Looking much more cheerful

Maisie looking much happier now her nose isn't so bunged up. The quick response to antibiotics makes it hopeful that her problem is just that the damage to her facial bone structure makes it prone to bacterial infections, which is much less of a worry than the possibility of a permanent viral infection that's always going to be there.

Case dog fostering

If an owner who is being prosecuted refuses to sign their animals over for rehoming before the case is heard in court, the animals may be "in limbo" for many months, sometimes for more than a year.

This is very bad for the mental welfare of companion animals like dogs, and there is a new project to recruit foster homes where they can have a more normal life.

If you think you might be interested in fostering, please email R4RHQ@RSPCA.org.uk to ask for more information.

One step forward, two steps back

Maisie's been doing very well apart from her absolute refusal to eat anything except Feline AD (appetite diet) made up with hot water. She's been chipped and had her first vaccinations and someone is tentatively interested in adopting her.

The vets were pretty convinced the food behaviour is mostly psychological, but now she's definitely got a bunged up nose and doesn't fancy anything much. Took her down to them again this evening and she's back on antibiotics on the assumption that some of the damage to the bones around her nasal passages, done in the original traffic accident, has left them prone to infection. Her temperature is normal and she's bright and lively, so they think the infection is localised to her poor nose.

Aww! A Furby!

Had to go back to the shop today to drop off some old newspapers for wrapping china as we were nearly out of them yesterday and it's wasteful to use new bags just to protect breakables that buyers are going to wash anyway before eating off them. While I was there I thought I might as well tidy up some of the chaos from yesterday; then someone phoned to ask if they could drop off a large donation of children's toys, and with one thing and another I ended staying for most of the rest of the day.

While we're so short-handed at the shop, this may be the way to go as I got a lot more done with the shop closed. Basically running a charity shop is like painting the Forth bridge: hopefully people will be buying stuff every day; but then the gaps they make have to be filled up. If you're aiming to take £500 daily and the average price of what you're selling is three to five pounds, then you have to put out at least a hundred individual somethings every day.

In practice, you need a fair bit more than a hundred because not everything will sell.

Your hundred items come out of the stock room, and that has to be continually refilled by donations or the shop will fold. At a very rough estimate I think I got just about a hundred items priced and put out to fill the gaps made by shoppers on Saturday and there were at least a hundred individual toys in the donation that was dropped off. I'm not a toy expert, but most of them looked in good condition and saleable — although someone will need to check that the jigsaws have all their pieces and that the battery operated toys do work. 

One of the toys I did recognise was a Furby, which did its stuff very cutely when I figured how to switch it on. 

There's also a rather alarming mauve skipping rope which counts how many skips the unfortunate child manages and also seems to be in working order.

What a day!

Up at six; wash up cat bowls; bleach & re-fill litter trays; wash floors; bath to render self acceptable to respectable human company; feed cats; feed self. Tablets for the five cats who need them.

Drop off Fern, who is one of my own cats, to the vet for an ultrasound check of her heart condition. Then back home. Decide no point moping about waiting for the vet to call, so into the shop early. Hardly had time to start discussing plans for next week when the call came to say F. was ready to collect, so turned round and zoomed back to the vet.

Results were not great, but better than I'd been fearing. Fern's heart condition is worse, but not dreadful and they think putting her on beta blockers should get her heart rate down enough to make it possible to think about tackling the underlying problem, which is that her hyperthyroidism has stopped responding to carbimazole treatment. Back home with F. and a packet of tablets to add to her collection of medication.

Then back to the shop again. We've no volunteers to cover Saturday afternoons at the moment, so I did the till while Bettina (shop manager) carried on with pricing and refilling gaps where items had been sold. Ideally we'd have at least three people, so that one could do the till; another keep moving new stock out onto the shop floor, and the third sort, steam and price stock ready to be put out.

It was a fairly busy day, although most people weren't going for the more expensive things. Ffiona and Bettina have just put out all the really good ball gowns that they've been saving up for the May Ball season, so let's hope those go when that kicks off at the end of the month. Right now the students are in the middle of exams, so probably not in the mood for retail therapy.

As often happens, there was a surge of activity just before five, so I couldn't bail out until just past the hour. I hared off to the clinic as I was supposed to be meeting a work experience pupil at five and got there at five twenty with no sign of the pupil. I hope he either couldn't make it or forgot, but he was ever so keen on the telephone, so I rather fear he arrived on time, found everything locked up & went away disappointed.

Hung around for another hour dealing with post and emptying the rubbish in case he went back home and phoned my mobile when he got there, then decided to call it a day. Back home; quick shop run for weekend food; then cat food and litter to one of our fosterers.

We really, really need more volunteers to cover the shops.

Volunteers email list

We now have a Google Groups list for volunteers in an attempt to make it easier to keep in touch with everyone. You can view the web version of the list or sign up to get new messages by email.

If you'd like to be added to the list, but have trouble signing up, please email rosemary@rspca-cambridge.org.uk and I'll add you in.

Fostering animals for the branch

We had a fairly typical call on Sunday from an elderly lady who'd been feeding a stray cat in her garden and watching with alarm as Kitty's pregnancy became more and more obvious. Her little dog was scared of cats and she herself was allergic, so she couldn't bring the cat indoors to have the kittens, and in any case she was very worried what she would do if urgent veterinary attention was needed. She was convinced that Kitty might be about to give birth at any moment, so was desperate to get her into a safe home. 

From our point of view this kind of situation is an emergency because, once the kittens had been born outside it would be very hard to find them and give them enough human contact to stop them growing up wild. In a year's time any female kittens would be able to have kittens of their own and in no time at all there would be a colony of hard-to-home cats and complaints about mess and smell.

So many thanks to one of our fosterers for coming up trumps and taking mother-to-be in at 30 minutes notice. The elderly lady had obviously been feeding her well and handled her enough to get her tame enough to settle comfortably indoors, so we should have no difficulty finding her a home provided all goes well with the birth.

Would you be interested in fostering animals for us?

You need to be living in premises where animals are allowed, but a garden is not essential as most fostered animals are either very young or recovering from injuries and need to be confined inside. 

Typically we try to get puppies, young kittens and/or their expectant mothers into foster homes so that they can benefit from social contact with humans and other animals. Kittens and puppies who spend their first weeks in kennels tend to grow up shy and have more difficulty adjusting to life in a normal family home.

We also try to use foster homes for recuperating injured or sick animals so they can get more TLC than in busy boarding kennels and to avoid too many trips between the kennels and our clinic.

The need for foster homes is fairly unpredictable, so we try to keep a roster of people who don't mind being contacted when an animal needs to come in. Families with children are ideal for socialising young animals because it means they get a broad experience of different types of people and are more likely to be friendly with everyone. If you have children who are going to be very upset if the fostered animal doesn't survive, it might be best to be selective about taking on injured animals.

All foster homes are visited by our homing co-ordinator before animals are placed with them. Basically this is a similar visit to the ones we do before placing animals in permanent homes, except that the homing co-ordinator will also discuss the practicalities of caring for injured or very young animals (e.g. loaning the foster home a suitable cage for animals who need to be confined).

The branch will cover expenses such as food and cat litter and any veterinary costs involved.

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

Join the RSPCA

If you've ever grumbled that, "the RSPCA doesn't do...." you should consider joining so that you have a vote in the selection of the governing council.

If you join now you won't be eligible to vote in this year's ballot, but you will next year, and you will also be eligible to stand for election to your local branch committee and to vote at their AGM.

You can apply to join online via the National RSPCA website  and unless you specify that you prefer NOT to join your local branch, a proportion of your membership fee will be given to the branch where you live.

Ten of the 25 National RSPCA Council members are elected by the branches on a regional basis, so branch membership also feeds back into National policy making.

And handover to the newly elected Council is, well... rather more rapid than after the other election.

Volunteering at our charity shops

We urgently need more volunteers at our shop at 61 Burleigh street. This is a big shop, now taking over £300 every day, but high turnover means that we need lots of helpers to keep donations moving out onto the shop floor.

Basically the process goes like this:

• Unsorted goods come in, either brought to the shop by individual donors, or collected via house-clearance runs or "trawling" (which is where we drop off collection bags in a street and return next week to pick them up, hopefully containing lots of things we can sell).
• We empty the bags into a large sorting bin, separating any obviously unsaleable items. Unsaleable textiles, shoes and metal items are bagged up for sale to recycling merchants. 
• The remaining items are checked again (e.g. for missing buttons, rips, stains). 
•  Any out-of season clothes (e.g. heavy winter coats in summer) are put into storage for their correct season.
• In-season clothes are hung on coathangers on a movable clothes rail, and items like crockery, bags, hats, shoes etc. are sorted into storage boxes.
• We use a steamer (basically similar to a large kettle with a flexible plastic spout ending in a bar like a vacuum cleaner attachment) to iron out creases and generally freshen up the clothes so that they look attractive.
• Each item of clothing is checked for size labels and the correct "size cube" is attached to its hanger. A price tag is completed and attached using a "pricing gun". Items like crockery and bric-à-brac are priced using sticky lables.
• As items on the shop floor are sold, the sales area is continually "topped up" from the clothes rail and the storage boxes in the back room. It's essential to keep up the flow so that the shop never looks bare and customers will keep on being attracted to come back.

At present we don't have enough volunteers to ensure that there is always at least one person to work in the back room as well as the one sitting at the till in the shop. Most of the time it would be useful to have at least two backroom helpers, so that one can be preparing goods and the other putting them out, as well as giving the person on the till cover for breaks.

If you might be interested in helping, please drop in at 61 Burleigh Street any day Monday-Saturday between 11 am and 5 pm.

Our shops are our only good source of regular income, and by supporting them you would be giving a real boost to our ability to provide local animal welfare services. It's also fun and a wonderful way to meet like-minded people

Dereliction of duty?

I wasn't planning to blog about the media criticism of the way we have to prioritise need when deciding which animals we can or can't accept for rehoming, but something that happened yesterday annoyed me so much I felt I had to mention it.

At present our branch funds are too low for us to afford to run our animal clinic, care for injured strays and other animals taken in via the inspectors and help owners with the cost of veterinary treatment at private vets. Paying part of the cost at private vets is the least cost-effective way of getting animals treated, so, sadly, we have had to decide that we can only help low-income owners via our clinic. This has open sessions on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, and, after an animal has been registered at one of these, our service provider will treat him/her outside normal hours in an emergency provided registration is kept up by annual visits to the clinic for booster vaccinations.

Of course, this leaves the insoluble problem of animals whose owners have absolutely no money and haven't been registered. Vets are supposed to have a professional duty to relieve pain and suffering, so, in theory, it should at least be possible for any owner to have their animal put to sleep rather than live on in misery. Veterinary surgeries are businesses (and have to be), so it's not reasonable to expect them to go beyond this at their own expense, because they'd simply go bust, which would help no-one in the long term.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, yesterday morning I had a phone call from a tearful owner whose pet needed to be put to sleep. The veterinary practice concerned wouldn't see her at all unless someone was prepared to put up some money. In the circumstances, as someone who's not being paid by anyone, it makes me very cross to have talk about "dereliction of duty" when the RSPCA, which is after all a charity, tries to stretch funds so that they cover the cases of most need.

Volunteer Meetings: change of date and venue

We've decided to move the monthly volunteer meetings to our shop at 61 Burleigh st. as most people seemed to prefer a more central location.

The regular meetings will now be 7.30-9.30 pm on the third Thursday of each month (try saying that quickly!) They'll be fairly informal, so people can arrive and leave to suit themselves between those times. Please drop in if you're interested in finding more about RSPCA Cambridge and what we do locally.

Parking at the Adam and Eve Street public car park is free after 7 pm. Map below shows the shop location on Burleigh Street and the pedestrian access from Adam and Eve Street.

View RSPCA E61 in a larger map

Fiona has just pointed out that the next meeting, on May 20th, is the day following the training session for potential bookshop volunteers  on 19th May. If you are interested in volunteering at our bookshop (188 Mill Road), please go to the training session in preference to the general volunteer meeting if you can't do both. The general meetings will be a regular feature, so you won't miss out if you have to skip one or two of them.

The June meeting will be combined with the branch AGM and will be at the Friends Meeting House, Jesus Lane, Cambridge on 17th June (same times). Subsequent meetings will be at the shop again.

RSPCA Week 2010

As usual I don't feel we made as much of RSPCA week as we could have done if we'd had more volunteers and hadn't already been maxed out with other things that couldn't be abandoned to make time to organise it properly.

Ideally we need to recruit someone who isn't already doing something else that's "mission-critical" to branch activities who could make it their sole project. Collectors don't just need to be recruited; they need to be contacted with reminders a few weeks beforehand; issued with their tins and badges, then finally thanked and told how much was collected after the event. It just isn't possible for someone to do this effectively on top of other major volunteering commitments. It's also much better for volunteers' morale if the person organising RSPCA week is collecting too, so they don't feel they're being bossed about by someone who's not pulling their weight in the actual work.

Staffordshire Bull Terrier Questionnaire

When the pilot Staffordshire bull terrier adoption/neutering campaign ran last year I put up a questionnaire for owners as part of the publicity activities. 

Results below:
Where did you get your current Staffordshire?

At least a third of dogs had been adopted from welfare organisations, and relatively few seemed to have originated from professional or semi-commercial breeders.

Is your current Staffordshire male or female?

Interestingly there doesn't seem to be any suggestion at all from the response to this question that male dogs might be any more difficult to control than bitches.

Is he/she neutered?

Most of the 21 no's said cost was a barrier (a few had puppies not yet old enough for the operation)





If no, would you consider getting him/her neutered?

Three no's expressed health concerns and desire not to put their dog through unnecessary surgery when he did not exhibit any behaviour problems.






Is your dog microchipped?

Interestingly, much less resistance to this than to neutering. Some of the no's mentioned cost as an issue and some planned to get their puppies chipped at the same time as they were neutered.



Would you consider adopting another Staffordshire?

The four no's included some who expressed concern about the risk of a future breed ban meaning they might adopt a dog only to have him/her put down and some who simply said that no other dog could replace their present one.

This probably wasn't a representative sample as those motivated to respond would be likely to be knowledgeable and concerned about the welfare of dogs, but it does demonstrate that many Staffordshires are living happy and well-adjusted lives in normal pet homes. It does suggest that more low-cost neutering would reduce the proportion of bitches who might have accidental litters and that more low cost microchipping would increase the proportion of dogs who are chipped (of course it's still likely that it would be the responsible owners, not the problem ones, who got their dogs chipped).

The questionnaire's still open for responses if anyone viewing this has a Staffordshire or other bull breed and would like to complete it.

RSPCA Week starts today

This year, RSPCA week runs from 26th April to 2nd May and collectors from our branch will be trying to cover all the Tesco stores where we've been given permission to collect.

• Newmarket rd
• Yarrow Road, Fulbourn
• Angel Drove, Ely
• Royston
• Newmarket
• Milton
• Bar Hill

We've not got enough collectors to cover all the stores the whole time and there's still time to join in if you'd like to help. Email treasurer@rspca-cambridge.org.uk for more details, or use the form at www.rspca-cambridge.org.uk/rspcaweek.html

Thanks for a very generous donation

Many thanks to Newmarket Road Tesco for donating a huge amount of end of line children's summer clothing to our charity shop at 61 Burleigh St.

Owners who breed their dogs

Called just before half-past seven this morning by a panicked owner whose Yorkshire terrier bitch had been in labour since the previous evening with no sign of puppies. He'd got absolutely no money — not even the cost of a consultation fee for our clinic, although he had been responsible enough to get her vaccinated and registered with us so we could get her seen by the vets who provide our clinical services as an emergency. I don't know at this stage what happened or whether she and her puppies lived or not.

If she survives, she will be luckier than the poor animal whose eventual fate was described in last week's Mirror:

A family yesterday claimed their dog was put down by a vet because they could not afford a £1,200 operation.

Parents Andrew and Lisa Geddes took Staffordshire bull terrier Coco for treatment as she struggled to give birth to puppies.

The couple claim they were told a consultation would be £39 but after the pet was examined they were informed a caesarian op was needed costing at least £1,240.

It sounds from the article as though the owners were expecting the £39 to cover their pet's treatment and had no realistic idea of what operations cost. They probably were intending to sell her puppies (in itself not wonderful considering how many unwanted Staffies are out there), but I doubt whether they were just cold-bloodedly trying to turn a profit; they probably did love her and were very unhappy that she died; they just didn't expect to have to take any responsibility.

That's why we'll help the little Yorkie, but we will insist that her owner gets her spayed as soon as is compatible with her welfare and that of any surviving puppies and we will insist he pays us for her treatment.

Twenty or thirty years ago the vets who saw the Staffie bitch would probably have allowed her owner to pay by installments — and the owners would probably have actually paid. There's no shame in being poor, and there's no reason why people who aren't well off shouldn't have the fun and companionship that pets bring into our lives. If everyone decides the world owes them a living the system falls apart and it's misery all round.

Boring intermission

It turned out that the 2010/11 HMRC software for calculating tax and NI payments wouldn't install on my old laptop, so the last few weeks have been swallowed up migrating to its replacement.

Finally got all the shop staff transferred yesterday with their details correct, but when I tried to do the automatic online submission of the tax data for 2009/10 the results it offered were about half what I expected (if only!). Their help file didn't sound confident that the totals would be right, so I ended up doing it the hard way by entering everyone's individual P14 details into the HMRC online form instead. Result was at least close to the total I expected (the website claimed we'd made a slight overpayment), but at least we made today's submission deadline.

Normal posting hopefully resumed soon.

Boom and Bust

While Googling for references to use in the previous post I was a bit miffed to find a BBC page slamming the RSPCA for keeping reserve funds in case of unforeseen disaster still lurking out there. After all, in 1999 it was obvious to anyone that the dot com boom was going to keep going for ever, wasn't it?

Millennium Volunteers, Big Society et al.

Politicians and political journalists seem to be in favour of volunteering, but it hardly ever seems that they "get" the nature and problems of existing voluntary organisations, particularly ones concerned with animal protection.

In my more embittered moments I feel they expect the RSPCA to solve any problem with the most tenuous connection with animals (pet cremation? dogfight? deranged cat? no money? floods? plague of frogs? frogs with plague?) while providing volunteering opportunties that train people so they can leave and get paid work as soon as they are trained. In spite of this they don't seem to expect to factor us into any of the new schemes for community volunteering even though it would be a lot easier to build on existing groups rather than reinventing the wheel each time. And on top of that a lot of them seem to have a grumpy view of animal protection as a drain on resources that ought to have been spent on humans.

The sheer volume of calls to the RSPCA phones illustrates the level of demand and the circular disaster of the attitude that says, "If you haven't got enough money, I won't give you another penny."

At the most basic level, service-providing animal charities like the RSPCA are putting serious amounts of money into local communities, helping to keep jobs at vets and kennels and improving the quality of life of very poor people who would otherwise have to give up their pets. We're neutering cats and dogs to prevent over-population from causing mess, disease and disturbance, and rehoming animals whose owners can't cope. It's the non-glamorous, hard slog end of animal welfare and we can't keep it up forever without more broadly-based support. Over the past few years we've been sucked into ever more desperate attempts to satisfy demand in the hope that giving what people want will eventually mean more help.

Many of the people who benefit from our services don't have any realistic prospect of getting into paid work so that they can pay their own vet bills, but almost everyone would be capable of doing something to help keep us going, whether it was collecting funds, helping at our charity shops, or donating old clothes for recycling. In return they'd get the sense of purpose, self-respect and companionship that's so badly needed to combat the pervasive depression and unhappiness.