What’s gone wrong with the RSPCA?
Once it was a trusted byword for animal welfare. As the charity loses a third chief executive in five years, how it’s been hijacked by zealots more interested in the rights of animals than humans
THIS week has been tricky for Daphne Harris, the 72year-old grandmother who is nominally in charge of Britain’s wealthiest animal charity, the RSPCA. On Monday, her troubled £140 million organisation admitted that it had parted company with its chief executive Jeremy Cooper, in mysterious circumstances, just 14 months after he took the job.
Mr Cooper left days before what promises to be a fractious annual general meeting, and became the third CEO to go in just five years.
His departure was not a happy one. Indeed, as we shall see, it is being linked to friction with a clique of animal rights extremists on the RSPCA’s governing council, which Mrs Harris chairs.
Two days after Mr Cooper left, a second scandal came along. This one struck much closer to home for Mrs Harris. According to the front page of a popular newspaper, the RSPCA has paid almost £1 million in recent years on the purchase, conversion and running of a small cattery.
It’s located at a rambling semi-detached property two doors down from the cottage where Mrs Harris lives in rural Kent.
The full-time occupant of this desirable residence is one Katie Toms. Not only does she live there, rent-free, with a husband and child, she also happens to be Mrs Harris’s daughter.
In addition, Ms Toms benefits from the use of a £40,000 4x4 vehicle, along with an £18,000 salary courtesy of the RSPCA for running the cattery, which is open just 18 hours per week.
Around £950,000, including the 2011 purchase cost of £465,000, has already been spent on the facility. The RSPCA says it has re-homed around 1,300 cats and contributed towards vet bills for 1,600 more, and the house has gone up in value. Still, this equates to a cost of over £325 per animal helped.
It’s an eye-watering sum. And while Mrs Harris insists that she was not involved in her daughter’s appointment, some think it an unconventional use of charity funds.
The Charity Commission certainly seems uneasy about the whole thing. It is ‘urgently addressing concerns’ about the cattery in order to determine whether it needs to be formally investigated.
If that weren’t awkward enough, Wednesday saw another dramatic announcement from the watchdog. In a virtually unprecedented move, the Commission said that the RSPCA is to be placed under formal observation as a result of Jeremy Cooper’s departure, because its governance has fallen ‘ below what we expect in a modern charity’.
The move, it said, was taken to address ‘concerns’ over dwindling ‘public confidence’ in the highprofile organisation and its management. It follows a string of scandals that have tarnished the reputation of the 193-year- old charity, which was founded by the anti- slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, and counts Her Majesty the Queen as its patron.
The RSPCA was once a cherished institution that symbolised our status as a nation of animal lovers. It was historically known for laudable, if somewhat unglamorous, animal welfare work.
Today, however, it seems just as likely to make headlines for political tub-thumping, aggressive litigation, and unsavoury fundraising scandals as it is for its commendable day job of looking after mistreated pets, stray dogs and sickly hedgehogs. Recently accused by a committee of MPs of ‘hounding pet owners’ and ‘targeting vulnerable, ill, or elderly people’, it has become the UK’s largest private prosecutor, spending around £8 million every year dragging people to court — often with disastrous results.
Among the many high-profile victims of this policy was the Byrnes family of Tring, Hertfordshire. Their elderly cat Claude was seized and put down against their wishes in 2013, in what an official report later dubbed a ‘travesty’.
The family, which was then threatened with prosecution, finally got a grovelling apology last year for the RSPCA’s ‘disproportionate and insensitive’ conduct.
The charity had repeatedly lied about Claude’s death in what the family’s lawyer called a ‘disgraceful attempt to besmirch the Byrneses’ reputation in the Press in order to salvage its own’.
Then there was a costly hoo-ha involving the Heythrop Hunt (which then prime minister David Cameron had ridden with), during which the RSPCA spent what a magistrate called a ‘staggering’ £326,000 prosecuting the Hunt for chasing foxes.
At the end of what many regarded as a politically motivated show trial, the Hunt was found guilty, but fined a mere £6,800. To the growing disquiet of the public, MPs and the Charity Commission, some prosecutions have carried a human (as well as financial) cost, with a string of vulnerable men and women committing suicide while facing investigation by the RSPCA.
The charity has also threatened farmers who allow the Government to cull badgers on their land — to prevent the spread of deadly bovine tuberculosis — with being ‘named and shamed’ for selling milk ‘soaked in badger blood’.
Finally, Daphne Harris was dragged before MPs last year to explain why the RSPCA had used ‘exploitative and unethical fundraising methods’ to finance its initiatives. It had been caught buying and selling the personal data of its supporters, including a dementia sufferer.
In a staggering admission of incompetence for the Chair of an organisation which employs around 1,600 people, Harris said she ‘did not know that this had happened’.
All of which brings us back to this week’s headline news: the sudden and mysterious departure of the RSPCA’s £ 150,000- a- year chief executive, Jeremy Cooper.
Formerly the head of the charity’s ‘Freedom Food’ label, which certifies ethically farmed meat products, he arrived in the top job last year, promising to repair the RSPCA’s tattered reputation and reverse dramatic declines in membership. (Today, it has fewer than 20,000 members, down from 30,000 in the Nineties. The RSPB, in contrast, boasts more than 1 million.)
Shortly after taking office, Cooper admitted that the RSPCA had become too partisan and adver-
‘He refused to be their puppet ... they hated it’
sarial, telling an interviewer that fox-hunting prosecutions would be ‘very unlikely’ under his stewardship because ‘we are going to be a lot less political’.
This pragmatic approach delighted the Charity Commission, whose chairman William Shawcross has criticised the RSPCA’s ‘ zeal for prosecutions’. However, it caused instant outrage on the RSPCA’ s 25-member ruling council, which Mrs Harris chairs.
Dominated, as we shall see, by a cabal of militant animal rights campaigners, the powerful body promptly slapped him down, insisting that the RSPCA’s prosecution policy would be unchanged.
Over the ensuing months, the council frustrated several efforts by Mr Cooper to reform the charity’s management and policies. They also made it tricky for him to select preferred candidates to fill vacant senior executive roles.
‘The council is dysfunctional,’ an acquaintance of Mr Cooper says. ‘It’s been infiltrated by people who hold frankly extreme views: stuff like banning horse racing, shutting down pet shops, and making Halal slaughter illegal.
‘Jeremy refused to be their puppet and do everything they wanted. Instead, he showed independence, for example instructing field officers to focus on “prevention rather than prosecution”, and educate vulnerable people who mistreat animals, rather than drag them to court. They hated it.’
Matters apparently came to a head on Tuesday, May 30, when Cooper left in circumstances that remain highly opaque.
A senior RPSCA source tells me he arrived at a scheduled appraisal meeting that day to see Mrs Harris and three senior council officers,
along with someone unexpected: an external employment lawyer.
‘They told him it was time to go,’ says the source. ‘He was offered a large financial settlement in return for agreeing not to go to an employment tribunal, and not to speak publicly about why he’d gone.’
The source insists that Cooper was paid a ‘high five- or low sixfigure sum’, and added: ‘You can judge for yourself whether that’s a sensible use of money people donate to the RSPCA.’
This version of events dovetails, in part, with one reported by the website Third Sector, which covers charity issues.
Third Sector claims that Cooper was unceremoniously ‘asked to leave’ — in other words, sacked.
However, the RSPCA insists that’s inaccurate. It claims that Cooper left voluntarily and ‘amicably’ to become a freelance business consultant. However, it refuses to explain why — if this is the case — he wasn’t required to work his notice period.
What’s more, the charity won’t confirm whether any of its funds were spent giving him a pay-off, or whether he signed a so- called ‘gagging’ agreement. Whatever occurred, the shambles highlights the dysfunctional nature of the charity’s ruling council, and the hardline views of its members. They include, for example, Peta WatsonSmith, a vegan extremist who, in a 2014 interview that outraged the Jewish community, described farming as ‘a holocaust going on behind closed doors’.
Also on the council is Margaret Baker, who recently circulated a petition to ban Halal slaughter (the method by which Muslims kill animals by slitting their throats), writing on her Facebook page: ‘The world has moved on. It’s no longer necessary to inflict suffering in order to get food.’
Baker has called for animal abuse to be ‘as punishable’ as child abuse, and for police dogs to be given similar legal status to officers.
Then there is Paul Baxter, a driving instructor from Newport, South Wales, whose social media carries a Ricky Gervais quote on country sports: ‘I don’t understand why loads of inbreds get the f*****g horn when they see a fox cowering in fear.’
Another Corbyn supporter in the ranks is Robert Baylis, who has campaigned for The Sun newspaper to be outlawed in his native Norwich because he dislikes its coverage of immigration.
Baylis has variously lobbied against the Grand National horse race and called for bans on pet shops selling puppies, and on fur being worn at London Fashion Week. His social media accounts include photos of him being arrested at animal rights demonstrations in the Eighties.
Elsewhere, we have Jane Tredgett, a vegan who has circulated petitions to ‘stop the Queen killing bears to make busby hats’, and Christine Beaumont-Kerridge, a supporter of Vegan Outreach, which campaigns to ‘move society away from eating animals and their products’, and who has campaigned to ban foie gras, grouse shooting, and traps which use glue to catch mice and rats.
Sitting alongside them are Joseph Piccione, who persuaded the RSPCA to withdraw from Crufts because of concerns over pedigree dog breeding; Richard Booker, an anti-hunting activist who calls people who follow the sport ‘a bunch of thugs’; Jose Parry, a veteran anti-vivisection campaigner; and Dan Lyons, an academic from Sheffield who wants pet owners to sit exams, and is chief executive of the Centre for Animals and Social Justice, a charity exploring ways to represent animals in Parliament.
If you think they sound like a rum lot, you’re not alone. But, crucially, their domination of the RSPCA council turns out to have happened by design, rather than by accident, in a classic case of ‘entryism’, whereby extremists gain control of large organisations by getting seats on the small but powerful committees that control them. This particular infiltration began in 1970, back when the RSPCA devoted almost all of its huge financial resources to the business of looking after domestic pets and injured wild animals.
This focus upset militant members of the animal rights lobby, which was then in its infancy. They believed the charity’s funds would be better spent supporting their campaigns on vivisection, hunting, the fur trade, and factory farming.
Several duly founded an organisation called the RSPCA Reform Group, and began seeking election to the council.
Because only a small proportion of the Society’s members bother to vote in such ballots, they were soon able to gain seats on the body — and some have been there ever since.
Perhaps the best known is Richard Ryder, who has been described as the ‘founding father’ of the animal rights movement and coined the term ‘speciesism’ — which is effectively what he regards as discrimination against ‘non-human animals’.
Elected to the Council in 1972, he was also director of the Political Animal Lobby which donated £1 million to the Labour Party before the 1997 General Election to secure the ban on fox hunting.
At a time when the RSPCA has been instructed by the Charities Commission to reform, its coming AGM will see another five members elected, several of whom are likely to be allies of Ryder.
The hardliners’ domination of the council, so typical of the manner in which the Left has taken hold of Britain’s public bodies, doesn’t just impact on RSPCA policies.
It also, as this week’s events show, seriously affects its ability to function properly and work with sensible senior executives such as Jeremy Cooper.
Though modern charity trustees are encouraged to serve short terms of between three and five years, many of the RSPCA’s have been there for decades, sometimes leaving then returning for three or four stints.
Though the largest moderncharities have small boards (the National Trust boasts just a dozen trustees) stuffed with politicians, captains of industry, public sector chiefs and other high-fliers, the RSPCA’s vast council has almost no one with any experience running multi- million- pound organisations.
The Chair, Daphne Harris, for example, is a mother of three who has run a local RSPCA branch and rescue centre in her free time. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but hardly a qualification to lead the board of a complex charity with thousands of employees and hundreds of millions in assets.
With this toxic mixture of politicisation and incompetence at the top, it’s hardly surprising that the organisation should lurch from disaster to disaster.
The Charity Commission, for its part, now hopes that ‘ improvements’ will be made to the RSPCA’s governance with ‘necessary urgency’ to prevent it having to take over day-to-day running of the entire organisation.
But don’t hold your breath: for as long as it continues to be run by a cabal of obsessive animal rights activists, Britain’s wealthiest animal charity will inevitably remain its most dysfunctional.
A toxic mix of politics and incompetence