URRY: But you’re going to, you’re going to be seizing

animals now, aren’t you, before anybody’s done anything wrong?

WASS: That was the allegation put by some of our opponents

prior to the Animal Welfare Act. For a start, the RSPCA don’t seize animals, and secondly,

the phenomena where all of a sudden we would use this legislation mischievously to increase

rapidly the number of prosecutions just hasn’t been shown out in the statistics.

URRY: But a leading animal welfare defence barrister says

he’s not seeing any moderation in the RSPCA’s approach to those it puts before the courts.

Jonathan Rich is one of a handful at the bar who regularly defends those accused by the

RSPCA. He’s been doing that for twenty years.

RICH: I think that the RSPCA are prioritising the interests of

animals as they perceive them to a much greater extent than I think they should be, and I think

that they are not prioritising the interests of the public to as great an extent as they should be.

URRY: But isn’t that what they’re there for, to prioritise the

interests of animals?

RICH: It might sound attractive to you to have an

organisation prioritising the interests of animals, but actually look at what it means in terms

of the consequences for a farmer, for example, who is looking to retire, whose cattle have

perhaps not had the right treatment for a day or two. Is it really in the interests of the public

for him to be prosecuted for cruelty?

URRY: You know cases where that’s happened?

RICH: I certainly have, yes. I think that I and a lot of other

people wouldn’t be bringing cases like that in the numbers that we’re seeing. I’m very

troubled by the sort of defendants that are almost becoming typical in RSPCA cases.

URRY: Even those who’ve dedicated their lives to caring for

injured, sick and abandoned animals are ending up in court.

ACTUALITY WITH PARROT

URRY: Here in the North East, tucked away at the bottom of a

valley, just off a main road at Loftus near Middlesbrough is Hope Animal Shelter. First

impressions are surprise at the scale of it, and also that someone’s gone to a bit of trouble to

make it an attractive place. Lots of trees and shrubs, exotic palms and other plant life among

the cages and pens, which are home to a miscellany of unwanted pets and damaged wildlife.

SPEDDING: Dogs, cats, rabbits, ponies, fish, tortoises, just about

everything that people can’t look after them or people who’s died, people just get sick of them.

URRY: The shelter survives on voluntary donations,

community support and the efforts of one man, Clifford Spedding. He’s been doing this for

thirty years - quite simply, it’s his life.

So how many dogs have you got here in total?

ACTUALITY OF DOGS BARKING

SPEDDING: I think there’s only about eighteen at the minute.

URRY: Why did you decide to spend a lot of your life really

caring for animals?

SPEDDING: Well it just really happened. I never decided to do it.

I had my own animals and people used to get to know and just started fetching sick and

injured animals to me, and it just started from there and then it’s never stopped since. It’s

about giving them life back really, so you can injured animals, get them back into the wild.

Pet animals, rehoming that nobody wants, things like that.

URRY: How many animals do you think you’ve helped over

the years?

SPEDDING: Thousands.

URRY: Much to his dismay, two years ago Hope Animal

Shelter was raided by the RSPCA.

SPEDDING: I was just in the middle of feeding, the police and the

RSPCA all turned up, showed me the warrant and I just let them in and I just let them get on

with it. They just came in and took certain animals and left certain animals. They took some

ducks and chickens from round the back, a couple of geese, they took one dog, couple of

macaws, couple of tortoises and that’s it.

URRY: Did they say why they were taking them?

SPEDDING: Wrong conditions and some of them said they weren’t

very well.

URRY: They were concerned for these animals’ welfare?

SPEDDING: Yeah, yeah.

URRY: And were they right to be concerned about that?

SPEDDING: Oh yeah, they were right to be concerned, but they

could have gone into it in a better way. They could see I was having trouble, the buildings

wanted renewing. I had all the new timber and everything there but there’s just not the time

to get it all done.

URRY: The raid came at a difficult time in Mr Spedding’s life.

Thieves had been breaking into the premises and stealing pet food bought in bulk at £200 a

time. He believes he was being targeted by drug addicts needing to pay for their next fix.

He was suffering from depression, on disability living allowance and sometimes, without a

roof over his head, was sleeping in the back of his car. By his own admission he let things

slide in some parts of the shelter. Even so, Mr Spedding’s lawyer, Paul Watson, argues the

RSPCA went over the top when they took him to court.

WATSON: Clifford Spedding, I would say, is a very remarkable

man. For up to thirty years, at his own expense, he’s been running an animal shelter in

exemplary fashion until he had this problem. I was shocked, I have to say, at the approach

of the RSPCA. What he really needed was some help. He needed an arm round his shoulder

and somebody to say, ‘Well, what can we do to

assist?’ I think that could have been done at much less expense than the RSPCA spent on

prosecuting him. I think perhaps a cost of £5,000 or £6,000 would have put right the

facilities that they were complaining about, instead of which the RSPCA incurred, up to the

end of the magistrates court proceedings, legal fees of nearly £10,500, and up to that stage

there was also the additional costs of looking after the animals and vet’s fees were nearly

£17,700.

"Over the top" does not adequately describe, in my opinion, what the BC SPCA did to Gwen Wilson, a decent, honest, kind person who only needed some SPCA and community support at a bad time in her life. It was the SPCA that Gwen saved cats from. The SPCA could have assisted her, not prosecuted her. In the end Gwen, dying of cancer and unable to work and earn money to pay a lawyer to defend her, had to plead guilty to a charge that need not have been laid against her in the first place.

URRY: But the RSPCA needed to also consider the welfare of

some of the birds and animals at the shelter, and prosecution case manager Phil Wilson has

little time for the pleas of clemency.

WILSON: I think the concerns were significant in respect of a

general lack of care, animals living in filthy, squalid conditions, animals subjected to

unnecessary suffering.

URRY: Why didn’t you help this man instead of prosecuting

him?

WILSON: Mr Spedding wouldn’t cooperate with us. He

wouldn’t cooperate at all.

URRY: The concern has been raised that he was a man who’d

spent thirty years of his life caring for animals. He got into difficulties, he admits that.

Instead of spending, what, nearly £30,000 on prosecuting this man and the consequences of

prosecuting him, why didn’t you just spend a few thousand on helping him out?

WILSON: Let’s be clear about this kind man that you set out to

portray. Mr Spedding is a convicted animal abuser. Let’s not mess around with this. He’s a

convicted animal abuser. So when we say, ‘Oh well let’s help him, let’s do this,’ it requires

his cooperation. Now I appreciate that people like Mr Spedding get very very committed

and sometimes obsessed with what they do. That is not justification to criticise the RSPCA

for doing what it was set up to do, and that is bring the animal abusers to justice.

URRY: Clifford Spedding pleaded guilty to nine charges of

causing unnecessary suffering to birds and animals by neglecting to take them to vets or to

look after them properly. Although it was his first offence magistrates handed down a four

month suspended jail sentence and an order banning him for fifteen years for keeping any

bird, fowl or reptile. But the case went to appeal late last year, the suspended sentence and

the ban were overturned, allowing him to continue to run his animal shelter.

Gwen Wilson and some of her rescued pets