http://www.farmersguardian.com/home/livestock/rspca-defends-animal-welfareprosecutions/52523.

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RSPCA defends animal welfare prosecutions

12 January 2013 | By Alistair Driver
THE RSPCA has defended its right to investigate and prosecute suspected abuses of animal welfare after a petition was launched asking the Government to investigate its activities. The Government e-petition, created by dog breeder Mike Davidsohn in protest at the charitys stance on pedigree dogs, accuses the RSPCA of using bully boy tactics against innocent members of the public to bring prosecutions and infringing on citizens civil and legal rights. The petition claims the RSPCA is misusing funds donated by members of the public specifically for its own political gain in bringing the prosecutions. It asks the Government to investigate its actions and introduce new rules governing charities use of funds for political lobbying or bringing private prosecutions. By Friday it had been signed by more than 4,600 people. The RSPCA has courted controversy over the past few months, including over chief executive Gavin Grants threat to name and shame people who participated in the planned badger cull, its role in the shooting of more than 40 sheep at Ramsgate port in September and the revelation that it spent 330,000 prosecuting an Oxfordshire hunt. A spokesman for the charity insisted the RSPCA always acts within the law and we have been investigating and prosecuting those that abuse animals for 188 years. More than 98 per cent of prosecutions brought by the RSPCA are successful, she said. She said surveys showed donors backed its efforts to bring animal abusers to justice. The RSPCA is not political. We do, however, do everything we can to improve animal welfare and often the only way to do this is through changes in the law, she said. The RSPCA has raised 90,000 so far from supporters for a Fighting Fund to enable it to launch a legal challenge of the live export trade. It has lodged a claim in the High Court to seek judicial review of the arrangements operated by the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency for the approval and supervision of live animal exports through Ramsgate port. We are still waiting for permission from the judge to proceed with the judicial review. We should know by the end of January, an RSPCA spokeswoman said. The RSPCAs own Government e-petition, launched with Compassion in World Farming, to halt live animal exports has been signed by 34,000 people.

Readers' comments (5) 1) Anonymous | 12 January 2013 9:29 am

The RSPCA should be commended for prosecuting fox hunts for breaking the law and their stance on live exports. If the CPS wont do their job then what choice have they got. We can't allow criminals to break the law as that would be anarchy. Anonymous | 12 January 2013 10:27 am

2)

@Anonymous 9.29 This is not JUST about fox hunting, this is about a catalogue of cases where the management of the RSPCA have spent gifted monies on what can only be described as expensive, politically motivated

agendas. Why for example would you require the top barristers, to prosecute a vet shop owner, about a parrot? Why did they not use their own legal team!!!?? 2ladybugs

3) Edmund Marriage | 12 January 2013 10:49 am

Within Clause 170 of the Labour Governments Report of the Committee on Cruelty to Wild Animals in 1951 we find the following: We have already mentioned that the RSPCA, although they cannot approve ethically of any form of hunting, regard fox-hunting as an effective and traditional method of control, and they also feel that if hunting was abolished greater cruelty would be caused to foxes by the more widespread use of other methods, particularly shooting. The RSPCA held this position from the time they were founded in 1824 and have never given a satisfactory explanation for their change of policy in 1978. Of significance is that they lied to the Burns Inquiry on the issues of wounding rates, and the need for the search and dispatch of sick, weak and injured mammals, as did the hard core shooting lobby, part of Elliot Morleys divide and rule strategy against both hunting and shooting. Their campaign to protect, rather than humanely manage sick badgers, which effectively prevented the issue of culling licences, is now projected by Defra to cost the taxpayer at least an unnecessary 3bn. This is despite the fact that RSPCA spokesmen and current director David Grant have said publically, that searching for, locating and dispatching sick super-excreter badgers, which are driven well away from sets and territory towards livestock by young healthy badgers, proven by Maff (1978) to be the principle source of TB infection, could not be successfully prosecuted. Over the past twenty years they have been repeatedly found to be responsible by the Advertising Standards Authority for presenting misleading and untruthful statements to the public and Parliament on wildlife management and farming issues upon which they raise funds. The RSPCA have now effectively demonstrated that they act in concert with the extreme elements of the animal rights industry and are clearly hostile to British agriculture. Milking the emotions of the uninformed public on live exports and shooting sheep unnecessarily is one of their specialities. It is now only a matter of time before the due processes of the Law, and a competent Charity Commission, close them down for their deceitful and fraudulent activities. Edmund Marriage - British Wildlife Management.

4) Charles Henry | 12 January 2013 10:55 am

It's very telling how some people revere the BVA, but hold the LACS and RSPCA in contempt. Most people I know and the indigenous West Country population, revere their Vets who will turn out any time in all wind and weathers to tend any animal's needs, but hold LACS and now the RSPCA in absolute contempt. Hunting may be illegal. But so is speeding, so is shoplifting, so is drug taking (CANNABIS); so is driving vehicles without insurance, so is identity theft and so is stealing lead from a Church roof. .The police won't even enter traveler's camps unless they can go in mob handed! The CPS don't prosecute (fox hunting) because compared to all other 'crimes' it's just not justified and never will be. . Foxes are vermin and this is a bad law that needs repealing. It has just made criminals out of erstwhile honest and law-abiding citizens. A political law. . The sort that starts wars.

5) Glynne Sutcliffe | 12 January 2013 12:07 pm

As someone who has experienced the RSPCA's strategies first hand in the course of a 12 yr. vendetta still happening, I set out a decade ago to find out what they were really about. In 2003 I put up the website by Verity Maxwell, on "Profiling the RSPCA" a copy of which can be found on the Animadversion website. Meantime I have just recently put up another petition site in Australia, at http://www.communityrun.org/petitions/stop-rspca-prosecution- scandals-1 Please feel free to sign up. As well, I summarised the legal scam structure last night. I think it is much the same in the UK as in Australia. Let me know what you think : glynnesutcliffe at internode dot on dot net. Or call and leave a message (Australian Central Time) your exit code plus 618 8270 3548. Here is what I wrote (with a couple more points still to be added): Circulated for comments, improvements, additional points Now that the Heythrop prosecution has put the RSPCA on the front page, and raised establishment ire in the UK, maybe we could set the activities of the RSPCA as a topic for public contemplation and discussion as follows: DO WE BEHOLD A MAJOR SCAM, OPERATING WITH PARLIAMENTARY BLESSING? A CONSIDERATION OF THE RSPCA, AND ITS DE FACTO USURPATION OF THE ROLE OF THE PUBLIC PROSECUTOR... Are we looking at an integrated and very sophisticated scam - in conjunction with the complete abandonment of public and legal ethics? Was Chicago in the 1930s with Prohibition and Tammany Hall and Al Capone ever as bad an abuse of the public weal as the RSPCA-run prosecutions we see before us, and supported our much vaunted Rule of Law? ISNT IT ASKING FOR TROUBLE if we allow the RSPCA: 1) to advise Parliament on animal welfare legislation, and 2) act as a pseudo police-force and 3) run animal welfare prosecutions, and 4) collect from the fines imposed by the court? And isnt the likelihood of trouble increased if the RSPCA 5) regularly employs both QCs and high profile private lawyers paid way above the market rate, 6) with a donor provided slush fund it can deploy to intimidate or bribe witnesses or potential experts for the defence, or mount supplementary evidence in massive quantities, suitably edited and honed while 7) exploiting its PR provided reputation as a charity, as it 8) ruthlessly sells high quality animals it has seized from sanctuaries and breeders, 9) using the justification of the highly subjective neglect clauses of the animal welfare legislation it has helped draft - precisely to make this possible! Moreover, pondering the above, do we also need to ask 10) why convictions follow a pretty standardised template, wherein the defence lawyer regularly makes strenuous efforts to get the accused to agree to a guilty plea, in order to get the agony and expenses minimised? And the high penalties applying to animal welfare legislation which encourage this submission to pressure are 11) fuelled by a complicit media publishing media releases given them by the RSPCA unedited, unchecked and completely verbatim even when these are best described as abusive and defamatory, as well as prior to trial, and using standard reliance on such subjective adjectives as appalling and phrases such as the worst case Ive ever seen this same while 12) simultaneously refusing to publish any comments, statements or questions from the accused. And where does it say that our courts should

13) run high impact trials without a jury before a single sitting magistrate under severe pressure to oblige his mates? Or allow that same magistrate 14) to grant court approval to the RSPCA to sell or dispose of seized (= stolen) animals PRIOR TO TRIAL, thus permitting the so-called shelters to support the fencing of stolen property under the remarkably thin disguise of Orwellian terms such as adoption and re-homing ? Etc. Hot off the Chandlers Hill press, and ready for tidying up, adding to, or modifying as seems editorially appropriate. Hope you can improve the implied indictments. Please note, this is a different line of criticism than that derived from the high shelter kill rate, ignoring of animals in trouble data this is scheduled for separate treatment.