RSPCA Cambridge and District branch covers an area of South Cambridgeshire stretching from Littleport in the North to Royston in the South and from Gamlingay in the West to Newmarket in the East. The branch is responsible for raising funds to run our animal welfare services within this area.
At the moment we particularly need to recruit:
Running our animal welfare activities costs an average of £96,000 each year. This money is spent on keeping animals alive and relieving suffering by paying for veterinary treatments and on boarding unwanted animals until we can rehome them. In an average year we help around 3,000 individual animals. A very large proportion of our welfare work consists of providing low-cost veterinary care for animals whose owners cannot afford the full cost of treatment. There is no National Health Service for animals and without us most of them would either go without treatment or be put to sleep. It is often true that their owners ought to have been more responsible, but we have to deal with society as it is - and unfortunately we are all too often presented with a desperately ill animal and an owner with no money at all. The majority of the animals we take in for rehoming are not simply healthy unwanted animals but are either ill, injured or neglected so they usually require a considerable amount of expensive treatment before they can be rehoused.
All RSPCA branches are separate charities affiliated to the national RSPCA. We are individually responsible for raising the money needed to run the local services which we provide.
We do not receive funding from the Government and it is comparatively rare for us to be given large donations or legacies, so we have to work hard to earn the money that is needed. Most of our funds are raised by a combination of charity shop sales, annual box collections, and a variety of stalls and events. All money raised locally is spent locally - our Headquarters, which runs the Inspectorate and National Control Centre, has its own funds.
We particularly need more helpers at our shops, collectors for RSPCA week and volunteers to help with our annual dog show
If you think you might like to help, please drop in at one of our shops to see what our volunteers do. It involves much more than sitting behind a till - for example some volunteers help by doing online searches to find what prices we can charge for unusual items; adding descriptions of second-hand books to our online catalogue; and running stalls at local fêtes to get the maximum value from any books that didn't sell in the shop.
Volunteers sort, steam and price donated items - think of the bags of donated goods as a kind of gigantic lucky-dip from which we occasionally pull a vintage dress worth hundreds of pounds.
Our charity shops are at 184 Mill Road, Cambridge CB1 3LP (specialist second-hand bookshop); 188 Mill Road (clothing, music and bric-à-brac); and 156 High Street, Newmarket CB8 9AQ (general). Just drop in between 10 am and 4 pm Monday to Saturday, or phone 01223 212 644 or 01638 668 023.
£3.50 would cover the cost of boarding a cat for a day
£4.00 would board a dog
£20 would pay for the cost of neutering a cat
£30 would buy another humane trap for catching feral cats so that they can be neutered
£95 would buy a microchip scanner
Usually at Block Fen Animal Centre:
Block Fen Drove, Wimblington, Cambridgeshire, PE15 0FB
Open to anyone who might be interested in helping with pre-homing visits to ensure a match between animals and their new homes. Please email rosemary@rspcacambridge.org.uk if you are interested in attending.
Training days are run several times a year - if you missed the last one and would like to be notified of the next session, please email us.
