Survey: please help

We're trying to develop a better picture of the unmet needs for veterinary treatment in the area served by our animal clinic and beyond.
Please encourage anyone you know who has pets to complete it: all information is anonymous, but will help us to find what we need to do to reduce the numbers of animals who go without the treatment they need.

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

Priorities again

Events over the past few weeks once again demonstrate how difficult it is to prioritise in a straightforward way.

Nathan, an apparently young, fit cat who was recovering well, suddenly deteriorated and developed uncontrollable fits which didn't respond to medication. 

Saffron, much older, but with someone willing to donate towards the cost of her care turned out not only to have nerve damage and early kidney disease which made it probable that she wouldn't survive an operation on her pelvic injuries, but also positive for FIV.

Conversely, some of the very old cats are now doing well on relatively cheap treatment by medication.

Looking at our situation in a more general way: someone looking at our expenditure with no extra information would almost certainly say we can run our rehoming program or our clinic but not both. 

What that basic income and expenditure sheet doesn't show is that, if we closed the clinic, the rehoming program would almost immediately be overwhelmed by people wanting to give up animals because they couldn't care for them. If we closed our rehoming program, we would be closing the part of our activities which the majority of our donors want to support. Quite reasonably, a lot of them wonder why they should subsidise other people to keep pets they can't afford.

Essentially the rehoming program and the provision of veterinary help are complimentary to one another. We need to be able to say to someone who either can't or won't pay anything for their animal's treatment that we will help the animal by providing treatment and rehoming but we won't provide free treatment with no contribution from the owner. We ALSO need to be able to say to owners who are meeting us half-way that we will help them to keep their animals. 

And to to do all that there is no substitute for the long slog of fundraising. Please support our ten point plan to keep our clinic open. 

Just five minutes completing a gift aid form if you donate items for sale means we will raise an extra 25p for every pound the items sell for.

Knackered...

On reception at the clinic all yesterday morning, with Patch, one of the cats I'm fostering fitted in at the end of the session. The abscess under her eye has healed up nicely, but unfortunately her skin condition is, if anything, worse than ever. She's now on steroids to try to clear up the inflammation and irritation and medicated baths to keep the skin clean and wash off allergens.

This morning I had an anxious call from on of our local "cat ladies", about a probable stray she's been feeding (shown in the picture). We're fairly certain that she's hyperthyroid and that someone has gone to the trouble of getting it diagnosed, because her throat has been shaved at the point where blood would be taken for the test. The major problem is that she doesn't seem to be going home at all, which is very bad news if she ought to be on medication for the condition. The vets were able to feel an enlarged thyroid, and she's got all the symptoms: extreme weight loss while eating ravenously, racing heart, thirst and excessive drinking.

Cycled over at 8 and collected her as the "least worst" option since if we take her in we do at least know for sure what's happening, while if we leave her where she is we've got no way of knowing whether or not she's returning home or getting any treatment at all. Hyperthyroidism is a common problem in elderly cats and is usually treatable with medication, but the longer a cat goes without treatment the greater the strain on her heart and kidneys.

To the charity shop at 11, but not a lot of customers due to the awful weather. This was compensated by lots of incoming donations of items to sell, including two enormous ones including loads of very good crockery, which should go well when the students return. The clothes donations included a bag of towels, which are very welcome with so many foster cats needing washable bedding.

We need to recruit more volunteers to help in the shops. If you are interested, please email camshop@rspca-cambridge.org.uk or newmarket@rspca-cambridge.org.uk (depending on your location).

More rather sorry souls

Oreo

Jaeger

Click on the captions to go to their JustGiving pages.

Thank you for your support.

Appeal for Luke's operation

Luke looking very sorry for himself

Luke was brought in to us as an injured stray and he was found to have a broken jaw. The branch arranged for an operation to wire the break so that Luke would be able to eat and he is now much happier than in the photo.

The cumulative cost of treatment for a succession of injured animals is scary. It's not so much that each individual operation needs a lot of money, but that there are so many of them.

This is a bit of an experiment: creating JustGiving pages for the next ten or so animals that we take in and seeing whether people are prepared to donate towards part of the cost of each animal's treatment.

If it's successful we need to have much less worry that at some point we are simply going to have to say: "No more," and agree that treatable injured animals will have to be put to sleep because we simply don't have enough money to pay for them to be helped.

To go to Luke's JustGiving page, click the photo.

Inspectorate group reports for 2010

Fox cub stuck in netting

I've just this morning received the inspectorate report for the Cambridgeshire branches group.

E2 ANNUAL REPORT 2010

CASES OF INTEREST

Three men from Peterborough were banned from keeping horses for 5 years after 5 horses they owned were found living on land deemed unsuitable, poor feed and no water made available. Two of the horses were emaciated. The RSPCA arranged care and treatment for the horses and are still looking to secure them good homes.

A man from Cambridge was banned from keeping all animals for 10 years for causing his dog suffering by failing to feed it properly. It was found in an emaciated state. He was also ordered to pay the society costs of £600 and ordered to complete 40 hours community service. Unfortunately due to the dogs condition and prognosis being poor the veterinary surgeon euthanased the dog on humane grounds.

RESCUE OF INTEREST

A collapsed pony was discovered on a bridle path in Peterborough. The pony was suffering from severe arthritis. The RSPCA cared for the pony and as no owner was ever found the pony was eventually rehomed.

Statistics for 2010

The "Collections" heading refers to situations other than cruelty cases where frontline staff were asked to attend sick or injured animals. These would normally be injured strays or wild animals which the person calling the RSPCA was not able to take direct to a vet. 

The majority of the cruelty complaints can be resolved by giving suitable advice on correct care. This is where the branch facilities are very important as it is often the case that very low income pet owners don't obtain veterinary help because they are afraid of the cost. Our inspectors can deal with many neglect complaints by telling the owner that they must take the animal to our clinic and checking later that our records show that this did happen and that the animal's condition was treated.

E2 statistics for 2010
Complaints dealt with	4549
Case files submitted	30
Convictions secured	12
Adult written cautions	10
No proceedings	8
Collections	5446

Animal Welfare Statistics for January

In January our clinic treated 232 dogs, 90 cats, 6 rabbits and 2 miscellaneous "small furries". We rehomed 2 dogs, 9 cats and 3 rabbits.

This illustrates how vital it is that we keep on raising enough money to fund the clinic, because this represents 330 animals who might either have been put to sleep or relinquished for rehoming if a low-cost option for getting veterinary treatment hadn't been available. 

Where owners are caring, but don't have enough money to pay the full cost of a vet, it's much better all round if they can be enabled to keep their pets. 

• It costs less than treating the animals and boarding them until they can be rehomed.
• It means animals don't have to lose the family they know and love.
• It prevents "recycling" whereby people relinquish an animal they can't afford to look after and then acquire another one.

Our clinic costs us around £50,000 p.a. to run, including payments for the provision of veterinary services, vaccines, heat, light, rates, repairs etc.

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. 

Video showing some of the work of our clinic

Sadly, Star, the cat featured in the video, suffered heart failure a few weeks after it was filmed. He was given treatment at the Vet School as an inpatient, but died shortly after admission.

Heart problems are a common complication of an over-active thyroid (which is what was wrong with Star), because basically the whole of the cat's metabolism starts running at an excessive rate. This can overload the heart and weaken it.

More on the "feed-in" to the branch from RSPCA frontline activities

If you're following RSPCA_Frontline you'll have seen that the staff responded to 1,442 complaints and collections on 2nd November. One of these was in our branch area and was a concern over a pet that had been noticed limping. An inspector visited the owner and advised them that the animal needed to be seen by a vet. 

As it turned out that finance was an issue, the owner was given details of the veterinary services provided by our branch and told to contact us for help. They did this and the animal was seen and treated.

This is why it's so important for us to continue providing a service to local owners who may not be very organised or competent. It's far better to Prevent cruelty than prosecute afterwards.

Homeless animals and homeless people

One of the major reasons for animals becoming homeless is human housing problems. Families may be forced to give up their pets if they are unable to find rented accommodation which will allow animals, or sometimes pets (generally dogs) may end up living on the streets together with their owners. The Dogs Trust maintain a list of shelters for the homeless with facilities for people with dogs. 

In many ways "street life" is not a dreadful hardship for dogs, unless they are either very young or very old,  because contact with their human partners is the most important thing in a dog's life. Disaster may strike if the dog is injured, perhaps through fighting with other dogs in a hostel, becomes pregnant, or is too young to be protected by vaccination. If a dog does need veterinary help it may be difficult or impossible for a homeless owner to organise transport from a hostel in Cambridge City Centre to our clinic's location in the housing estates in the North of Cambridge. This is another urgent reason why we need to raise enough funds to re-start our help at private vets for owners who genuinely cannot manage to get to the clinic.

Our shops and our animal welfare work

Our 2nd hand bookshop at 188 Mill Road

Some of the comments from visitors to our shops over the weekend made me realise many people don't really know how our fundraising activities relate to what we do locally to help animals.

All the profits from our shops (after we've paid the rent, rates etc.) go to pay the costs of running our animal clinic, providing care for animals that we've had to take in and other work to help animals in the local region.

We need to raise this money because there is no government funding to pay for the work we do.

At the end of each day, the staff and volunteers count up the shop's takings and pay them into the branch bank account. This money is then available to pay bills, such as the charges for boarding animals in kennels before rehoming and from vets for treating injured and sick animals. Fees paid by clinic users are paid into the same bank account and go towards paying the University's charge for providing qualified vets to treat animals at the clinic. We pay roughly half their charges using money we've raised by fund-raising activities such as our shops, and the clinic fees pay the other half. Periodically they send me their bills and I make out cheques to pay them. These are then counter-signed by a second member of the branch committee and posted off to the vets and kennels. I enter up the amounts in a spreadsheet to keep a record of how much we've spent each month and how low our funds are getting.

Last month we spent:

• £1,263 on boarding animals waiting to be rehomed
• £1,702 on veterinary treatments at private vets
• £13,786 on treatments at our clinic

Without the shops to pay part of the cost we would need to increase the clinic fees a lot and that would mean some of the very poorest pet owners probably couldn't afford to use it any more, so it is very important that they make enough profit to support the clinic.

The money we raise is also an essential lifeline for injured animals because it means that vets who have animals whose owner is unknown brought in to them can give at least some treatment rather than always putting them to sleep.

The money we raise isn't sent away to swell some "funds" elsewhere; it's used directly to provide help for animals locally.

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That Channel 4 programme

Grim shop meeting this evening at 188 Mill Road. It's now long enough since the Channel 4 anti-RSPCA "documentary" to assess some of its impact and donations have been hit significantly. At least one commercial house-clearance agent who regularly gave the shop old books it was too much trouble for him to sell has stopped because he now believes we've got plenty of money and aren't spending it on the animals. The antique centre round the corner in Gwydir st is apparently telling customers not to give to the RSPCA: "because they've got loads of money and don't care about animals".

I'm sure the Channel 4 programme makers thought they were very daring and anti-establishment—it would be daring and anti-establishment to cut NHS funding (after all it's got a million times as much cash as the RSPCA) and just let sick people die, but that wouldn't make it a good idea.

Ironically Dogs Today this month is featuring the Animals Count party as "the political party that wants an NHS for dogs". It would be more useful if they hadn't done their level best to destroy the closest thing to an animals' NHS that exists, although I respect Beverley Cuddy for being willing to allow honest discussion in the comments of her articles.

Branch animal welfare statistics so far this year

Rehomed: 13 dogs, 23 cats, 4 rabbits and 6 miscellaneous animals.

Veterinary treatments given: 1,110 dogs, 505 cats 46 rabbits and 26 miscellaneous animals.

67 dogs and 57 cats neutered, 44 dogs and 52 cats microchipped.

Worse and worse...

Three calls asking for help with the cost of treatment at private vets today. One I didn't feel that bad about as the owner knew about our clinic and had had the dog in question for several years, so there's no real excuse for not getting him registered. I'm reasonably happy that she did get the dog to the private vet and, while it may have left her painfully short of cash, nothing awful is going to happen because we couldn't help her.

One I felt very bad about — a hamster which had been dropped and almost certainly had a damaged spine, as he was dragging his back legs. In that situation there would be little that a vet could do other than put the hamster to sleep, and it's debateable whether spending £100 to get that done this evening rather than wait until the morning would be a good use of charity funds even if we could afford it. Still, in an ideal world this is something that wouldn't be delayed, even though spinal injuries aren't usually painful.

The third was one of those situations that really make you despair: a couple with twelve dogs, six of them not vaccinated, one with a litter of puppies. Last week one of the un-vaccinated dogs developed parvo-virus and was put to sleep. Today, the bitch with the puppies had diarrhoea with blood in it, which is one of the symptoms of parvo-virus infection. If she'd been registered at our clinic she could have been seen as an emergency — although even then there's a very limited amount that could be done to improve her chances. All I could suggest was that the owner should speak to the vet who treated the first sick dog to at least get some advice, and then take the bitch to our clinic on Tuesday (leaving her in the car so that she didn't mix with any of the other dogs).

Tiger showing off her smart new splint

Tiger went up to the Veterinary Hospital to have her leg checked today, and she now has a smart newly bandaged splint instead of the old one which had got pretty grotty where she'd been digging in her litter tray. She also had an X-ray which showed the main lower leg bone is healing nicely, but the thinner one still needs support to keep the broken ends positioned together. It should be able to come off for good in another 10 days; then three more weeks cage rest while the bones are still in a weakened state.

Tiger isn't a stray, but was signed over to us because her owners didn't feel able to cope with a cat with a broken leg. She'll be up for rehoming once she's fully recovered.

Dawn over Coldham's Common from the path to the clinic