MR PIG’S DEATH AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE RSPCA
The first thing Bob Skinner knew about the kidnap of his best friend was when he came home one evening to find a message on his gate. It said: “Please phone the RSPCA, reference your pig.”
Mr Skinner felt a nasty lurch because Mr Pig – his rare Kunekune pig who lived on a nine-acre island at the back of his Dorset home – was his most cherished companion. They’d been together for 20 years – well beyond the breed’s normal lifespan. Mr Skinner, 63, knew his pig was long in the tooth and had a nasty ulcer on his mouth but he didn’t feel ready to send him to the great sty in the sky just yet. Now, without so much as a by-your-leave, Mr Pig had been taken from him.
So he rang the RSPCA the following day and was promised a visit. He rang again the day after that, increasingly concerned. But it wasn’t until the weekend, three days after the note was left, that the RSPCA man deigned to drop round.
At first he was “all smarmy and lovely”, saying “we’re just looking after your pig”. Then, after a bit more probing, the mask slipped. “We’ve put the pig down,” admitted the inspector in his black, police-style uniform.
According to the RSPCA, the pig was suffering from cancer and had had to be put out of his misery. But according to Mr Skinner, this was a misdiagnosis of a simple ulcer that, though not curable, was certainly not deserving of a death sentence.
How did he feel? “I was absolutely mortified,” Mr Skinner says. “I’m a bloke and blokes don’t cry. But I don’t mind telling you I was crying my eyes out. I’ve been on my own since my divorce and Mr Pig was my only companion. They killed him without even giving me a chance to say goodbye.”
Mr Skinner had originally bought the pig as a Christmas present for his younger daughter. “Now, when did you ever hear of Father Christmas giving a girl a pig? Can’t you think of something else?” he had asked her. But Kimberly was adamant that a Kunekune pig was what she wanted, so a Kunekune pig was what she got.
Mr Pig was a hideously ugly beast. Malodorous, too. “He smelt something terrible,” admits Mr Skinner. “Horrible, yucky. And he was naughty, always wearing an ‘It wasn’t me, Dad’ expression when he’d done something bad, like steal the geese’s eggs. The geese would attack him, but he wouldn’t mind, he’d be laughing his head off. That pig was great.”
Hearing Mr Skinner talking about his beloved pet porker, the very last impression you get is of someone who would ever be deliberately cruel to animals. For years he ran a pet business, which he’d bought for £30,000 and it was so successful that he sold it for £800,000.
“It worked because I understood about the needs of every animal in my care,” he says. “I’ve loved animals since I was four and I knew my stuff.”
But animal cruelty was what the RSPCA decided to prosecute him for, all the same, and last week in the magistrates’ court Mr Skinner was found in breach of animal welfare laws. The judge ruled that there was no reason to impose a ban on him owning animals in the future, as there had been no malicious intent. But he did have to pay the RSPCA’s prosecution costs of £1,000, plus a “victim surcharge” of £15. Mr Skinner doesn’t want to think about his total bill, but believes it must have come to around £9,000.
According to his solicitor, Jamie Foster, this is a case that should never have been brought.
“The guidance for crown prosecutions says that two questions need to be answered satisfactorily,” says Mr Foster. “First, is there enough evidence to make a conviction likely. Second, is it in the public interest to bring this case?”
The answer to the second of those questions, he argues, was “clearly no”.
“Here is a man of 63 with no previous convictions, whose pet pig has quite obviously only lived to such a fabulous old age because it has been so very well looked after. Our courts are massively overstretched, with a huge number of cases to deal with. The cost to the taxpayer for a case like this is going to be at least £10,000. The idea that so much time and money should be squandered on this persecution of a blameless individual is obscene.”
If anyone should be prosecuted, Mr Foster believes, it’s the RSPCA, whose killing of the pig was “completely unlawful”.
They confiscated the pig after a tip-off from the Environment Agency, whose workers had spotted Mr Pig’s ulcer while working on a neighbouring field.
First, the RSPCA intruded upon Mr Skinner’s private land, then they killed the pig while it was in their care – without having first acquired the necessary court order that would have informed Mr Skinner of what they were planning to do his pet.
Not that any of these antics come as a surprise to Mr Foster, whose firm, Foster & Griffin, frequently defends clients in cases brought by the RSPCA.
There is no shortage of work: the RSPCA is the second biggest prosecutor in Britain (after the Crown Prosecution Service) and has been known to spend more than £11 million of its £44 million annual income pursuing people like Bob Skinner and – its favourite target – foxhunts. (In 2012, the RSPCA was censured by a judge for having spent a “staggering” £326,000 pursuing David Cameron’s local hunt, the Heythrop.) It may sound vexatious and unjust, but it can also be very profitable.
“The idea is to get these court cases written up in local newspapers, so that little old ladies can read about how the RSPCA is battling animal cruelty and give them lots of money in their wills,” says Mr Foster.
Of course, if those little old ladies really knew what the RSPCA was doing with their money, they might not be so enthusiastic. For example, as was revealed in one leaked report, the RSPCA “euthanises” around 50,000 pets a year, making it probably Britain’s largest killer of domestic animals.
Too often it does so for the flimsiest of reasons. Last year, for example, it seized a much-loved 16-year-old cat called Claude, which belonged to the Byrnes family in Hertfordshire. According to the RSPCA, the cat was too thin and its hair dangerously long. The family explained that this was because the cat hated being groomed and could only have his fur trimmed when he was asleep. But the RSPCA, on its vet’s advice, had Claude put down all the same. Then, adding insult to injury, the RSPCA issued legal proceedings against the Byrnes for cruelty – only to have the case thrown out on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service.
On another occasion in 2011, it prosecuted a 13-year-old girl for ferreting for rabbits, despite the practice being entirely legal. The RSPCA contended that Amber West, from County Durham, hadn’t killed the rabbit quickly enough – and she was given a £200 fine and a ban on keeping animals. But the conviction was thrown out on appeal and the judge said she was free to go out with her dog and ferret that very day if she wanted.
The RSPCA also prosecuted 16-year-old Sophie Johnson and her mother Tracey, after a neighbour reported that they had allowed their cocker spaniels to get wet and that they had been found “shivering”. Judge Michael Kelley was highly critical of the prosecution. “To criminalise a mother and daughter in this way, who in the previous seven weeks had cared properly for these puppies was wrong,” he said. “To prosecute a 16-year-old in these circumstances was totally inappropriate.”
But this appears to be a common trick of the RSPCA’s, Mr Foster explains. It will prosecute several named members of a family as a form of leverage. “If you plead guilty, we’ll let the others off,” it will say to the father or mother. For similar reasons, it prosecutes the elderly or vulnerable, such as Carl Dunn, an alcoholic with mental health problems, whose dog Ben was injured while trying to protect his owner from local yobs. The RSPCA prosecuted Mr Dunn for “allowing” Ben to be hurt and for not taking him to a vet.
Why does the RSPCA behave in this way? Things started going wrong in the Seventies, when the charity – one of whose founders was a foxhunting man and was originally concerned mainly with the mistreatment of livestock – was hijacked by animal rights activists, led by a psychologist called Richard Ryder.
But its reputation definitely took a turn for the worse when, in 2012, it appointed as its boss Gavin Grant, an aggressive former PR aide to Nick Clegg, who appeared to think the best way to raise the charity’s profile was by ramping up the prosecutions. This backfired. After a string of unfavourable newspaper articles, criticising everything from Mr Grant’s “fat cat” £150,000 salary to the RSPCA’s malicious prosecutions, Mr Grant resigned.
The charity currently has no chief executive and no deputy chief executive – a lack of direction that may explain its mishandling of cases such as that of poor Bob Skinner and his unfortunate pig.
In another case last week, the RSPCA was criticised by a High Court judge over an investigation into dog breeders suspected of causing unnecessary suffering to animals. The trial of Deborah Fuller, 55, and Phil Sheldrake, 59, collapsed when it emerged that RSPCA officers had used the wrong warrant to enter the couple’s Essex property.
Lord Justice Beatson dismissed an application by the RSPCA for judicial review of the decision to close the case – insisting “officers of the state” must respect the restrictions on their powers.
“They want to establish themselves as our animal police,” says Mr Foster. “It’s why they wear those uniforms – which really ought to get them arrested for impersonating police officers, but they get away with it, apparently, because their uniform predates the police’s. It’s why they sometimes apply to magistrate courts for search warrants, though they don’t have the power to do so. What they want, ultimately, is statutory powers – something which, so far, no government has given them.”
And if the RSPCA’s treatment of Mr Skinner and other hapless victims is anything to go by, let us hope that no government ever does.