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.

Chaos!

Phone call yesterday evening from someone concerned that a neighbourhood cat seemed to be unable to stand. She very helpfully offered to transport him to a vet herself, rather than wait until an RSPCA driver could get there. Then, about an hour later, there was another call, this time from the vet's surgery, to say they had the cat and also a stray kitten who'd been handed in.

Sadly the adult cat didn't survive, but the kitten improved over night although she's very snuffly still and anaemic because she had so many fleas feeding on her blood.

Then began what you might think was a straightforward process of moving her for further treatment. Being so small, kittens can improve or go downhill very fast. Yesterday evening, the vets were doubtful whether she'd survive the night, but by mid-morning she was perky enough not to be really in need of inpatient care. Because of the snuffles, there was the added complication that vets don't really want a potential source of cross-infection to other ill patients unless it's absolutely unavoidable.

We don't usually end up calling round our foster homes while an animal is actually in a volunteer's car wondering where to go, but I'm afraid our new volunteer driver had some anxious moments wondering whether he was stuck permanently in transit with a sniffling kitten.

Thank you VERY much to our domestic bird fosterer for stepping in at about 5 minutes notice to provide a safe place with no animals likely to be susceptible to cat germs, and thank you to our wonderful volunteer driver for coping with something we don't normally land on new volunteers!

It does show how essential our volunteers are to making it possible to save animals, and also the importance of having as many individual foster homes as possible to minimise the risks of cross-infection.

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

Calls about reptiles

Common Lizard (Zootoca vivipara)
  © Copyright Lairich Rig and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

We're getting a slightly surprising number of calls from people who are concerned about finding lizards in their garden (or straying inside buildings), so I thought I'd try to find a photo showing what species these are likely to be. The only other British lizards are the Smooth snake (a legless lizard) and the much rarer Sand Lizard. 

They are entirely harmless to people (in fact beneficial because they feed on insects and slugs) and, at a maximum size of about 8 inches, have much more reason to be afraid of us than we of them.

All species of British lizard are protected by law, and it is an offence to kill or injure them. If one end s up indoors (perhaps attracted by warmth), the best way to remove it is probably to capture it by putting something like a jam jar over it, then sliding a piece of card or paper under the rim of the jar until the lizard is confined. Alternatively you could use a dustpan and soft brush to gently sweep the lizard up and then release it outside. 

Lizards have waterproof skin which is dry and scaly to the touch. Other lizard-like creatures you may find locally are various newts. These are amphibia (related to frogs and toads) and their skin is moist. They definitely ought not to be indoors as they will dehydrate and die, but may get in by accident, or possibly be brought in by cats.

Newt
  © Copyright Penny Mayes and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

As exotic reptiles become more common as pets, there's the added potential complication of escapees. If you find a lizard that's significantly more than 8 inches long, it may be a lost pet. 

Another stray cat

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

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

Updates from the "Tweetathon"

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

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

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

RSPCA 24/7 Tweetathon

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

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

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

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

Phones and phone calls

Give the UK public a phone number and they will call it—except when they are suspicious that it is a premium rate line, when they may phone to ask me to call it for them.

The RSPCA National Control Centre takes over a million calls every year. That's roughly two calls every minute, and, since these won't be evenly spread over the 24 hours it gets hammered at peak periods. This is why calls take some time to be answered and why the control centre staff may sound unsympathetic—they can't spend time on anything besides getting down essential details that will enable the field staff to evaluate and deal with the issue.

Judging by the number of calls we get direct to the Cambridge branch, the total number of calls to all the RSPCA branches combined probably amounts to another million.

Altogether that's a LOT of phone calls. We try to deal with it in various ways, none of which are entirely satisfactory. Some branches have set times when calls will be answered, some have rota systems of volunteers, some have a phone that's permanently on answerphone and will sift calls and return those they can help. The nearest thing to an ideal setup is probably a rota of volunteers with other tasks that they can be getting on with between calls, although it does mean a lot of interruptions, and most branches simply don't have enough volunteers who can be available during the 9-5 period when most people are at work.

Then there's the vexed question of whether there should be a single branch number for everything or several numbers that can be treated differently, such as an emergency mobile number that's answered immediately, and an enquiry number that's answered when someone happens to be about.

This would probably work except that callers to the enquiry number tend to get fed up because no-one answers and try the emergency number. If you happen to be the person with the mobile in their pocket and you are on a bike this can make your journey a bit of a frustrating process.

Even for the National Control Centre with its staff who are employed to do nothing but answer RSPCA calls, there have to be trade-offs between various factors to generate a "least-worst" solution. The core staff work all the year round and develop a lot of background knowledge. At busy times of the year they are supplemented by pulling in extra people from the parent call centre company in order to keep waiting times before calls are answered to acceptable levels. These staff are trained, but they give slightly more of an impression of working to a script because they don't have the same depth of knowledge. The trade off here is between the need to keep down costs by using only the number of staff who are really necessary and the risk that animals will suffer if waiting times are too protracted and callers give up. At the end of the day it's pointless having a super-efficient system for taking calls if it doesn't leave enough funds available to actually deal with the problem once it's been reported.

Similar trade-offs apply when it comes to taking action following the phone calls; there is no point employing so many animal collection staff that there's no money left to pay the vet bills for the animals they collect. This is why we always ask callers whether it would be possible for them to take injured animals direct to the closest private vet, as this means the animal gets help more quickly and we can afford to spend more money on the actual treatment instead of on the process of getting the animal to the surgery. It's also why it's more cost-effective to pay for the use of private vets' existing facilities than try to set up lots of RSPCA hospitals which would all have overheads.

This can be upsetting for both ends of the incident—witness the usually calm RSPCA_Frontline's uncharacteristically sharp reaction to a follower who simply will not accept it's not possible to get a collection officer to her address instantly: "For animals in need - call 0300 1234 999. Swearing is unacceptable on Twitter and this account is also followed by children."

Ultimately the only solution is to increase our fundraising.

If you think you might like to volunteer to go on our phone rota, please email info@rspca-cambridge.org.uk 

Squirrels

A happier ending than I was expecting on this.

A few days ago I took a call from a friend who'd been contacted by another of her friends who was in great distress because the complex where she worked had problems with squirrel damage in their roof area and pest control operatives had been called in. 

Both of them were so upset about it that it was difficult to be clear what exactly was happening, but eventually they explained that that the squirrels had been trapped and were simply being left to die. 

This is clearly not legal under UK law, which insists that bird or mammal traps must be checked at least once a day and I suggested that they should call the RSPCA NCC, making it clear that it was a complaint about the squirrels being caused to suffer, not about them being killed (which is not in itself illegal).

I'm still not absolutely clear whether the squirrels were actually inside live traps in the roof space, or trapped in the space itself after the holes through which they were entering had been blocked up, but my friend called this evening to say that one of our inspectors had visited the building and got the squirrels released (blocking the entrance holes after them so that they couldn't return).

I must say that I had been expecting that the result would be to ensure that the squirrels were killed humanely instead of suffering a lingering death—and a pretty pointless one as a couple of them are not going to make much difference to the total squirrel population of Cambridge.

From the NCC's Newsletter

We probably get more grumbles about the RSPCA National Control Centre (NCC) than almost anything else, and sometimes people are quite unreasonable about what is possible for someone stuck at the end of a phone line and fielding a non-stop stream of calls from agitated members of the public. 

With this in mind, I thought I would include an excerpt from the latest NCC newsletter to try to give some background about what this enormously stressful job actually involves. I've edited it slightly to make it clearer to non-RSPCA readers because the original was produced for internal consumption. 

A Day In The Life Of...A Service and Support Line Controller

Job Role:

To take calls from the Inspectorate, Branches, Emergency Services and Vets. The inspectorate call for various reasons, such as checking PCO [Person Complained Of] details, markers and matches, allocations, directions and telephone numbers. Branches call in to report anonymous complaints that they receive either by telephone, letters or e-mails, they will also ask the NCC to arrange collection and transfer of animals from vets and other establishments. The NCC take calls from emergency services such as police, fire and rescue, coastguard and occasionally the ambulance service. They will call in for assistance with trapped animals and will also call in to register complaints when they have attended a property and have concerns about the welfare of animals being kept there.

The Vet Line is a dedicated line for vets to contact the NCC to request a contribution towards Initial Emergency Treatment of stray domestic animals when the owner is unknown and for treatment of some wildlife, predominantly wildlife above the size of a wild rabbit. The Vet Line has recently also started to deal with owned animals when the owner cannot afford to pay for the treatment. The controllers will liaise with the owner, vets, branches and other charities to try to assist.

This is a typical day: 

07:50 - Log onto system and check knowledge base for any updates.

08:00 - 09:30 - Take calls from various people including a vet who had been called out to a sheep. The member of public had spotted the sheep with a protruding eye in South Yorkshire, had picked the sheep up and put it in her car and had taken it home with her to Nottingham! The vets had to euthanize the sheep and NCC issued IET and also advised to contact the police and the local councils to try to trace the owner. NCC also advised them that DEFRA should be contacted due to the movement of the sheep.

09:30 - 09:45 - Break

09:45 – 10:15- Fit to Fly. This is a weekly meeting with other members of the team and their Team Leader. It is a chance for the TL to keep the team up to date with any changes that they need to be aware of and to also give feedback on performance and quality and gives them a chance to ask questions and raise any issues they may have and are usually quite upbeat and informative.

11:00 – 12:00 - Back to more calls. NCC was asked to do a call back for an owned animal. The owner had been given assistance from the local branch but could not afford the consultation fee so was asking for more assistance. NCC rang the owner back and discovered that it was not the consultation fee that she needed assistance with; she had an outstanding bill with the vet and wanted the RSPCA to clear her previous debt, this was declined.

12:00 – 12:30 - Lunch. 12:30 – 13:30 - More calls from Branch, Vets and the Inspectorate.

13:30 – 14:15 - Presentation to New starters. The presentation gives an overview and how their role as a call takers will link with the service and support team and explains what Initial Emergency Treatment is and when RSPCA would pay it.

14:15 – 14:25 - Break

14:25 – 15:30 - Final calls of the day included a call from the police about a dog locked in a car, a call from the fire service asking for assistance with a cat trapped in a car engine, a call from Branch asking for three cats to be transferred from a vet to the Branch and a call from an inspector regarding a case of someone illegally docking puppies tails.

If you need to contact the NCC

• Make sure you can explain as accurately as possible where the animals involved are located. In a residential area a street number and post code will do this, but it will be much more difficult if the problem involves animals in the countryside or beside a road. This is crucially important for neglect complaints because of the risk that an inspector will visit the wrong animals (for example if there are several fields all with similar animals in them).
• If a sick or injured animal needs help, please contain it if this is possible without putting yourself at risk. It may mean a wasted journey if the animal concerned cannot be found. If it is possible for you to transport the animal to a vet the NCC may request this in order that treatment can be started without delay.
• Stay calm, and explain the situation to the controller answering the phone. If you are too upset to give complete details they may not be able to assess the situation correctly. Please remember that the RSPCA has to deal with the law as it is, not as we might want it to be—for example we can intervene to stop grey squirrels being killed in a cruel way, but we cannot prevent someone arranging for them to be killed humanely.

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.

More comparisons

Compared with the London Ambulance Service fiasco, the NCC really doesn't look too bad. Note that the annual budget for the LAS is about £200 million — roughly double the RSPCA's annual income. They get approximately the same number of calls as the NCC over the course of a year.

Horses and ponies

A few RSPCA branches have facilities for caring for horses and other large domestic animals or have arrangements to board them in private livery stables, but in general the National Society takes responsibility for finding suitable accommodation for equines if they are taken in as a result of rescues or cruelty investigations. 

In the case of very large incidents, like the one at Amersham, other equine rescue organisations will usually chip in so that animals can be distributed among centres which have available space and suitable facilities. 

Rescues and cruelty investigations are always done by the Inspectorate in conjunction with vets and often with technical advice and help from experts such as the World Horse Welfare field officers. This means that it is important to contact the National Control Centre, rather than our branch, if you see horses which are neglected, injured or in danger, as this avoids delay.

The contact number for the Control Centre is 0300 1234 999. You may report incidents anonymously if necessary, but it is very important to give an accurate location for the animals, and preferably a contact phone number so that an inspector can call you back to get further details if needed. 

Be aware that if a case goes to prosecution it may be as long as a year before it comes before the courts—so the animals may be removed from a site, but you may not see any reports in the local media until very much later.

Hedgehogs

Starting to get calls from people concerned about small hedgehogs in their gardens. Hedgehogs of any size who are seen wandering during the day are very likely to be unwell in some way. In this case, the best thing to do is to capture the hedgehog (use gloves to avoid being scratched by its spines) and confine it in a box before telephoning the RSPCA control centre 0300 1234 999. They will do their best to arrange for the hedgehog to be collected and taken to the closest RSPCA wildlife centre. (In our case, this is East Winch, in Norfolk).  I suggest you put the box somewhere where any insect life will not be a problem, such as a garden shed.

Very small hedgehogs who appear in the garden after dusk are probably not yet at risk because there is lots of wild food about still (the slugs in my garden are so fit they scare my cats!). If you want to improve their chances of surviving their first hibernation by providing extra rations (or just want to encourage them closer), you can get dried food made specially for hedgehogs from most pet shops. Being mammals, hedgehogs can produce their own body heat, so the unusually chilly summer isn't a problem for them in the way it is for cold blooded hibernators like tortoises, or really tiny mammals, such as bats. That means that, for the moment, they're really best left where they are rather than taking up space in a wildlife hospital that may be needed by another animal. 

Lost Cats

In this hot weather there's a high risk of cats being shut in sheds etc., so it's advisable to start asking neighbours to check sheds, garages etc. (anywhere that a cat might go in for a nap and get shut in) if a cat doesn't check in at normal mealtimes. Also ring round local vets in case he might have been injured and handed in. It's best to start this as soon as a cat's been away for longer than his normal habit.

Vet24 at Milton do most of the out of hours emergency cover for the Cambridge area, so it's particularly important to phone them as they're the most likely vet for an injured cat to be taken to over the weekend or evenings. Their phone number is 0845 500 4247. Injured cats reported to the RSPCA will normally be taken to the closest available private vet for initial first aid.

The Blue Cross cats home on Garlic Row would be the most likely place for an uninjured stray to be taken if found in Cambridge City. Their number is 01223 350 153.

It's also as well to get a missing cat logged  with the RSPCA National Control Centre (NCC). Their number is 0300 1234 999.