Better to light a candle than curse the darkness...

But it is b. annoying when someone is trying to knock the matches out of your hand.

It is truly terrifying that this was apparently written by a fairly senior politician.

He says:

"Now I gather the RSPCA like other animal welfare charities receives no government funding which makes this policy change even more bizarre"

Why is it bizarre that the RSPCA needs to make choices about which animals are in greatest need because we depend on donations and fundraising instead of being able to raise income from taxes?

He says:

"we have had both cats and dogs from their branch at Radcliffe on Trent - and was never happy that they only housed animals for 7 days before putting them to sleep, but now to just shut their doors is shameful."

If he had looked at the Radcliffe's website he would have seen that many of the animals advertised for rehoming had been in their care for many months and the "only 7 days" claim is just not true. If he had bothered to read the main RSPCA website he would have seen that the RSPCA is not "shutting its doors"; we are giving the most needy animals priority so that they are guaranteed a safe place.

He seems incapable of understanding that reducing donations to the RSPCA will mean fewer animals can be helped and he has no idea that the Radcliffe home is run by volunteers, or indeed what a very large part of the RSPCA is run by volunteer trustees who are permanently worried about raising funds to carry on. Judging from his Twitter feed he doesn't see any reason at all why someone like me should be upset—after all I am only a volunteer. He doesn't appear to know or care about the very low-income families who use RSPCA clinics and hospitals for their pets.

 

It's the irresponsible, campaign mentality that's so terrifying. He really does think all he needs to do is to put enough pressure on us and we'll magically do everything he wants out of a bottomless pit of funds. I don't think it much matters which political party is in power—only that the people at the top should have experience of running something productive themselves, not predominantly campaigning.

Thoughts on work experience

We get lots of requests for work experience placements, and have to disappoint most of the callers because we don't really have anything suitable for people who want to work directly with animals. Most of our rehoming is either via private boarding kennels or foster homes and neither of these is suitable to meet the fairly stringent checks which are required by local authorities before placements can be approved. 

Our clinic is approved by the LEA, but doesn't really give a very satisfactory placement opportunity because work experience students can't have contact with the animals due to confidentiality requirements (because most of the animals have owners). This means they're limited to helping out at the reception desk, and the staff area there is tiny, so really they don't get do do much besides helping with filing and watching animals being booked in. If we had more than one person at a time, the area would burst!

I suppose it does give the placement students an opportunity to see an animal welfare clinic in action and get an idea just how pressured it all is.

The shops are really much more suited to giving placement students a genuine experience of the adult world of work (and possibly an understanding that most people's jobs are rather mundane for most of the time). I'm also happier that they're offering a more realistic view of employment, as I have real concerns about young people being encouraged to choose supposedly vocational courses because they love animals without any understanding that there may be very little chance of getting a job at the end of it.

Realistically, society needs a pool of people earning money in jobs that aren't particularly exciting in order to be able to afford animal carers (either for our own animals or ones in rescue).

I'm not sure the emphasis on students choosing jobs they're going to enjoy even does them many favours if they do get an animal care post because a lot of the work is still going to be repetitive, dirty, hard and poorly paid and they're going to need to learn perseverance to get through it.

Further thought: I suppose what bothers me most about some of this is that it's all about encouraging the kids to think you can cause things to happen by wanting rather than by setting your goals and working towards them. Fundamentally that's the root of a load of the problems we face here: there are tons of people who want to tell us what we ought to do, and very few who are willing to help us work to achieve 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.