Newcastle - Meeting a need
It’s yet another chilly Spring evening in Newcastle. Darren Lewis arrives with his girlfriend’s small dog Pippa and hands her over to some veterinarians who have set up a temporary stand in Nelson St, tucked next to Eldon Square. Lewis has housing problems, and difficulty accessing care for Pippa. He rushes off for some treatment of his own for a blood clot in his leg, promising to be back soon. “That’s okay,” says vet Rebecca Dobinson (see profile video), who gives Pippa an examination while organiser Michelle Southern looks on.
The scene replays itself on the first Wednesday of every month thanks to Street Paws, a group Southern founded locally three years ago, but which has now spread to cities across the UK.
The goal is to provide health care for the dogs of the homeless, those in vulnerable housing and people who simply can’t afford vet fees. This includes vaccinations, micro-chipping and surgery.
Michelle was a practice manager at a vets and volunteering with a soup kitchen when she noticed the number of people with dogs that lacked care. She started the group and within a year gave up her job to devote herself to it full-time as it “snowballed” with requests for help from other places. In just a few weeks from now, she’ll open the group’s 25th outreach programme in Dublin, making it the first outside the UK. And she is even eyeing France, after a recent trip to Paris. “Once you work with homeless people, you just notice it everywhere,” she says. “The situation is definitely getting worse in the last three years, horrendously so, I think.”
Michelle says many people have dogs before becoming homeless, and some afterwards. “It’s about companionship. The dogs don’t judge them. The dogs give them a purpose in life. They’ll all tell you, if it wasn’t for my dog I wouldn’t be alive.”
In winter, some homeless go into shelters but usually can’t take their dogs, as Michelle estimates fewer than 10 per cent of hostels nationwide will accept pets. Many people stay out in the cold rather than part with their dogs, so Michelle’s recent moves include arranging kennels and shelter accommodation for dogs if their owners go into a hostel or are hospitalised.
Darren returns and talks to the vets about what the 12-year-old Pippa needs, which might include surgery for fatty lumps and damaged teeth. He’ll have to get his girlfriend’s okay, since surgery is a risk for an older dog.
A short while later, he’s with Pippa at the railway station asking passersby for money so he can afford a B&B for the night. Otherwise he’ll sleep rough near the main library. The 39-year-old’s life took a turn for the worse after a car crash and his marriage fell apart. He acknowledges Pippa helps with raising funds, but says she gives him more than that. “It’s company for me. She’s a joy to have. She’s just a joy to be around. She’s so placid. She’s my best buddy, really. I’d be lost without her, wouldn’t I sweetie?” he says, giving her a cuddle.
Street Paws volunteers treat a dog
Darren and Pippa
Taking shelter
A more traditional way of helping animals in need is through shelters, and there are numerous locally. But things are changing.
The area’s largest facility, the Newcastle Dog and Cat Shelter, currently has 21 dogs and 50 cats awaiting adoption at its rehoming centre in Benton. Another group of animals is at the arrivals centre near Jesmond Dene, but the shelter does not release these figures.
Another leading facility, Bryson's Animal Shelter in Gateshead, currently has 17 dogs, along with 37 cats and kittens and 14 other animals including a rabbit, donkeys and horses.
Shelter manager Tracy Holmes oversees 10 part-time and full-time staff, along with more than 100 volunteers, who do everything from feeding, walking the dogs and raising funds. “We’re very well-supported for that, we’re very lucky.”
Other shelters are part of a trend of so-called ‘micro shelters,’ which either take in very small numbers, or go without a base completely and oversee animals that are temporarily fostered in a network of homes. This makes it hard to get overall statistics on the number of unwanted animals in Newcastle and surrounding areas.
If the numbers at the larger shelters like Brysons seem low, that’s because some people are avoiding shelter dogs completely in the quest for the most Instagrammable pet.
Tracy calls it a sign of the times, noting that Brysons used to have a waiting list for dogs, but no longer. Backyard breeders and puppy mills in the Newcastle area are churning out ‘purebred’ dogs to meet the latest fad, especially French bulldogs, despite the serious and costly breathing problems many suffer from.
Websites like Gumtree and Preloved offer French bulldogs for sale locally. One post says nine puppies are available from the “family dog” for a cool £1,500 each. The days when puppies were free to a good home seem to be long gone.
Tracy says she recently saw a Gumtree ad for a lilac French bulldog, a colour not recognised by the Kennel Club, for £14,000. The female dogs churning out litters are “just breeding machines. It’s very sad,” she says.
A shelter will vaccinate, microchip and assess the health and temperament of each dog so that owners get the right pet for themselves, but that care goes out the window with some of the dog breeders.
And when people buy an expensive dog that turns out to have health or behavioural problems and is no longer wanted, the pets do not end up in shelters. “When they’ve paid however much for a bulldog or a Cockapoo or whatever, they want their money back,” says Tracy. So the dogs are sold on, or made to have a litter of puppies which can be sold. “It’s a sad reflection on society, isn’t it?”
Some improvements may be afoot. On May 13th, new legislation was presented in parliament to ban the sale of pets from third parties, starting in early 2020. It is known colloquially as Lucy’s Law, named after a breeding dog that died after years of mistreatment at a Welsh puppy farm.
Beyond Dogs
The changing shelter sector and the fussiness of new pet owners has seen some animal advocates give up on dealing with dogs (and dog owners) completely.
Lynne Ebdale from Pawz for Thought near Sunderland transferred her remaining dogs to Brysons, and calls some owners “feckless and stupid.”
The squawking of seagulls as you approach her shelter is the first indication of how things have changed. It’s now the go-to place in the region for the seabirds, which sometimes fall out of nests when young, or are shot. At an enclosure complete with a pool, it’s clear that some will never fly again. But Lynne can’t bring herself to put them down.
In other enclosures there are crows, pigeons and a pheasant. Injured birds’ broken legs and wings are mended, and those that recover sufficiently can fly away when they’re ready through an opening in the enclosure. That won’t be the case for a particularly aggressive rooster known as Hannibal, who is kept by himself.
The shelter also has 13 cats, although numbers can go up to 40. Some are elderly and recovering from surgery, like one which has just had a thyroid operation. Others have unpopular colouring, such as a pair of healthy black cats who face challenges being adopted, a sign that old superstitions die hard. A shelter volunteer says that at least one shelter she knows of puts down black cats. But Pawz for Thought has a no-kill policy, so the animals will stay here for life if they’re not adopted. As we visit, a new arrival is settling in, possibly after its owner passed away. “Sometimes what happens when someone dies is that the relatives just throw the cat out,” says a volunteer.
In another room, which mostly houses hedgehogs, a pair of small South American rodents known as degus run incessantly on a wheel. Apart from exercise, they also have certain dietary requirements, and some owners soon lose interest. The plight of exotic pets in the UK is the focus of the RSPCA’s latest annual report, released a few weeks ago. More than 4,000 exotic animals were rescued in England and Wales in 2018.
The determination of a small band of volunteers to keep shelters like this one going is a recurring theme in the facilities we visited in a number of countries, with some facing larger struggles than others.
