Thank you to everyone who donated items to our shop yesterday

Just a quick thank you to everyone who dropped in donations to our Burleigh Street shop yesterday.

We're now opening Sundays 11 am — 4 pm, and so far it looks as though sales aren't huge, but it's a more convenient day for many people who want to donate items for sale.

Next Volunteers' meeting

Just to remind you all that our volunteers meeting is this Thursday at the Cornerhouse Pub on Newmarket Road.  They do good food, it's warm, and there will be drinks so if you have a free hour or two we would love to see as many of you there as possible.

Things will get started around 7.30pm so we look forward to seeing you there! Any questions about the venue etc. please get in touch. If you are unable to make this meeting don't worry and we hope to see you in February!

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Update on our shops

FINALLY our new shop at 10A Market Street in Newmarket is really close to opening. The shopfitters will be starting work this Monday and should be finished by the 30th of this month. Our projected opening date is 1st February, but it's possible this may slip a little depending on how long it takes us to put all the stock out and do final tidying up.

We will be installing some of the new "gift aid" tills which will make it possible for donors to gift aid the proceeds of sale of their donated items if they are UK tax payers. The way this works is that the donor fills in a short form when they leave donations and the items are bar coded so that their sale can be tracked through the till. When a gift-aided item is sold, we send off a letter to the donor letting them know how much was raised and checking that they still want to give it to the charity. Provided they are happy for us to keep the money, they need do nothing more and we send off a monthly claim to the inland revenue who will give us an amount equal to the tax that the donor paid on an equivalent sum of their normal income. The system also helps us track our stock as it means an automatic record is kept of donations coming in and sales going out. We plan to install the new tills in both the Burleigh Street and the Market Street shops.

If you've been to 61 Burleigh Street recently you'll have noticed that our staff and volunteers worked hard over the Christmas "break" to put in a new "books and media" section in the raised area that was previously used for storage. This has approximately quadrupled the existing shelf space for books, CDs, videos and DVD's while making room in the rest of the sales area for more clothes and other items.

We've done some rationalisation of the shelves at our second hand bookshop at 188 Mill road and it is now staffed entirely by volunteers for half of the week. We would like to say a very big thank-you to the volunteers for agreeing to take on this extra level of responsibility. It is VERY much appreciated and will make it possible to continue with this shop which is much loved, but unfortunately does not have sufficient trade to cover the wages of a full-time manager and still make a profit to be used for the welfare work of the branch.

Please visit our shops to support the volunteers and make all their hard work worthwhile.

We also need donations of anything saleable. We move stock between the shops, so please feel free to take items to whichever is most convenient for you.

Branch volunteering and "Big Society"

There's lots of discussion about "Big Society" but not much light about what it may mean in practice; particularly for voluntary organisations which already exist.

Having experienced initiative after initiative over twenty-odd years on the branch committee, what  would I like to see?

• A single point for organisations to sign up as bodies who can take volunteers. One of the most frustrating things for me has been the waste of my time completing repetitive forms for each new bright idea about encouraging volunteering that emanates from Whitehall. I'd like to see a system (possibly using the existing volunteering add-on to our Charity Commission registration) that let us register as bona fide users of volunteers who are not either axe murderers or operating suicidally dangerous premises. Having done that once we wouldn't need to keep confirming that, yes, we do have a health and safety policy, Employers' Liability Insurance etc. 
• Recognition for existing volunteers if we (and they) choose. There are large numbers of people who have volunteered for years and years because they have no realistic prospect of getting paid work and they want to put something back into society. In an absolutely ideal world I think there would be an option for people like this to have an alternative type of benefits (maybe called something like volunteering tax credits) that was not a way of forcing or bribing people to "volunteer" but recognising their choice to make a contribution rather than sitting at home watching daytime TV.
• A centralised and simple way to record the amount of time volunteers have put in (maybe a website where we could submit details). Again it should be up to the volunteer and the organisation whether they want to be included.
• A single system which could be used to register any volunteer instead of the present alphabet soup of initiatives aimed at getting people into meaningful activity. Ideally this could be used to produce references and some information about what they've done to assist them in future job applications, and would be computerised rather then involving more bits of paper.
• Sort out the position of volunteers under the age of 18; most urgently those who are under 16. At the moment if a volunteer under the age of 15 wants to work in a charity shop, the shop has to apply for special permission from the local authority, and must do this for each volunteer. It would make youth volunteering much more of a practical proposition if each place where young people were to volunteer had just one set of registration requirements and only had to do one generic risk assessment of the venue's suitability for young people, rather than an individual assessment for each young person. It would also help if there was some sensible reassessment of the need for background checks of adults who will be working alongside young volunteers.

At present I strongly suspect that some young people are drawn into risky forms of activism simply because more responsible organisations dare not involve young people because of the difficulty of staying within the law.

• An educational component in all volunteering activity, to be developed by the organisation with the aim that the volunteer would learn something meaningful about the functioning, purpose etc. of that organisation, rather than simply being used as an extra pair of unskilled hands.
• A more sensible attitude to using volunteers for tasks that are sometimes done by paid staff, rather than the mantra that "job substitution" is to be avoided at all costs. Of course it would be unacceptable (and a breach of employment law) to sack paid staff and replace them with unpaid volunteers. Some roles (such as the inspectorate in our case) would be quite unsuitable for volunteers. But there is nothing magical about being paid and it is equally unacceptable to waste charity funds through a bigoted attitude that volunteers must always be subject to a paid manager and not expected to take responsibility. Voluntary organisations are not job creation schemes and, in the long run, this kind of attitude helps no-one because properly-used volunteers release funds that can be used to employ paid professionals for the tasks that genuinely can't be done by anyone else.
• A sane attitude to using volunteers to save money — of course this is a good thing (provided it can be done without detriment to services). There is nothing to be ashamed of in using volunteers to stack shelves if it means another dog or cat can have a fracture repair done by qualified veterinary staff.

(Cross-posted, with a few edits, from our i-volunteer entry).

Animal Welfare Statistics for 2010

During the whole of 2010, our clinic provided a total of 4,165 treatments, of which 2,786 were for dogs, 1,243 for cats, 87 for rabbits, and 49 for miscellaneous "small furries".

We also neutered 246 animals, chipped 248 and rehomed a total of 22 dogs, 67 cats, 11 rabbits and six miscellaneous animals.

In addition, our partner, the rabbit residence rescue rehomed a much larger number of rabbits with financial help from us for neutering and vaccinations. I don't yet have these figures, but will include them later.

Thank-you RSPCA HQ!

I've just been notified by HQ that our application for a grant to restart our emergency assistance at private vets has been approved. This means that we will be able to give at least some help to animals whose owners have not registered them at our clinic if they have an emergency which can't wait until our next ordinary clinic session.

HOWEVER:

The amount of money which will be available for each individual animal will necessarily be strictly limited; if we don't do this it will simply run out within a couple of months. Most of the time it will simply cover the vet's consultation fee, plus some initial first aid aimed at keeping the animal alive and pain-free until they can be transferred to the next available session at our clinic. 

It will not be possible to cover expensive surgery which cannot wait, such as emergency pyometria or caesarian operations, so please, please, if you have a bitch or female cat and would not be able to pay for this yourself, get her spayed unless there are medical reasons why this can't be done.

If you are on benefits (including working tax credit etc.) and know you would struggle to afford emergency treatment for your pet (or could not afford to take him/her to a vet at all), PLEASE get them registered by taking them to one of our standard sessions for a check-up or get them microchipped or vaccinated at the clinic. If they are not vaccinated and belong to a species (cat, dog, rabbit) which needs this, getting it done will protect them from several nasty diseases and will also mean that they are registered. Our veterinary service provider is only prepared to see registered animals outside normal clinic hours.

Registration only applies to an individual animal; if you have multiple animals it is essential that they all visit the clinic.

New year looking rather black for sick pets

Veterinary costs are going up in a terrifying way and the increased rate of VAT is going to mean another 2.5% hike on everything. 

We desperately need to increase our income so that we can raise the amount of subsidy we pay in order to reduce the amount that users of our animal clinic are charged by our veterinary service provider.

The way this works is that we pay the service provider (Cambridge University Vet School) a yearly fee and in return they staff our clinic and provide hospital facilities for inpatients back at the Vet School. Pet owners pay us a consulation fee of £10 and are charged by the University for drugs and operations at a special reduced rate. However the amount of the reduction depends on how much we are able to pay (currently it works out at about £54,000 p.a.). 

Unless we can increase our contribution fairly substantially so that we are subsidising a larger proportion of the fees I very much fear that the amount the University charges pet owners will be unaffordable for many very low income families. 

Fighting the last war...

The UK has a 94.75% save rate for stray dogs collected by local authorities. I don't know of any comparable statistics for cats, but the RSPCA's internal figures indicate a 95% save rate for cats without severe injuries or illness. 

There is a problem of unwanted pets in this country, and dealing with it is rather like painting the Forth bridge, but it is manageable with effort, good-will and provision of subsidised pet neutering services for owners on low incomes and TNR (Trap Neuter Release) for feral cats. There is a worse problem in Ireland, and some UK-based rescues have made a decision to bring animals in from there in order to give them a guaranteed future.

So why are we being pushed into fighting the last war instead of dealing with the current one, which is the problem of ensuring that sick or injured animals (whether owned or not) receive at least basic first aid and that all animals taken in as cruelty/neglect cases have a guaranteed safe place to go? Why, indeed, is the battle to provide 24/7 access to basic first aid at risk of being lost as a result of what seems to be a combination of malice and self-righteousness?

The RSPCA is the only animal welfare organisation in England and Wales which runs a 24/7 365 day general-purpose rescue service, with a telephone helpline provided by our national control centre and frontline staff working round the clock. It's the only organisation with a network of volunteer branches (some admittedly not in a very thriving state) covering the whole of England and Wales and dedicated to rehoming the animals rescued by the frontline staff.

A lot of our problems stem from the fact that everyone with a special interest that falls within the remit of the RSPCA thinks that it ought to get first call on our efforts.

See, for example, this, this, this and this.

Or, alternatively, this, this and this (being middle of the road is a recipe for getting shot at from both sides).

Every one of these special interest groups attempts to stop donations to the RSPCA and to discourage people from joining the Society except with a view to forcing it to further the special interest. All of them are primarily interested in taking, not giving and ultimately that simply won't be sustainable. 

I worry about the impact on the next generation of potential members, volunteers and trustees of the RSPCA branches. If they are continually hearing variations on: "I will not give a penny to the RSPCA, because they have not said one single word about ..." (never mind that the missing words may be diametrically opposed), it must be having some effect. 

I suspect there is already a generation which has been diverted into efforts that are at best less productive than they could be, and at worst coming very close to focussing on what are virtually fantasy animals instead of those who can be helped and need help right now. We are keeping the affection of the broad public, but losing those people who would have become the dedicated volunteers and trustees needed for the immense effort of running successful branches.

If you want animal welfare work to continue to progress in England and Wales, please consider joining the RSPCA and supporting the practical, educational, and, yes, campaigning, work that we do.

If you have any doubt that the UK situation is better than in the US, please take a look at these web-pages:

 and this:

Happy Christmas!

I think I must have carted roughly my own weight of pet food and cat litter over the past 24 hours. However anything we've not got by now will have to wait until the shops open again.

Happy Christmas everyone!

Please consider supporting our Christmas Appeal: animals will go on needing help all through the holiday period and beyond.

Tis the Season to be Jolly

Mistletoe from £2.00 a bunch at our charity shop at 61 Burleigh Street. We also have other decorations, cards and gifts as well as all our usual stock.

Buy a mug and fund our animal welfare services for five minutes!

Photo mugs 

Dog design

Cat design

If you're searching for some inexpensive last-minute gifts, then look no further. 

These cute mugs featuring animals rehomed by the branch during the past year are available at our charity shops at 188 Mill Road and 61 Burleigh Street, at £4.75 each.

Every mug bought will make enough profit to run our  services for five minutes (so we need to sell a lot of mugs!)

If you live in Cambridge, please tell your friends.

While they're shopping for mugs they can also look out for some wonderful bargains and gift ideas in our Burleigh Street general charity shop and for a range of fascinating reading in our second hand bookshop at 188 Mill Road.

Animal emotions, citizen science and the promotion of welfare

There's a lot of interest in the cognition of dogs and whether they've evolved to be especially capable of recognising human signals and facial expressions. Cats have been rather left out of this, so it's interesting to find two projects which are almost mirror images of the dog ones — not how good cats are at reading human behaviour, but how well humans can interpret cats.

The tagpuss project at the University of Lincoln aims to investigate the feasibility of studying animal emotions using "citizen science".

Citizen science is a term that describes a partnership between ordinary citizens and scientists working together in real scientific studies. This partnership means we can create large research teams with networks of volunteers who have little training in the area of research to peform tasks such as observation, measurement and computation.

In the case of tagpuss, the volunteers are shown random images of cats and asked to add tags which describe the cats' emotions. Once the image is tagged the system reveals a word cloud showing which tags have been selected by other participants.

It's evident that there's generally a fair degree of agreement, even if it's not perfect — it might be enlightening to compare agreement over tagging images of human emotions (for instance is this person terrified, angry, shocked? )

This can have practical implications for the way we view and look after cats. The extremely rich and subtle social and emotional signals they display help to dispel the idea that they are rather simple unsocial animals. Finding out more about our ability to interpret cats' emotional signals can also help to improve assessment of individual cats—as in the ASPCA "Is that cat feral" study which is intended to help shelters decide which cats are suitable for adoption as domestic pets and which would be happier if they were simply neutered and released back to their original location.

Clinic opening hours over Christmas

The Cambridge RSPCA animal clinic will be CLOSED on Saturday 25th December, Tuesday 28th and Wednesday 29th December. It will also be closed on New Year's day (Saturday 1st January). All other times as normal. In case of emergency, phone the mobile contact number on your pet's clinic registration card and arrangements will be made for your pet to be seen at the University Vet School.

Please note that the Vet School staff are only able to see animals who have been registered by attending the normal clinic.

If your pet is on long-term medication or a prescription diet, please make sure that you order and collect any repeat prescriptions in good time. This means that the Tuesday session is the last opportunity before Christmas if you need to order medications for collection at the Thursday 23rd December session.

Prescriptions can only be ordered by phoning the clinic (01223 247 986) on a clinic morning. It is not possible to order them by phoning the emergency mobile as the branch contacts answering the mobile do not have access to any of the medical records.

Points from yesterday's "tweetathon"

Except for the one incident involving a large number of rabbits, these are selected from the events which had outcomes recorded during the session.

The codes N, SE, E, SSW refer to the area of the country where the incident happened. We are in E [East] region. I've automatically converted the entries to sentence case to make them a bit easier to read than the feed copy/pasted from the NCC's feed.

On Thursday 16th December 2010, @RSPCA_Frontline said:

**Update** re: N: dog. Shivering, not weight bearing on back rt leg, found tied to fence with metal chain . Noticed at 07:20. (15/12)

Officer attended. Dog collected. In poor condition. No trace/evidence of who abandoned dog. Dog taken to animal home for treatment and boarding ahead of rehoming if no trace of owner. 

**update** re; SE: dog. Was hit by a car. Blood on face, dragging a leg. Happened 10-15mins ago. Owner unknown. (15/12)



Officer attended. Dog collected and owner traced and advised dog now at rspca hospital receiving treatment for injuries.

**update** re: dog. On hard shoulder hit by car. Excessive bleeding on a front leg. Traffic officer needs assistance as unable 2 transport 2 vets (15/12)

Officer attended. Dog microchipped. Reunited with owner at vets for treatment.

**update** re: SSW: cat. Found at school. V old and heavily matted coat.

Officer attended. Cat collected and taken to rspca establishment for care.

**update** re: N: cat.dragging back legs. Not known what has happened to cat. Found in street this morning.now confined in callers bathroom.

Vets initially refused to treat cat without payment.

Officer spoke to vets and they will now accept cat if RSPCA pays. Cat has been taken to vets for treatment by caller. If cat survives, will then be collected by RSPCA to try and find original owner or rehome.  

**update** re; N: cat. Owner moved out 1 week ago. Cat outside very thin and shaking

.

Officer attended. Cat collected and taken to vets for examination and treatment. Is very thin and weak. Cruelty case/investigation commenced.

[warning – this one is quite shocking. There is much more detail on the actual allegation but too much and too graphic for me to post here]

N: rabbits. Dying. Some of the rabbits are full of disease and very ill. No vet treatment. Rabbits living in horrendeous filth cages & cages 7 inches deep in faeces, no water in any of the cages and no food. Confined in tiny. Supplies pet shops with rabbits.

**Update** re: N: dog.unable 2 put 1 back leg 2 ground.leg broken? Crying a lot.found lst nite on field nearby. Dog warden refuses to collect due to injury.

Officer attended.

Male entire staff bull terrier. No collar. No ID. Limping on back left leg. Taken to local vets. 

                                                                                                                                                           

These are only a very small selection of the total number of incidents (1195 on the 16th) allocated by the control centre to frontline staff. These in turn are only about a third of the total number of calls answered by the NCC during the day. Many of the remaining two thirds will have been resolved by advice, a request for the caller to take the animal direct to a vet, or referral to the caller's local branch, but inevitably there is a degree of rationing by apparent seriousness of the incident. Callers requesting collection of healthy, but apparently stray cats will normally be told we don't believe it is in the cat's best interest to remove it from an environment where it is thriving. Finders of healthy, uninjured stray dogs will be referred to Local Authority dog wardens.

Most incidents which result in an injured or neglected animal being collected will eventually mean a call on local branch funds to pay for continuing veterinary treatment or for the animal to be cared for until it can be rehomed.

An incident involving large numbers of animals (like the rabbits mentioned above) will normally be coped with by several branches working together to share the animals out among their available foster carers and boarding facilities.

Follow the RSPCA Control Centre online today

From 9 am until 5 pm today the RSPCA's National Control Centre tasking system will be shadowed on Twitter, with every incident allocated to frontline staff being "tweeted" online. You can view the calls by following @RSPCA_Frontline on Twitter (or just click the link to see all the calls so far).

On average someone in England and Wales calls the RSPCA’s cruelty line on 0300 1234 999 every 30 seconds. The National Control Centre received more than 1.25 million phone calls last year and responds to around 1,000 incidents a day. (This is in addition to calls made to the individual branches).

Inspector Tony Woodley, communications and liaison officer for the RSPCA inspectorate, set up the RSPCA_Frontline Twitter feed as he wanted to publicise the work of the RSPCA’s 288 inspectors, 119 animal welfare officers and 74 animal collection officers. 

The idea of using Twitter to give readers a realistic impression of the sheer scale of workload coming in was first thought of by Greater Manchester Police.


I hope the exercise will go some way towards combatting the attitude that, if the RSPCA doesn't succeed in solving all calls to deal with animal related problems, the right thing to do is to hammer us by reducing donations until we can't deal with any of them.


Please also remember that, although the frontline staff deal with the immediate incidents, they depend on us, the branches, to provide subsequent continuing care. It's also essential that branch services are available for those callers who just need to be directed to a source of low-cost veterinary help.


If you would like to make a donation towards the continuing work of RSPCA Cambridge, please follow the link to our page on the JustGiving fundraising site.

Branch Christmas Appeal

Help us reach our target of raising £2000 to fund our services over the Christmas period.

Message from Katie, who will be trying to pull together our branch volunteering activities

Just to let everyone know that the volunteers meeting will be held, as usual, at Emporium 61 on Burleigh Street next Thursday (16th December) beginning at 7.30pm. I hope to see as many of you there as possible!  As of January we will be holding these regular meetings at the Cornerhouse Pub on Newmarket Road and hope that this will make for a nicer atmosphere as well as encourage a few more new faces!

 

I have attached the proposed fundraising calendar for next year and as always we will require any help that you can offer. Be it an hour, a day or a week! (Particularly for fundraisers during RSPCA week really anytime you can spare will make a difference).

 

Just to introduce myself a little more formally, my name is Katie and I recently graduated from the University of Exeter, currently I am working in Sawston for a small market research company. As I work 9-5.30, email is the best way to get in touch with me but I am hoping to become a central point of contact for all volunteers. I want to make sure that everyone is happy so any feedback you can offer will be greatly appreciated. Another part of my role is recruiting new volunteers as well as coordinating the volunteers needed for some of our larger events such as RSPCA week and hopefully next year our sponsored dog walk and dog show!

 

I will be using an email list to let you all know what is going on, any events that are coming up and general reminders. I fully appreciate that no one wants to be bombarded with emails and so I will try and keep this to a bare minimum. If you would like to be taken off of this list for ANY reason please do let me know!

 

Anyway Happy Holidays to all of you and thank you for all of your hard work this year!!

 

Best Wishes

 

Katie

(If you would like to be added to the volunteering email list, please send an email to volunteering@rspca-cambridge.org.uk)

January
February	One World Week @ University of Cambridge : Work for A charity  event
March
April
May	RSPCA Week (2nd-8th May) Sponsored Dog Walk Half term (30th May- 3rd of June)
June	Microchipping day/ Dog Show we are hoping to combine an ‘alternative dog show’ with a microchipping event for dogs £10 per microchip with an average saving of £10 which raises £6 for each microchip RSPCA AGM-end of June
July	Summer activities- Bingo night/ Pub Quiz/ Treasure Hunt/ Race night/ bat walk one activity a fortnight over the summer
August	Pole Dancing/ Pilates/ Yoga trials
September	Freshers Fair @ Cambridge university
October
November	Mill Road Christmas light switch on
December	Mill Road Winter Fair Meeting for next year’s fundraising calendar Christmas Event- All ideas welcome!!

Animal Welfare Statistics for November

In November, our clinic treated 218 dogs, 119 cats, three rabbits and seven miscellaneous "small furries".

We rehomed six cats, but took in an alarming total of eleven rabbits, which had been signed over to our local inspector for welfare reasons. As a result, the total number of animals we currently have in our care has gone up from 42 to 52. 

Fortunately the rabbits can be kept in foster care, which is less expensive for us than commercial boarding, but it's a worrying trend as rabbit adoptions tend to be lower during the winter months when potential adopters really don't feel like doing outdoor carpentry to erect rabbit runs. If our inspectors had another large intake of rabbits we would have to tell them we have no space.

Interest in keeping rabbits as indoor pets - just like our cats or dogs - is growing and may be part of the solution to the problem of unwanted rabbits. 

You can view some of the rabbits on our rehoming gallery.

If you are interested in adopting a pair of rabbits from the branch, please email rehoming@rspca-cambridge.org.uk 

Depressed

Three days running I've had desperate people ringing late at night with animals who need to see a vet urgently. At that time of day it costs £100 just for the consultation and at the moment there isn't any way we could afford to pay that much each evening because it would mean an annual spend of £36,500. That  would be more than the annual cost of running our clinic, which treats ten times as many animals each year.

Last night I was called about a dog who had been badly mauled by another and needed £700 of emergency treatment, followed by transfer to our clinic for surgery on his broken leg. Again - that's just not possible for us and it is tragic that the owner hadn't registered his dog at our clinic because that would have meant our own veterinary provider would have been prepared to see him at a much lower rate.

By and large these are not people who are bad owners or unwilling to pay for routine veterinary care, but they just don't have the resources to find £100 at 5 minutes notice. Getting the animals signed over to us to be rehomed is not a solution because it would just add the cost of boarding to the treatment cost which we have not got.

Please give us your support so that we can do at least something to help these animals in future. Any saleable unwanted items that you can donate to our shops at 188 Mill Road or 61 Burleigh Street will help us to raise more funds.

We also need fundraising volunteers and more volunteers to help out with running the shops and collecting items to sell. Could you organise a "donate, don't dump" day at your place of work, with everyone being asked to bring in at least one item to give to the shops?

Pictures from the Mill Road Winter Fair

Remaining tombola prizes

Guess the name of the pink pony (slip us a fiver and we'll make sure you don't have to take it home)

Katie and Ffiona looking very cold!

Total amount raised (including books sold in the shop) was £540. One of the benefits of the Winter Fair event is that it helps publicise the bookshop to local people who never normally walk down Mill Road.