How $14 made a multi-million dollar charity wobble

Puppies saved by a NSW rescue group – Image The Newcastle Herald

A $14 allowance paid to RSPCA staff on the days they kill pets, has again thrust the RSPCA NSW kill rates into the media spotlight;

David Kelaher, an ex-union official who exposed the allowance during online debate, says he has represented RSPCA employees in disciplinary matters in the past and that if workers could ‘swing it’ to kill five days a week, they could add $70 per week to their take home pay.

“The median wage was around $35.5K – so presuming you worked a regular 48-week year you could get a 10 per cent salary increase by continually killing,” Mr Kelaher said online.

Steve Coleman was forced to defend the allowance and their kill rates (66% for cats, 46% for dogs) on talkback radio (‘Dog Killers’ – 2GB) with the main message being that the RSPCA simply have no choice on which pets come into their shelters, so killing is a necessary evil requiring compensation.

So how true is this? Are the RSPCA simply passive pawns in a larger animal management problem? Are animal advocates being unfair in their assertion that the people might be motivated to kill by this bonus – given all who work in animal welfare are simply doing the best they can? Are rescue groups naive to think they could possibly respond to the sheer numbers the RSPCA process? And should the community stop critiquing and start thanking the RSPCA for killing pets?

The illusion of inculpability

The RSPCA NSW want you to believe they are simply the ‘last stop’ in a pet’s long journey to homelessness. The pets they receive are the true dregs of the pet world and as such, high kill rates (more than one in every two cats, nearly one in every two dogs) are simply a side-effect of these poor quality intakes. As Steve Coleman repeated several times in his 2GB interview, they don’t have the luxury of ‘picking and choosing’ – that is they are proudly ‘open door’ and take everything.

So to blame them for the killing is unfair.

Except we know a few things which make these assertions seem hollow.


Firstly, the RSPCA NSW does actually ‘pick and choose’ the pets it takes into its facilities. According to the report ‘Council Data Collection System for Seizures of Cats and Dogs 2011/2012? many of the pounds who are run by the RSPCA NSW in shire provided facilities, kill pets at the end of their holding period. Then the remaining pets are moved into RSPCA facilities and onto their ‘books’. Then some more pets are killed, and some are rehomed. See the full pet transfer history here.

So if the RSPCA is critical of rescue groups for supposedly ‘cherry picking’ the pound population, then claiming an increased success rate of placement, then they need to be honest to the fact that they also cherry pick their own council pounds pulling only a segment of the pound population into official RSPCA ‘care’ – however, sadly it doesn’t seem to produce the same purported result of low kill rates, making it a doubly untenable position that being ‘open door’ is to blame.


Secondly, the RSPCA NSW have historically aggressively tendered for multiple pound contracts. That is, rather than each RSPCA facility supporting a single community, they bring in pets from multiple council locations. For example the RSPCA Rutherford processes pets for Cessnock, Lake Macquarie, Maitland and Newcastle City Councils. Unanderra takes pets for Shellharbour and Wollongong. In this instance we’re seeing a reverse cherry picking taking place. The RSPCA is choosing to take in more pets than it seemingly is able to reasonably process. They are choosing to be paid by multiple cities, block other organsations from taking the contract and the pet-load, and to then use killing as the primary tool for the shelter overpopulation created.

Taking in more pets than you can care for and place, if anything, is a much worse misdeed than only taking those pets you have the capacity for. At least when a rescue group ‘cherry picks’ and leaves some pets behind, other rescue groups can step in. Or the pound can make arrangements to work to treat and place the pet themselves, and the pet may be adopted directly a member of the public. However, if you choose to take in pets with the view that there is ‘no option’ but to kill them because of your high numbers of intakes, then that pet is dead, with no chance at all.


Thirdly, the RSPCA NSW supports mandates which allow increased levels of killing. In 2009, the Lake Macquarie Council removed protections for feral and infant animals, allowing the RSPCA to kill them on intake. Previously it was a requirement that they were kept and cared for, for a minimum of seven days. This was set to allow the RSPCA to kill an extra 150 pets a year no questions asked. When the contract was renewed this month, the protection for these most vulnerable animals was still absent, with council calling an immediate death “an effective manner to deal with feral and infant animals”.


And finally, even if we were to take the RSPCA assertions as completely true – even if the pets coming into RSPCA NSW facilities were indeed in need of abnormally large amounts of care and rehabilitation compared to those seen entering other, better performing pounds and shelters – that is exactly why the public support them to the tunes of tens of millions of dollars every year.

“Honey was rescued from a life of neglect. Left to starve in a barren backyard, she was on the brink of death. Reduced to a skeletal shadow of what a gorgeous young dog should be, Honey’s little rib bones and hips were popping out from her tiny frame. If the RSPCA inspector had not rescued her on that very day, poor little Honey might not have lived another day. She was so weak, malnourished and dehydrated.”

The RSPCA NSW’s Guardian Angel campaign was one of the most successful in the organisation’s history, raising $20 for every dollar spent on promotion in its first year. It did not raise this money promoting the saving of charismatic, good looking, healthy homeless pets and the efficient killing of imperfect ones – the organisation tapped into the desire of the public to see unwell pets made well, and our most vulnerable pets given a second chance.

To now maintain they have no obligation or mandate to treat pets and that killing is a perfectly reasonable alternative to providing that treatment, is in conflict with their very core promise to supporters.

The illusion of necessity

To be able to keep killing, the need to kill must be defended. That is, there is no other option for these animals, and the RSPCA is simply doing what it has to do. Providing an extra payment to staff who kill, is therefore a moot point, as the pets were always going to need to die. The payment is not a motivator, it is recompense.

Except. The basics of the No Kill movement have been known since the 1980’s. Working with rescue, extensive foster care, online and proactive lost and found, humane cat management, high-volume and free desexing programs targeted to ‘problem’ areas – all of these basics working in combination have been proven to reduce intakes.

So why hasn’t the RSPCA NSW implemented them?

Steve Coleman criticised animal advocates for not coming down and ‘taking 200 dogs’, but up until the beginning of the year the organisation was still refusing to speak to rescue. The PetRescue website has been in operation for coming up to a decade, including the contact details of hundreds of rescue groups in the NSW region – why haven’t these relationships been sought out by the RSPCA before now?

Why, when desexing is constantly lauded as the answer to all our animal management issues, isn’t the RSPCA NSW doing 5,000, 10,000 or 30,000 desexing operations for at risk pets every year? Why do they still act as apologists for high-intake cat culling programs, rather than advocate for those programs that would keep cats out of their facilities? Why don’t they put a photograph of every single lost pet online so as to maximise their chances of finding their owner, or a rescue group willing to – at their own cost – save that pet’s life? Why does the RSPCA still work to tear down the No Kill movement in the face of its overwhelming success, rather than work to learn about its successful implementation?

Steve Coleman and the RSPCA NSW want you to believe the answer to all of these questions is simply ‘because the RSPCA has to kill’. Any other answer requires the responsibility for their current performance to be placed on the shoulders of the organisation’s management – a position they’re unlikely to take on board all the while the ‘we have to kill’ mantra, still maintains a level of support that allows them to continue to operate.

The illusion of authority

The RSPCA need you to believe them when they tell you that they are a compassionate organisation, staffed entirely by pet lovers, who do everything they can to save lives, only using killing as a last resort.

They need you to believe that they are the authority on saving lives – the number one animal welfare organisation – and that no one else could do what they do. They need you to believe in the brand story, the mythology, that is the RSPCA.

And they need this, because their very organisational future depends on it. Without large-scale community support, their bloated over-reaching $100 million dollar a year charity fails to exist.

Which is why the grassroots work of animal advocates is becoming so painful for them. They don’t want the public to ruminate on the figures, or compare and contrast those figures with other more successful animal welfare organisations. They don’t want the ‘oopsie’ kills that inevitably happen when you’re killing on a large-scale to keep showing up in the media as stories of loved, family pets being offed before their owners could save them. They don’t want to be questioned as to whether killing is an appropriate tool to manage all but perfect pets. They don’t want the public to ask whether making money from killing pit bulls in BSL states is appropriate revenue. Whether an effective shelter director can still kill the majority of unclaimed intakes. Whether Community Cat cares are offering a more humane solution to cat management issues. Or whether someone being ‘paid to kill’ is at odds with a culture of compassion.

Questions are painful because each one takes a little shine off the RSPCA brand which is built on being the authority on all things animal welfare. However these painful questions are exactly what is driving the organisation change we’re starting to see.

Steve Coleman may today be able to tell us that killing is appropriate and necessary. But tomorrow – as more Australians learn that it is not – this position will become indefensible. And that will be the day when the lives of pets will start to be protected.

See also: Overhauling the pound system – action every animal advocate can take to make a better future for pets