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.