Fun dog show: pics from last year

Just to whet your appetites for our Bigger and Better show in two weeks time.

This year's show will begin at 12 noon (registration) with the first class starting at 12.30. Lots of side shows and activities as well as the main show itself. Please come along and help raise even more money to help local animals.

Ben, our mascot for the day

Winners of the "mismatched pair"

Waiting for the command!

Fastest recall

Slightly lumbering recall

Flatten your ears to reduce wind resistance

I retrieve too!

Village Vet Whittlesford kindly provided sponsorship

Some of the winners

In a bit of a tangle

More winners

A bit hot for some

Face painting and ice-creams!

Getting a thorough examination

Animal Welfare Statistics for May

During May the branch rehomed three dogs, two cats and nine ferrets. Our clinic treated 218 dogs, 68 cats, 10 rabbits and 8 miscellaneous small furries.

Numbers of rabbits seen by the clinic continue to be worryingly low considering that this is the time of year when rabbits should be vaccinated against myxomatosis.

In Cambridge even the bees are on bicycles!

Not really RSPCA- related, but I couldn't resist adding this photo of a swarm of bees who settled on one unlucky student's bike which she'd parked in the New Museums site where I work for my day job. (The bees are the brown mass hanging below the basket).

Heeelp!

Frenetic Sunday starting at 6 am feeding the cats, tableting those that need it and washing up a mountain of cat dishes.

Then to the bookshop at nine to load Nicola's car with boxes of books for our sale at ASDA. Unload, wave goodbye to Pat and Amy who stay to begin setting up, then return to shop and repeat the process.

Grab bike, off to Burleigh st to open up our shop there and let in Glenn with the large dog collecting box from the stall at Arbury Carnival.

On arrival, discover Saturday team evidently had several gigantic donations of sale items (good) but hadn't had time to do any processing (less good as stock room now so full I can't move).

Decide nothing I can do about this for the present and open up. 

Feed coffee to the wonderful volunteer who takes over the till and stagger back to do battle with the horror. 

Inspection of the bags fortunately reveals several of them contain things that can be processed while at the till; mostly this involves attaching gift aid stickers and a price and is easily done with small items such as DVDs and videos.

We recently put out an appeal for soft toys, and our supporters have done us proud; lots of these, and again quickly sorted and priced. Legally we can only sell soft toys if they have the "CE" kite mark which should mean they are safe for children.

In a couple of hours we must have put out at least 200 individual items between us. This is key to a successful shop as customers will only keep coming back if they see new stock coming out each day.

By 5 pm we are about ready to drop, but the level in the stock room has dropped enough for the remaining unsorted bags to be stacked fairly neatly in our sorting bins ready for the Monday team to start hanging and steaming clothes to fill the shop rails which have been depleted by shoppers during the day.

Cash up and reconcile the till and find we've taken £188.40; reasonably good for a Sunday. 

Unfortunately this means Pat and Nicola have to be left to pack up and transport the unsold book sale remains on their own, which is heavy work as only a proportion of books will go at any sale.

We need more help (or I need to be twins!)

Education?

I doubt whether fiction that beats them over the head with a moral works any better for children than it does for adults. These are now a bit dated, but the storylines do reflect Monica Edwards' own wrestling with questions about the way animals should be treated in a way that assumes children can think for themselves.

Some of them (Punchbowl Midnight and The Wild One are particularly relevant to the aftermath of the dairy calf documentary as they portray a fictionalised picture of life on a small scale mixed farm in the 1950s and the conflict between profitability and love of animals.

Traffic accident

Looking very poorly and having fluids

This poor chap was hit by a car either Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning. Luckily one of our clinic clients spotted him and knew the clinic was open so she could rush him straight down.  Although he looks very pathetic and sorry for himself in this photo there is a happy ending as his family phoned round and traced where he had been taken for treatment.

Before we knew he was owned I made up a donation page on JustGiving to raise funds towards his treatment. If you would like to donate to help ensure that we can provide treatment to the next injured animal, please visit http://www.justgiving.com/ditto

Dairy calves

Storify of the reaction to the "Jimmy's farm" documentary about male dairy calves. I have to say that I'm startled by the number of viewers who seem to have had no idea how the food they eat is produced.

Dogs die in hot cars

This is an actual page from the RSPCA prosecutions report for 2011. A moment's inattention has meant a hideous death for two dogs, a lifetime of regret for the person responsible and enormous distress for the police staff who tried to save the dogs.

PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE DOGS IN CARS UNATTENDED IN WARM WEATHER.

Doing what we can

These cuties were found living outside with their mum and we were asked to take them in so they didn't grow up to add to the unhandleable feral cat population. Fortunately mum is friendly and the whole family should be easy to rehome once the kits are old enough.

Healthy cats like this should need minimal expenditure on veterinary treatment—basically just flea and worm treatment, vaccination and neutering. Animals with serious injuries are much more of a difficulty.

At the moment we've had to impose a 12 month moratorium on taking in animals whose injuries will require surgery, simply because it's so hugely expensive.

You may have seen Wood Green's appeal to raise the £5,000 needed for surgery on an injured dog they took in last week. Most of the operations needed to treat strays we handle will be more likely to fall in the £400-£800 bracket, but we simply can't produce the money to fund several of these each week.

So it was with a very heavy heart that one of our volunteers took a call about a stray cat with a broken jaw. His surgery was estimated at £250; a comparatively small amount, but an amount that we simply don't have if we're to carry on meeting all our other welfare commitments.

Most of the other charities are in the same boat, but by phoning round Janine managed to locate a space in one of the shelters run by the National RSPCA which have an in-house vet so would be able to do the surgery themselves. Obviously there is still some cost involved, but doing it this way will get it down to an amount we can justify as not being likely to put other animals at risk.

Another of our volunteers will transport him there tomorrow morning.

It's not ideal; injured animals should preferably be moved around the country as little as possible, both for their own welfare and to save resources in terms of fuel and volunteers' time.

Lecturing people about their behaviour does not work

Using charity budgets effectively

Great presentation from David Bowles on educating the public rather than nagging them.

Exhausted

Got home about half an hour ago after working in the charity shop all day and almost immediately got a call on the branch 24 hour mobile. This is answered by volunteers on a rota system and is primarily meant as a way people whose animals are registered to use our clinic can contact us in an emergency.

Today was one of my days to take the calls and unfortunately this one was from someone who'd been put on to us by Directory Enquiries although he ought to have been told to call the RSPCA National Control Centre. He'd picked up a young hare which he thought had an injured leg and wanted us to take it.

Most people are reasonable when we explain that our clinic only has facilities for domestic animals and that they need to call the NCC, who will have contact details for local vets prepared to give first aid to wildlife. If he'd been closer to Cambridge I'd have taken a chance and suggested he went to the 24 hour vet in Milton, but this wasn't really practical and, in fact, when in desperation I did offer that vet's details as one I definitely knew was open on a Sunday evening, the caller became really angry and abusive, saying that as I obviously didn't care and was just fobbing him off he would kill the hare by running it over.

I contacted NCC and asked them to call him as a matter of urgency, but I've no idea whether he did kill the hare or not (or indeed whether it really was injured or was simply a young one sitting waiting for its mother to return).

We are not magicians; the kind of service which the public expects from the RSPCA would cost billions, not millions to provide. If you find an injured animal we will ask you if you can take it to the closest available vet, because that is the option that will enable treatment to start as quickly as possible. If you can't transport the animal, an inspector or animal welfare officer will collect it, but this won't be instant, because there are fewer than 500 field staff covering the whole of England and Wales. In some cases a volunteer may be able to get out, but we do have to eat and sleep sometimes.

Gearing up for RSPCA Week

Tony Woodley and the RSPCA's stance on campaigning

I think Tony Woodley's latest contribution to the debate on TwitLonger about the Grand National is so important, not just with reference to racing, but generally, that I'm reproducing it here.

#RSPCA works with organisations to improve welfare.  

"It's better to be in the tent than outside it shouting in". 

We have used this ethos in the way we work to greatly influence the law makers and policy makers affecting animal welfare since 1824 when we were founded.  

We work with the farm and research animal industries and have brought about massive changes in animal welfare in those areas. The respect as a legal and reasonable organisation that we have with authorities such as the Government, DEFRA, Police etc means we do get listened to and changes, though they may be slow, do get made. 

If we were to simply walk away from an issue saying we 100% disagree and so will then just campaign for it to end, we would lose that respect we have and effectively 'abandon' the animals and leave them with no independent body trying to improve their welfare. 

There are other organisation who may wish to carry out extreme and/or illegal acts in the area of animal welfare, that is not us and if we did become extreme and/or acting illegally, we would not have the influence we do have. 

It may not always bring about swift changes but it does bring about long term and effective change, for example the Animal Welfare Act 2006 which the RSPCA was hugely involved with drafting and is the best thing to happen for animal welfare for many many years. 

I hope this assists some with understanding how we work.

http://tl.gd/gvojnc 

I can't stress enough the vital importance of Tony's comment that to walk away is to abandon the animals.

Otherwise, continual very light blogging I'm afraid, due to the combination of our approaching annual audit and weekend duty at our charity shops.

Congratulations to the new inspectors graduating today

Sadly this is also the day HQ have announced that there are likely to be at least 130 redundancies of support and admin staff.

Admin staff don't get much appreciation, but the work they do does matter because they are the people who ensure that payments get sent on time, repairs get done and phones are answered. They are the links who keep the wheels turning and if they drop beyond a critical level those wheels will begin to drop off.

RSPCA Week: It's all about money...

And, yes, I'm afraid that it is all about money. 

Without funds to pay for veterinary treatment, pet food, boarding of animals we can't place in domestic foster homes, suitable animal housing, petrol costs for volunteers who move animals or pre-visit adopters, we can't help any animals.

We understand that most people are keen to do hands-on volunteering to benefit animals, but, without the financial wherewithal to cover materials and the things that volunteers can't do, there can't be any hands-on work.

Whatever your role in the branch, please look at your diary and work out a way to put in at least 2 hours helping with this year's RSPCA week collection. 

RSPCA week runs from 30th April to 6th May and we have permission to collect outside all the Tesco Superstores in our area (Ely, Newmarket, Royston, Cambridge, Fulbourn, Bar Hill and Milton). Rowena, our new volunteer organiser is working out a rota to cover as much of the available time as possible, so PLEASE email her at volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk to let her know that you will do your bit.

Thank you!

What a busy month!

Things are really beginning to buzz now. Our new volunteer group is forging ahead with plans for a newsletter, re-vamped website and the best-ever RSPCA week collection effort. We also have an enthusiastic and growing team of helpers at the bookshop, which is now opening six days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday. Anyone who might be interested in training to cover Tuesday, please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk as it would be great if we can make the full 7 days by early Summer.

The catch in all this is that, for a while, the existing committee members will be busier and busier the more help we get because new people need training and support. Don't get me wrong, this is GOOD! However it does mean light blogging and less attention than usual to some of our other activities.

If you can spare 2 or more hours between 30th April and 6th May, please email volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk as we need all the collectors we can possibly recruit. Volunteer collections are one of THE most cost-effective ways of fundraising as there are virtually no overheads and donors like to know that all the money they give will be spent on helping local animals.

The veterinary treatment crisis goes on...

Wood Green Animal Shelters are trying to publicise the dire situation of animals whose owners have no means of paying for necessary treatment:

Wood Green, The Animals Charity is being forced to turn away more than 14 pets in need of veterinary care every week because their owners have neglected to insure them.

The Charity is receiving daily requests to treat issues including broken legs, jaws, ear infections, skin disorders and dental problems of dogs, cats and rabbits because pet owners cannot afford the treatment.

We had a call this morning from someone in Sawtry (sadly well outside our clinic catchment area) who'd been given our details by Wood Green in the desperate hope that we could do something to help them, and another request via the shelter for help with neutering.

A collie was abandoned at another vet, almost certainly because her owners knew they couldn't possibly pay the cost of her treatment.

Personally I am haunted by some of the calls I've received where owners beg and plead for us to help their pets.

The bottom line is that we can't put the existence of our clinic at risk to help people who could have saved their pets by taking the minimal action of getting them registered and therefore making them eligible for low-cost out of hours treatment from our own veterinary provider.

Our of hours emergency treatment at private vets is now hugely expensive and we simply cannot currently afford even the comparatively small (£100-£150!) cost of emergency euthanasia if we're going to end up paying it two or three times each week.

Before we can consider reinstating help of any kind at private vets we have to raise enough funds to be certain of the clinic's long-term viability, and that means we have to build a proper fundraising team.

If you can help, please email volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

We're now gearing up for RSPCA week, which is our single biggest fundraising event of the year, when we have permission to collect outside all 7 major Tesco stores in our branch area. Every extra person willing to give a couple of hours to collect means £20-£40 raised to help suffering animals.

Please consider whether you can spare those hours this year.

Reactions to "Pedigree Dogs Exposed: Three Years on"

Pledge 2: saving homeable animals

Mention pet over-population and most people imagine huge numbers of healthy animals being put to sleep. The reality is different; at least in this country.

Animal shelters are under extreme pressure to take in more and more unwanted animals, but a lot of the time this is not straightforwardly because owners have lost interest (or, viewed more charitably, can no longer cope because of changes in their circumstances).

Many strays come into rescue because they are ill or injured and frequently the reason why an owner cannot cope is inability to fund veterinary treatment.

To live up to the pledge of saving all potentially rehomeable animals we do need to reduce the numbers of animals bred and taken on by people who are never going to be able to afford proper care, or who could cope with a few animals but not with five or six. The real crux, though, is to achieve a situation where we can always give owners of treatable pets the option of having them signed over to be treated and rehomed, or support to keep their animals if they are prepared to work with us to pay at least part of the cost.

The Five Pledges: Pledge 1

Please help us to raise funds so that our branch can continue to support this pledge by providing low-cost neutering, micro-chipping and veterinary care to the local community.

Pics from the Newmarket shop's 1st anniversary

Unfortunately Chief Inspector Mark Thompson was called away to an incident so was unable to attend the anniversary. However the customers, staff and volunteers thoroughly enjoyed it, including a fantastic cake baked by a local confectioner's shop.

This was the first time I'd had an opportunity to see the shop in action and I was very impressed by the way Lorna and her team have made use of every inch of sales space. This is essential as the Market St. shop has lots of storage in its basement, but a very compact sales area which depends on keeping a constant flow of items to fill up as donations are sold.

The cake!

Newmarket shop's first birthday

Our shop at 10A Market Street, Newmarket opened on 14th February a year ago, and the shop manager and volunteers will be holding a celebration on the anniversary next week. 

Our local Chief Inspector, Mark Thompson, cut the ribbon for us when the shop opened, and he will be there again to mark a year's successful fundraising.

Please go along if you can to support everyone who put so much effort into keeping the project running.

The official celebration will be at 10.30 (with cake!) but your presence (buying lots of things!) will be valued throughout the day.

MANY HAPPY RETURNS, NEWMARKET!

Tacking!

As a footnote to the previous post, take a look at this list advertising Shar Pei pups for sale. Scan down the list looking for "Tacking".

Then ask yourself how we ever got to a situation where it's considered normal to breed puppies who need their facial skin held out of their eyes by tacking it as if someone was taking up the hemline of a skirt.

Born to suffer

I'd like to share a few calls to our branch helpline this week which illustrate exactly why the RSPCA's "Born to Suffer" campaign is so important. 

The first, and most disturbing, came on Sunday evening just after 10 pm. The caller had a Rough Collie puppy with acute liver disease. The pup had been given first aid and initial diagnosis by a Blue Cross animal hospital while she was away from home, and she'd been advised to go to our clinic as soon as possible. Sadly the puppy got much worse over the weekend and was in great distress by the time she called us. 

I very much doubt if he would have survived even if he'd been registered and therefore eligible to be seen by the University Vet School right away, but if our own finances hadn't been so dire I would have authorised the cost of having him put to sleep that night rather than by Wood Green the following morning.

There are a whole load of issues here: inbreeding and line breeding of pedigree dogs which increases the likelihood that they will suffer genetic disease; the ethics of commercial veterinary surgeries with no provision for emergency euthanasia to relieve suffering where an owner has no money; the responsibility of pet owners to set aside enough funds for at least minimal treatment and the responsibility of breeders once a puppy has left their ownership.

This is why we so urgently need to raise enough funds to be able to relieve suffering when no-one else will take responsibility.

The second call came today and is less awful because the puppy concerned is receiving treatment and should end up with reasonable quality of life. He's a Shar Pei and the purchaser was horrified to discover that the "weepy" eye which caused her to take him to a vet was in fact ulcerated and will need surgery to treat the deformed eyelids which are causing his eyelashes to rub and damage the eyeball itself. The surgery's likely to cost her £300-£500 and the breeder is flatly refusing to return any of the pup's purchase price to cover part of it.

Why should he have to suffer this discomfort for something that at the end of the day is simply a fad for wrinkled skin?

Haggling!

Our shop volunteers are usually a cheerful bunch who take everything in their stride, but one thing they find really stressful is customers who try to beat them down on price. 

Some of those who try this on are pretty obviously dealers, and a few of them will put on quite a lot of pressure when they think they might be able to bully an inexperienced volunteer into letting them have something for much less than it's really worth so they can later sell it on at a profit.

Quite honestly this is sometimes verging on theft—after all, the original donor gave the item to raise money to help animals, not to line someone else's pockets. It's unfair to the volunteer on the till, and if they do give way it potentially loses future donations for the shop because donors won't give worthwhile items if they know they'll be sold at stupidly low prices. Haggling also disrupts the working of the shop because it usually means the person on the till has to call the shop manager for a definite ruling, which means the manager isn't getting on with the back-room work.

In this respect the gift aid system is a bit of a mixed blessing. The way the system works means donors get regular reports on what we've managed to raise from their goods, and we've had some very positive feedback saying how nice it is to know how well the sales went. The downside is that donors will also know if the amount raised is suspiciously low. If that happens regularly they're not going to come back—and there's an underlying concern that they may be wondering if we are pilfering stock. 

The perfect Valentine's day gift?

If the man or woman in your life loves books (as well as you, of course!), why not buy an author-signed volume as a Valentine's day gift.

We have a shelf of very reasonably priced books to suit every taste, signed by authors ranging from Maeve Binchy to Sir Peter de la Billière at our bookshop at 188 Mill Road.

The shop's next open on Friday 27th January, then every Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the week: perfect for last-minute choices.

We have some wonderful new volunteers training  now and hope very soon we'll be able to open Monday and Tuesdays too.

Please display this poster if you have a suitable location

Animal Welfare Statistics for 2011

Just finished the analysis sheet for 2011 and the final totals for the Cambridge branch are:

Low cost veterinary treatments provided via our clinic:


Dogs: 2,826
Cats: 1,204
Rabbits: 107
Miscellaneous small animals: 53

Grand total: 4,190

Emergency first aid at private vets (for owned animals): 

Dogs: 38
Cats: 33

Microchipping:

Dogs: 143
Cats: 121

Animals rehomed: 

Dogs: 29
Cats: 75
Rabbits: 11
Miscellaneous small animals: 13

Grand total: 128

The number of rabbits seen at the clinic remains worryingly low considering the high availability of rabbits as pets. For the first time I began breaking down our vaccination statistics by species and it is concerning that very few rabbits seem to be vaccinated against myxomatosis. 

On the plus side, it's interesting that cats appear to have a relatively high vaccination rate - in many months nearly equal numbers of cats and dogs are vaccinated even though overall figures for attendance by dogs are more than double those of cats. Dogs appear to be microchipped more frequently than cats; possibly because chipping is viewed as a way of preventing theft rather than reuniting an injured animal with their family.

We rehomed slightly more animals than our intake during the year, enabling us to end 2011 with a slightly reduced current number of animals in care.

11 of the cats, 1 rabbit and two rats taken in had to be put to sleep on vets advice due to untreatable injuries or illness.

Cats update

The vets had a call this morning from a family whose newly spayed cat had gone missing in the area where our little injured cat was found. They drove over to view and fortunately she is their cat, so  we have a happy ending there.

No-one has enquired about the older boy yet, although the vets say he's so laid back and friendly he must have a family out there somewhere. They wired his jaw yesterday and the plan is to transfer him to a foster home tomorrow and see how he goes. He's not yet very willing to eat, which may be due to crush injuries to the delicate bones of his nasal passages impairing his sense of smell. The vets are going to give him an injectable appetite stimulant this evening and we hope he will then eat normally in the foster home. If he doesn't, we may have to bring him in to our clinic with a view to fitting him with a gastric tube so he can be fed that way.

He'll need a second operation in about six weeks to remove the wire from his jaw once it's healed.

We need to recruit more volunteer foster carers for recuperating animals. If you might be interested in this, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

Update
Older boy's family have now turned up, so he'll be going home too.

Two injured cats taken in

These cats were taken in as the result of two separate road accidents. One is a middle-aged neutered male, who has a broken jaw, but we hope no more serious injuries, the other is a young female who has been recently spayed as a shaved area is still visible. She has a broken pelvis, but the vets think she will not need a repair operation although she will need at least six weeks confined to a cage to reduce stress on the damaged bone. If you think either of them may be your cat, please contact us or phone the emergency vets where they are being cared for on 0845 500 4247.

Gift Aid: Thank You Everyone!

Our Newmarket shop achieved a fantastic 40% gift-aided sales in December, meaning that we will be able to claim around £500 from HMRC. Total gift aided sales for all three shops were nearly £4,000 meaning that we are very close to achieving our initial target of raising an extra £1,000 income for the branch each month through gift aid.

Thank you to everyone who completed a form, and thank you to the staff and volunteers for putting in all the extra work involved in stickering and tagging sales items. It really is starting to pay off and help us towards our goal of maintaining as much of our animal welfare services as we possibly can.

Identifying a wheaten terrier

The Soft-Coated Wheaten Terrier Club are circulating a helpful guide on identifying Wheatens who have been neglected to an extent where it's difficult to guess their breed. I have to admit that my best guess for some of these pictures would have been a neglected Tibetan terrier or some kind of cross-breed.

Little tabby cat

We've just taken in a tabby kitten with head injuries. He's about 6 months old and has no chip or collar—he's young enough that the lack of a chip may simply mean someone was intending to get it done when he was neutered.

Sadly, he's another perfect illustration of the added complications caused by the unreasonable antipathy some people have towards the RSPCA and the way this makes sensible decision-making more difficult for us.

He may not survive, whatever we do. Head injuries are unpredictable and there's little that can be done to treat them except provide supportive care and medication to keep the patient pain-free and to reduce swelling and inflammation. 

He has a broken jaw and will need to be tube-fed, which means inserting a feeding tube under a general anaesthetic. To avoid subjecting him to two anaesthetics it makes sense to wire his jaw at the same time, although this will be wasted money if the head injuries kill him in the end. Anaesthesia always involves some risk, so it's possible that he may not survive the treatment intended to help him, but there's no way to avoid this as he can't be left without food.

Because he's so young we want to give him a chance, and if he does survive he should be easy to place in a home, even if his current owner doesn't make contact with us. However, his chances are probably not much better than 50/50 and arguably the funds needed for his treatment might be better used to help other animals. It's possible that an owner may turn up, but choose not to continue his treatment or request to sign him over to us.

Basil was not much more of a hopeful prospect when he first came in, so let us hope giving little tabby his chance was the right thing to do.

If we had opted for euthanasia and his owner then turned up, there are people out there who would have made use of the situation as propaganda to discourage donations to the RSPCA and knowing that doesn't make decision making any easier.

Sad update
Unfortunately little tabby didn't make it. He deteriorated during the night despite being given iv fluids and the vets advised that it would be wrong to attempt to put him through surgery the following day.

More freakonomics

• One of the most common reasons people give for not supporting the RSPCA is that we're not doing some task they think we ought to be—and often the reason we're not doing it is because we don't have enough support.

• The second most common reason is probably an objection to one of our campaigns (or conversely objections because the campaign isn't being pursued sufficiently vigorously!)

Update

Tony Woodley has a blog entry in the Huffington Post and the comments illustrate exactly what I mean.

Cats, Dogs and freakonomics

Freakonomics is basically about the use of ideas from economics to investigate how incentives shape the way people act—including perverse incentives that trap them into behaviour that benefits nobody, including themselves. I picked up a copy of the book in our charity shop recently, and I've been thinking about the ways in which these ideas apply to the world of animal welfare.

Lots of the issues we face are very clearly freakonomics-type problems:

• The person on very low income who buys a £2,000 puppy and doesn't have £20 to pay for vaccinations, or £55 to pay for neutering.
• Whether it's better for rescues to charge an adoption fee and lose some potential adopters, or charge nothing and risk rehoming to people who can't even afford the cost of a single veterinary consultation if the animal gets ill or injured.
• If rescues don't rehome to people who can't afford veterinary treatment, what happens when those people get animals through other channels?
• Does provision of low-cost, or free veterinary treatment for pet owners on low income mean some of them acquire more animals until they still can't afford treatment costs? What proportion of them?
• Pet owners who can't afford the cost of spaying and are then faced with the cost of a caesarian or emergency hysterectomy, which can be at least five times as expensive.
• Cat owners who put off spaying because of the cost and end up with five cats to feed instead of one.
• Pet owners who simply assume free or low-cost veterinary treatment will be available in an emergency. What proportion of pet owners does this apply to?
• Does provision of low-cost spay/neuter reduce the numbers of unwanted pets? It seems obvious that it should, but maybe it's not true for all species—for example most pet rabbits seem to be acquired from pet shops, and the primary reason for them becoming unwanted seems to be lack of knowledge about the amount of work and expense involved in keeping them. (It is very important to spay and neuter rabbits in order to be able to keep them in pairs which is vital for their individual welfare.)
• What effect does education about spaying and neutering have on the proportion of dogs and cats belonging to pedigree breeds? Are the effects the same for both species? 
• How do you avoid education replacing one problem by a different one? For example discouraging purchase of exaggerated pedigree dogs leading to a fad for crosses which may have their own problems.
• Fads for particular breeds (during my lifetime German Shepherds, Border Collies, Lurchers and now Staffordshires have all suffered the effects of excess popularity, or popularity for the wrong reasons.)
• Breeds becoming attractive to certain types of people precisely because they have a bad reputation.
• Is there a way to encourage pet owners who would otherwise be a drain on the resources of animal welfare societies to contribute by taking part in fundraising, or other useful activities, thus potentially changing a vicious circle into a virtuous one?

Update

Checking the link to the Freakonomics site, I came across this economics blog post which is horribly relevant to the problem of the family with maxed-out credit cards and a sick pet who won't make it through Christmas without treatment.

Clinic opening hours over the holiday

Tuesday 27th Dec: Closed
Wednesday 28th Dec: Closed
Thursday 29th Dec: OPEN
Saturday 31st Dec: Closed

The emergency out of hours service will be available throughout the holiday period - please phone the contact number on your registration card.

Basil off to his new home

Excellent news for Basil the little terrier who was found with terrible injuries to his front legs some weeks ago. Not only has he made an almost complete recovery, but he has a beautiful new home for Christmas.

All the family members are adults, so Christmas is a fairly quiet occasion for them and there should be no problems settling Basil in during the festive season.

The rather large plastic collar is to stop Basil licking at the scab on his right leg and he should be able to do without it fairly soon.

Late Night Shopping

As an experiment, we're going to open our shop at 61 Burleigh Street for late night shopping every Wednesday from 5-8 pm until Christmas.

Crossed fingers for good results.

We have lots of beautiful RSPCA cards and calendars, as well as plenty of items that would make really unusual presents - anyone interested in an antique earthenware hot water bottle?

Or a limited edition print of a racing car signed by Damon Hill.

A glimpse into the canine underworld

We've been concerned about the large numbers of animals being advertised on "Gumtree" and similar sites for a long time, and a call I took over the weekend gave me a very nasty insight into what can happen.

The caller wanted to find out whether the RSPCA could prosecute a man who bought a dog from him, and had the dog put down as dangerous within a few days of the transaction. Of course this wouldn't be possible because it's not illegal to have a vet put an animal to sleep—it's illegal to cause an animal to suffer, but not to kill.

If all the details of the story are correct, it appears that the purchaser changed his mind about wanting the dog, and possibly expected to be able to get his money back in order to buy a puppy (also, incidentally of a "status" breed). The seller couldn't have taken the dog back as his original reason for selling was friction with an existing dog (although he seems to have several other dogs and I wonder whether he is also breeding). He does appear to have left the purchaser a contact number when he sold the dog and offered to try to help solve any problems.

Background details of the various dogs involved are complicated, but there appears to be a whole ecosystem of people breeding dogs at home. Their motivation is probably a combination of the attraction of "cash in hand" income and a fairly genuine interest in dogs as a hobby. I wonder how much of it is driven by a desire to find a substitute for meaningful work that they can take pride in and whether an improvement in the job market would make things better.

An awful lot of dogs seem to be traded around like so many packets of sugar, with not much common sense about the presence of small children, or suitable facilities. Against this background our messages about not getting animals you can't afford to care for probably aren't going to make very much of an impact. 

The people we're trying to persuade are being lectured all the time—don't drink so much, don't smoke, eat more fruit, lose weight ... it's not hard to see why they're not going to pay attention to us.

Pics from Mill Road Winter fair 2011

Ben (in the dog suit) got rather too hot, while poor Pat was frozen running the tombola outside the shop for most of the afternoon. Grand total raised was £354.91, £22.86 of this from  the collecting boxes, just over £50 from the tombola and the rest from shop sales.

It just goes to prove that this shop can make money if we can only persuade people to realise we are here and come in.

Many of the people who visited on Saturday said how impressed they were by the shop and the interesting books available and that they hadn't realised we had a shop here (this roughly ten years after we first opened!)

We need more volunteers so that we can open six days a week. If you might be interested, please call in on a Saturday, drop in at our larger shop at 61 Burleigh street, or email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk

6 am this morning...

Yet another call from the purchaser of a new puppy that's now very ill. At six weeks old the pup is too young to leave the mother and the seller very obviously did not tell the truth when he said it had been wormed as pup is passing huge quantities of them as well as bloody diarrhoea.

The RSPCA has an online guide with useful tips about getting a puppy to help prospective adopters avoid some of the pitfalls.

Veterinary treatment again

Maddeningly it appears that people are still not paying attention to our plea that they get their animals registered at our clinic so that they will be eligible for low cost treatment outside normal clinic hours in an emergency. Combine this with the fact that others are still allowing animals to breed without considering what will happen if something goes wrong, and yet another group are buying young animals, and you have a nightmare situation.

To give some idea of what this means: on Monday we had a frantic call from someone whose new puppy was now vomiting repeatedly and becoming unresponsive. Nearly all her spare cash seems to have been spent buying the puppy and she had no idea that intravenous fluids at a private vet would cost around £200. On Sunday night we had a call from someone with a litter of kittens who'd accidentally knocked over a video-player on one of their siblings. Last Thursday evening someone who did know about the clinic called us as an emergency because his dog was very ill but he hadn't taken him to the normal clinic session because he didn't have any money. The previous week we had another instance of a person with a  giant dog so ill that she could not stand simply demanding that we should pay to get a vet out to her because she couldn't be got to the vet.

If we don't help, animals like these will go without any treatment, and it's not their fault their owners are so thoughtless.

If we do help, it risks simply perpetuating the problem of people with not enough to do acquiring animals they can't afford.

There's a separate problem that's almost a mirror-image of it. When we rehome animals, we do careful checks of the suitability of the home. In fact it's comparatively rare for us to turn homes down; it's more about trying to steer people towards suitable animals. However we do sometimes tell people they simply don't have suitable facilities and/or arrangements for what they'd do if the animal was ill or injured, and it's highly probable that some of those we refuse do go out and buy instead. When they do, we may well end up providing veterinary treatment for the purchased animal or, indeed, end up rehoming the animal if the purchasers really cannot cope.

In many ways, what we ought to be doing is trying to draw in more of the people who desperately want animal companionship, but don't have enough money or skills and involve them in working to provide a comprehensive support service.

Update
Sadly the puppy died two days later.