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Update on Taylor

Taylor's swollen pads are better than they were, but still not normal, so I took him in for an appointment with the veterinary dermatologist this morning. He's now on a different antibiotic with slightly lower levels of the steroids for another five weeks and booked for re-exam. then.

As I'd booked the whole day as leave from work, I thought I might as well open up the bookshop for the rest of the afternoon and was pleasantly surprised to take £25 in only two hours. It just goes to show the shop can be a useful asset to generate funds if we can only recruit enough volunteers to open every day. 

If you're interested in old books, the shop is a fun place to be as there's always something unexpected turning up—and you do get to read books if you want! If you're looking for something that will help improve your CV, this may be for you, and we do give references for job interviews if we're asked.

If you might be interested in volunteering, please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Sunday at 61 Burleigh Street

Huge thanks to everyone who donated so much fantastic china and books this week—please keep them coming.

As summer winds down, we could still do with more lightweight summer clothes since, at this time of year, shoppers are more likely to buy from charity shops than spend on new things they'll only wear for a few weeks if they need to replace clothes.

On Saturday we took in another injured cat, Riley, who will need surgery to repair her broken jaw. Your donations and purchases at our shops provide the funds to pay to treat her and other similar animals, so please keep up your support.

If you would like to make a donation by mobile phone to help with the cost of treating Riley, text the message PETS00 £10 to 70070 to donate £10 to RSPCA Cambridge. Your phone provider will add £10 to your bill and send £10 to our bank account. If you are a UK taxpayer and you complete the gift aid options we will receive an additional £2.80 at no cost to you.  

(The last two characters of PETS00 are zeros, not letters.)

Village vet open day at Milton

Many thanks to Village Vets for giving us a free stall at their open day. Attendance wasn't as good as I'd hoped because of the weather (by 3 it was setting in to rain properly and we all bailed out).

However it was all extra publicity for the shops, and several people took bags to collect saleable items for us.

If you would be able to take some of our collection bags to display somewhere (for example at your place of work), please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Just managing decline...

Bobby needs a home

Is not something we should ever accept.

Currently we are stuck in a series of vicious cycles and unless we can break out and convert them into virtuous cycles things are just going to get worse.

For years RSPCA branches have struggled against a perception that they have almost unlimited resources and are simply being mean when they can't do everything.

We've gone on throwing everything we have into efforts to improve in the hope that finally enough of the animal-loving public will understand we are doing all we can and be won over into giving their support.

Every time we can't do enough someone will go away to tell all their friends that "The RSPCA doesn't care," and, in the next turn of the vicious cycle,  our resources are even more limited.

Unless we can turn this round we'll end up in a situation where injured strays are kept alive just long enough to give an owner some chance of locating them and otherwise put to sleep because no-one can afford the cost of treatment. Understandably, vets hate it when this happens and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why so few vets and vet nurses are RSPCA members. 

Ultimately, the solution is in their hands. If animal welfare professionals want a different RSPCA it's up to them to join and participate. 

We can't offer free treatment to every local pet owner who is on a very low income, but we can give them the option of taking responsibility and registering at our clinic so that they can access low-cost treatment in an emergency.

However hard they work 60-odd volunteers and 200 subscribers have no possible way of satisfying the amount of need that exists. Four thousand people all contributing what they can do to help could bring about a situation where all treatable strays could be saved and found new homes and all pet owners in genuine need could be given access to affordable veterinary treatment.

In some ways the deteriorating animal welfare situation mirrors attitudes behind the rioting in London. People being told there's no point in using democratic options to make their views known because everything's corrupt. Being told nothing they personally can do will help them improve their community. Thinking they're entitled to more and being aggrieved when they don't get it. Believing there's no need to take personal responsibility for anything because someone else will always have to sort things out. Destroying instead of building.

The only way to get anything worthwhile done is to cooperate. None of us can expect to get precisely what we want, but working together gives us a heck of a better chance of getting close. 

Volunteer for the RSPCA and learn new skills... hmm

Very many thanks to the new volunteers who've offered to help at our second-hand bookshop. 

WE STILL NEED MORE, so please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk if you think you might be interested.

Volunteering at the bookshop genuinely does mean learning more about the books, music and print trade, how to price items, what will sell and how to present them to best advantage (also use of the till and some general admin skills).

We probably won't ask you to fit a new toilet seat, as Ffi and I have just done that this morning, and also given the kitchen and lavatory a general sprucing up. If you are interested; removing fixing screws that have been in place for something like five years is difficult and involves hanging over the toilet bowl looking as though you are about to throw up.

Many thanks also to the generous donors who brought in huge quantities of books this week. 

Please keep the donations coming. This is a shop that can be made to work to generate useful funds if we can only get enough volunteers and attract interest from the local community to get customers through the door and making purchases. 

Another stray cat

He's an un-neutered male and taken to the 24 hour vet under an RSPCA log number from the NCC because he was fitting. They've just phoned to say they think they've got the seizures under control, but he's very dehydrated and they suspect he may have eaten slug pellets or some other poison.

They're giving fluids and hoping there's no permanent damage to his kidneys. He's quite a young cat, but the next 24 hours will be critical.

Running on empty

Just had a call from the 24 hour vet about an owner with absolutely no money and a pregnant cat who needs a caesarian. There's no way we can cover the cost, and he's going to try the Cats Protection branch, but even if they can help this time, eventually they'll run out of money as well.

Private veterinary surgeries can't work for nothing or they will go our of business. If only the owner had got her cat spayed—CP would have given her a voucher to get it done for nothing, or she could have used our clinic and paid only £35. If she'd done no more than arrange for her cat to be vaccinated at our clinic it would have meant the cat was registered and eligible for emergency treatment at the University Vet School's reduced charity rates.

The small numbers of people who keep animal charities running can't solve these problems on their own. We need support from the competent animal lovers who form the majority of the pet-owning population, and we need to educate the minority to develop at least the minimal forethought to get pets vaccinated and registered with our own clinic or with the PDSA if they're not going to be able to afford a private vet.

Ferrets!

This cute little family were abandoned on our ferret fosterer's doorstep in a cardboard box.

Ferrets make very friendly, interesting pets but there seems to be a growing trend for thoughtless breeding of litters.

It used to be the case that Jill ferrets had to be bred each year to prevent them suffering from pyometria, but modern veterinary medicine has put paid to that.

PLEASE get Jills spayed (or keep them with a vasectomised male ferret) to avoid contributing to the problem of surplus babies.

If you are interested in giving a home to a pair of ferrets, email davedodds992@gmail.com

Help with veterinary treatment

After spending all morning on reception at our clinic, I was less than delighted to see someone from London had posted a complaint on the branch Facebook page about the level of service the RSPCA provides to pet owners who can't afford to pay out of hours fees at a private vet.

Unfortunately this is just one aspect of a vicious circle in which we can't raise enough funds to do everything members of the public think we should, which leads to bad publicity and in turn to less funds and more situations where we can't help.

We run the only low-cost animal clinic in the whole of Cambridgeshire, and if we go under something like 2% of the local population will have no source of affordable veterinary help at all. It's absolutely imperative that we persuade more people who care about animals that the RSPCA can't function unless they get involved and help keep our services running.

Part of the problem is that we are dealing with a lot of people who are having difficulty finding relatively small amounts of money. On the whole, someone facing a £2,000 veterinary bill will understand that it's not possible for the RSPCA to cover it. Someone whose animal needs £100 worth of treatment can't understand why an organisation with a £250,000 turnover can't pay for it all, and, indeed, if there was just one person in that situation there would be no problem.

What is completely impossible is finding that hundred pounds every day of the week in addition to carrying on the normal clinic service for registered patients.

It's not as straightforward as saying that people shouldn't have pets unless they are prepared to pay for them, because at the point where they need a vet it's not a choice of keeping the pet or having it rehomed, but keeping it or having it put to sleep. Plus, of course, if everyone who would struggle to pay a £100 vet bill asked us to rehome their pet immediately, we couldn't possibly do that either.

Dogs and Heatstroke

Sadly we've just had a fatal case of heatstroke in a dog taken to our clinic as an emergency. This wasn't a very old or very young dog and the owner hadn't done anything irresponsible like leaving him in a car. 

In very hot, humid weather even young, fit dogs may be at risk of overheating, so I'm reproducing the advice given on the main RSPCA website at www.rspca.org.uk Dogs are less able to cope with high temperatures than we are.

Heatstroke - early warning signs

Heatstroke can be fatal. Do everything you can to prevent it.

Some dogs are more prone to heatstroke. For example, dogs with short snouts, fatter or heavily muscled dogs and long-haired breeds, as well as very old or very young dogs. Dogs with certain diseases are more prone to heatstroke, as are dogs on certain medication.

If dogs are unable to reduce their body temperature, they will develop heatstroke. There are some signs to look for:

• heavy panting
• profuse salivation
• a rapid pulse
• very red gums/tongue
• lethargy
• lack of coordination
• reluctance or inability to rise after collapsing
• vomiting
• diarrhoea
• loss of consciousness in extreme circumstances.

Heatstroke - first aid

If your dog shows any symptoms of heatstroke, move him/her to a shaded, cool area and ring your vet for advice immediately. Heatstroke can be fatal and should always be treated as an emergency.

Dogs suffering from heatstroke urgently need to have their body temperature gradually lowered:

Immediately douse your dog with cool (not cold) water, to avoid shock – you could put your dog in a shower and run cool water over him/her, or use a spray filled with cool water and place your dog in the breeze of a fan.

Let your dog drink small amounts of cool water.

Continue to douse your dog with cool water until his/her breathing starts to settle – never cool your dog so much that he/she begins to shiver.

Once you have cooled your dog down you should take him/her straight to the veterinary surgery.

Top tips for warm weather

Your dog should always be able to move into a cooler, ventilated environment if he/she is feeling hot.

Never leave your dog alone in a car. If you want to take your dog with you on a car journey, make sure that your destination is dog-friendly – you won’t be able to leave your dog in the car and you don’t want your day out to be ruined!

If you have to leave your dog outside, you must provide a cool shady spot where he/she can escape from the sun at all times of the day.

Make sure your dog always has a good supply of drinking water, in a weighted bowl that can’t be knocked over. Carry water with you on hot days and give your dog frequent small amounts.

Never leave your dog in a glass conservatory or a caravan. Even if it is cloudy when you leave, the sun may come out later in the day and make it unbearably hot.

Groom your dog regularly to get rid of excess hair. Give long-coated breeds a haircut at the start of the summer, and later in the season, if necessary.

Dogs need exercise - even when it is hot. Walk your dog early in the morning or later in the evening. Never allow your dog to exercise excessively in hot weather.

Dogs can get sunburned too – particularly those with light-coloured noses or light-coloured fur on their ears. Ask your vet for advice on pet-safe sunscreen.

Updates from the "Tweetathon"

The team aimed to Tweet about 10% of the incidents coming in to RSPCA National Control Centre over a 24 hour period.

Most of the messages are all capitals because this was done by simply copy/pasting from the NCC computer's outgoing feed of incident details (the information which they send out to the field staff for action on the ground).

This is possible because the control centre staff have to summarise the gist of each problem in a few sentences. By serendipity this means the rather elderly Control Centre IT system is an ideal source of Twitter status updates even though social media hadn't been invented when it was first set up.

RSPCA 24/7 Tweetathon

I've moved up the widget that displays RSPCA_Frontline's twitter feed so that it's more easily visible. Tony Woodley is aiming to display a selection of the incidents reported to the RSPCA National Control centre over a 24 hour period.

The codes E, NE, SE etc. indicate which of the RSPCA regions is the location of the incident.

Please don't forget that many incidents will result in the relevant local branch being asked to provide support in terms of veterinary treatment or care until an animal can be placed in a permanent new home.

You can donate to our branch (RSPCA Cambridge) using text messages on your mobile phone. Simply text the message PETS00 £10 to 70070 to donate £10 to RSPCA Cambridge. Your phone provider will add £10 to your bill and send £10 to our bank account. If you are a UK taxpayer and you complete the gift aid options we will receive an additional £2.80 at no cost to you. 

We stagger on...

Many thanks to everyone who turned out on a damp evening to support our second attempt at holding a valid AGM. We were successful in getting the required seven people elected, so the branch remains in being for another year.

PLEASE! Persuade, badger or cajole your animal-loving friends and relations into joining the RSPCA.

Adult membership is £25, of which £5 is passed on to support your local branch and keep its welfare services running. 

My personal goals for 2012 are to see the branch able to:

• Save all healthy and treatable animals that we take in for rehoming.
• Continue to offer low-cost veterinary treatment for responsible pet owners in financial need.
• Offer rehoming as an alternative to euthanasia for pets belonging to owners who cannot afford to pay for even reduced-rate veterinary treatment.

Wildlife

I usually try to get people who find sick or injured wildlife to call the National Control Centre as the Animal Welfare Officers are better placed to handle them than we are. However I did bike over and collect a hedgehog on  Friday as the caller didn't have anywhere safe to shut it in away from her two dogs.

Took Hhog in to the clinic on Saturday when I went in for Taylor's weekly foot examination and the clinician diagnosed probable lungworm infestation and gave him subcutaneous fluids and panacur.

The problem with treating lungworms is that, although panacur wormer will kill off the parasites, it's not good for you to have dead worms embedded in your lungs either. By yesterday evening the hedgehog was obviously worse and he'd also opened up a nasty puncture wound which had fly eggs developing into maggots, so I ran him in to the hospital as an emergency. Sadly, they called in the morning to say he was still deteriorating and recommending euthanasia.

Unfortunately almost any wild animal will be extremely ill or injured before it will let humans get up close, meaning there's a dilemma of whether you are simply prolonging the animal's distress by trying to treat.

On a happier note, Taylor's sore feet are gradually improving and only one still looks really bad.

If anyone has lost a budgie, one was handed in to Village Vets over the weekend and will be adopted by one of the nurses if no-one claims him.

Singing Westies!

Singing Westies!

I'm sure someone out there would love these.

Press their paws and they sing and do a little jig.

Many thanks to the kind donor and to everyone else who brought items last week.

The response to our appeal has been wonderful, but we need to keep up the momentum if we are to preserve our services, which are in greater demand than ever. It's quite frightening to think that we run the only low-cost small animal clinic in the whole of Cambridgeshire. If we close, many animals will have no source of veterinary treatment at all.

We also have a large collection of very nice collectable china dolls.

Another antifreeze poison case

Vets have just phoned to let me know the cat who was admitted with suspected poisoning last night has been put to sleep as tests showed that his kidneys had stopped functioning.  He was only three years old, and the only consolation is that at least we were able to prevent him dying slowly and in pain.

His owner paid £10 (all the cash she had). I hope that she will pay us back for the rest of the cost of emergency treatment, but obviously it's human nature that there's less incentive when the outcome is a dead pet rather than a live one. 

What to do?

Ultimately the only solution is to mobilise the local pet-owning community to understand we can't keep providing services unless everyone helps by doing something, even if they can't do very much.

Ducklings!

One of our phone rota volunteers also takes in lost birds, but this little group handed themselves in.

Ducks often fly into the built-up areas of Cambridge looking for safe places to nest, and they often find it tricky to get back as the ducklings have to walk.

Releasing the family on the banks of the Cam

Mum and babies swim off into the sunset

Explaining finances

Cambridge Evening News came over for a photo-session at the clinic today, with a view to doing a follow-up on the feature they did last month. I think they found my explanation of how our finances work confusing, if not positively evasive, and I'm wondering how it can be made more understandable.

Part of the problem seems to be an assumption that most charities have some kind of regular funding, either from grants or donations, which may dip (if the grant is cut, for example), in which case they then have a fixed sum they need to appeal for in order to fill the gap.

In our case, our regular income is generated by our shops. The good thing about this is that it's possible to increase it by working harder. The downside (and what's confusing) is that shops have running costs, so it's possible to have a very impressive turnover  (money taken) but relatively modest profit (money generated for use by the charity). 

So, for example with our new shop in Newmarket (I've rounded up the figures):

Monthly takings: £6,500

Monthly rent: £2,300

Monthly Wages: £1,000

Rates, heat etc: £300

That still means a net monthly profit over running costs of nearly £3,000 (although you need to bear in mind that we spent money fitting out the shop, so it's not an actual profit until we've fully covered those costs, which we should do in 10 months time). 

This is why the shop takings we need to achieve in order to fund our clinic and the rehoming and emergency veterinary treatment are such a lot larger than the costs of the programs themselves.

Once the shops' fixed running costs have been covered, everything else is a bonus, so if we can generate more sales, increase donations of items we can sell and so on, the percentage profit available to finance animal welfare will increase. More sales mean some extra overheads (for example electricity used to heat water for steam cleaning donations), but they're comparatively minor.

Rollercoaster week

After the high of our dog show, I got home to find Bambi hiding under my bed and obviously not well. Taxi to the 24 hour vet and she was put on a drip to support her liver, but sadly further tests and a scan showed that she'd finally gone into liver failure, 3 years after I adopted her, having been signed over to the branch by her previous owners, who couldn't cope with her medical condition.

Fifteen years isn't bad for a cat who developed a chronic condition at twelve, but I'm torn between relief that she had good quality of life right up to the last few days and sadness that it all happened so suddenly. Cycled over to the vet after working in the shop last Sunday and she's now buried in my garden.

As we approach the holidays, schools and youth groups start to think about end of term activities, and it's excellent that the St Matthews school Brownie pack and Barton Primary school were both kind enough to organise fundraising events to support us. Let's hope the children who got involved will be the RSPCA volunteers and trustees of the future.

Saturday was horribly wet, but today we had one of the best Sundays at the Burleigh St. shop for a long time, taking over £250. Very many thanks to all the people who donated so many really attractive items. 

The desperate need to keep funds coming in was made all too clear too, as I had two calls for help with the consultation fee for very sick animals. If we hadn't been here neither of them would have been seen by a vet today. 

This always involves very difficult decisions when we're called outside normal consulting hours, and the animal isn't registered with our clinic, as it's so expensive just to be seen and any help we give would go much further if it could wait until morning. Vets can't always tell whether something really is serious by asking the owner over the phone. 

Occasionally their judgement can be hopelessly wrong, as happened to me some years ago when a vet assured me the owner was just making a fuss, but in fact the cat didn't survive the night. I felt dreadful, and of course the owner blamed the RSPCA for the cat's death.

Plasma cell pododermatitis

Poor Taylor and his sore feet enjoyed minor celebrity status at the clinic today with all the students gathering round to see them.

He's got plasma cell pododermatitis, an unusual problem, which fortunately doesn't seem to be as painful as it looks and is relatively cheap to treat. The picture below gives some idea what it looks like (image freely available under GPL from the veterinary dermatitis site).

The pads of Taylor's hind feet are almost completely healed now, and the sore area of his left fore foot is better than it was, but his right forefoot still looks horrible, although some of the swelling has shrunk.
Update (11th January 2012)
Taylor's feet are looking pretty good; slightly puffy and with thinner, softer skin than a normal cat, but no bleeding or splitting. He's been off medication for several weeks with no deterioration so it looks as though his condition can be managed by keeping him in an environment where he's not running on anything hard or sharp and monitoring his feet for any inflammation that indicates he needs another course of steroids.

RSPCA bookshop at 188 Mill Road

These charming "Four Seasons" and cat prints were donated to our Books and Prints shop at 188 Mill Road.

Spring

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Mill Road doesn't really attract many shoppers during the week and the area is becoming more and more just a "dormitory" where people who work more centrally return at night. This means we can't justify paying a manager's salary for the shop, as we'd never sell enough to cover it. 

At the moment we can usually only open on Fridays and Saturdays, when we have enough volunteers. I've been on holiday from my paid job for the past few days, so I've experimentally taken in some of the branch paperwork I need to catch up with and done it at the staff desk. Results have been patchy. Thursday afternoon was pretty good, but yesterday was hardly worth the effort, with most people browsing rather than buying.

We do get a lot of good donations, that donors might not make the effort to cart all the way to our Burleigh Street shop, and I would really like to make the effort to keep 188 open for a full six days. If you have an interest in books, music CDs or pictures and think you might like to get involved, even for just a few hours each week, please email volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Talking Tigger

Huge Tigger cuddly toy donated to our Burleigh Street Shop. Press his tummy and he talks.

First pics from the dog show

These were taken from my phone, and some of the people with proper cameras will have better shots, but they do give a feel of how the day went.

In spite of a few heavy showers everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and we raised over £500. The Shelford Feast organisers have said they would be happy to consider letting us do the show as an annual event and it looks as though there's lots of scope for improving our total next year with the experience gained from this time.

Rain clouds blowing up

Heroic collector in dog suit

Rehydrating our shaggy dog collector

Face painting

Judging the best veteran

All in all this was a really positive event, with several visitors taking membership leaflets, and some of them taking advantage of the opportunity to get their dogs chipped.

Crisis upon crisis

Message from Vanessa, one of the Animal Collection Officers, to say she's just dropped off four seven week old GSD X Rottweiler cross pups after getting them signed over to the RSPCA.

Meanwhile, the other side of the county, one of our Inspectors is desperately trying to arrange treatment for an elderly dog owned by an even more elderly gentleman with no money. He's been quoted over £300 at a private vet.

We need more volunteers!


Fosterers, fundraisers, shop helpers, donors... You name it, we need it!

Horrendous morning at clinic

These pictures are a bit dark, but do at least give some impression of how swollen and sore this poor stray cat's pads had got. The pic immediately on the left is actually the underside of one of his front feet, and you can just see the claws round the outside.

I have a horror of really bad injuries to cats' feet ever since the time I trapped a feral tom who was literally walking on bone because abscesses had rotted away all the flesh of his pads.

To my enormous relief, the vets think this cat's problem is an immune-related dermatitis which is causing horribly painful swelling and bleeding, but isn't destroying the tissue in the way an infection would do.

He's got to go on steroids and antibiotics for a week and be confined in a hygienically-clean cat pen while (hopefully) the open, bleeding wounds heal up. Unfortunately all this will mean he can't be released where he came from as he'll almost certainly need to take steroids for the rest of his life, so he's yet another kitty looking for a permanent home.

The clinic was just non-stop busy, with two difficult questions about clients from long distances which illustrate the enormously worrying vet treatment situation. First was a gentleman who takes in rescue dogs and had been in the habit of using our clinic. Ironically he lives just next to Block Fen animal home in Wimblington, but we just can't allow him to keep registering extra animals. Second, and much more troubling was a couple from just outside our catchment area who'd been quoted £500 (which they didn't have up front) by a private vet to operate on their cat's broken jaw. We can't let them register because the University simply wouldn't accept it if we did, but I'm afraid they will be another group of people who'll go away and tell all their friends that "the RSPCA doesn't care about animals". 

I do care; we all care, but we do not have unlimited funds, and, like the PDSA, will be able to help fewer and fewer animals every time someone withdraws support because we can't help with everything.

Update
Three weeks on Taylor's feet look a lot better. The really bad one (shown in the photos) is still red and sore, but the swelling's gone down, and his other three feet look almost completely normal - would look normal if you didn't know what you were looking for.

Animal Welfare Statistics for June

In June our clinic treated 274 dogs, 106 cats, 13 rabbits and 5 miscellaneous "small furries" - a 6% increase compared with June 2010. We neutered 20 dogs, 3 cats and 5 rabbits, and chipped 13 dogs and 7 cats.

We rehomed 2 dogs and 2 cats, but took in 1 dog and sixteen cats, so we urgently need more offers of permanent and foster homes. Please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk if you are interested in adopting or fostering animals.

Repeat AGM

We didn't get the 10 members needed to hold a valid Annual General Meeting, so will be trying again on 2nd August. If you are an adult member of the branch you'll receive your notification by post towards the end of this week. 

The repeat meeting will be at 61 Burleigh Street, and will be slimmed down to the bare minimum required to elect a committee to keep the branch in existence, so it should only take about 30 minutes. 

I very much fear that the problems with branch AGM's are just symptoms of something wider and more troubling. In our area, roughly 5% of the population make use of some of our branch services during the course of a year (this isn't just the clinic; it's also things like helping with injured stray animals, advice and so on and it's not necessarily the same 5% each year). 

Roughly 0.2% of the same population are branch members, and roughly 0.02% are active volunteers.

Either we convince more people that we are not a statutory service and without participation there will be no service, or in a few years we will be a "downed branch" with no help for owners with sick animals and minimal ability to rehome animals from the inspectorate.

If you are not a member of the RSPCA, please consider joining. You can do it online by going to www.rspca.org.uk/membership, or pick up a leaflet from any of our charity shops. Membership gives you a vote at branch and national level and means you can (if you wish) stand for election to your local branch committee and to regional and national trustee boards. 

Dining table for sale at Burleigh St charity shop

Varnished pine dining table to seat 6 people, plus chairs, for sale £80.

Wayne and Ffiona managed to collect it from the donor in their hatchback, but you would need a car with the capability of folding down the back seats to take it away.

(The crockery is not included).