The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
The RSPCA has gone from charity to activist
That’ll shut them up,” the RSPCA has been chuntering this week, “that’ll close down the criticism, and silence the naysayers.” Fifty years after the last logo tweak and with a little help from creatives JKR and advertising agency AMV BBDO the (exactly) 200-year-old society, launched to prevent cruelty to animals, has a new look.
The letters are now released – uncaged – from their elongated octogen, and they breathe as a hero blue type or a secondary range of colours with a neat full-stop (which can alternate as a little animal). And the advertising flourish is that the letters can morph into the word RESPECT.
“We need people to reappraise us and rethink our place in the world if we are going to face up to the huge challenges facing animals,” said
RSPCA chief executive Chris Sherwood, adding; “our bolder, brighter, welcoming brand aims to inspire everyone, whoever they are, to get involved so that together we can help animals now and for many years to come.”
And there we were thinking that the reason the RSPCA had lost traction with its traditional heartland of supporters – country-dwelling, animal-loving, passionate conservationists – was not because of some old-school logo but because it had long descended into a, er, rabbit hole of political posturing, reckless spending and aggressive litigation.
Or, as Tim Bonner, chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, once put it, an outfit specialising in “smears and bigotry”, of “dysfunctional governance, and especially a radical animal rights element on its council… we all appreciate the work the Society does for animals, but there is no room in animal welfare for a political agenda and bigoted approach”.
Although it was founded on principles of animal welfare, in recent years it grabbed the headlines for becoming the UK’s largest private prosecutor and, in 2017, a committee of MPs accused the RSPCA of “hounding pet owners” and “targeting vulnerable ill, or elderly people”.
Chief executive Sherwood joined the charity in 2018 after his predecessor left in what has been described as “opaque circumstances” (did Jeremy Cooper quit having lost internal battles with animal rights extremists? Was he given a golden goodbye and gagged from ever discussing the RSPCA?). And
Sherwood acknowledged the problems facing the charity this week. “We have great awareness – 93 per cent,” he told
Third Sector magazine, “but, while many people know who we are, the strength in the brand weakens when it comes to how much they like us and drops even more when considering donating.”
Which is a truly wonderful way of saying “everyone’s heard of us, but they all hate us”.
Hence the spending of considerable sums on the rebrand, which included very detailed research, and will incur considerable sums in infrastructure costs (from changing letterheads and signs in everything from buildings to vehicles). Sherwood refuses to divulge the cost but says it was less than one per cent of its animal welfare operations. And will this help to re-secure the love, to reach more people, as Sherwood says, “from all walks of life, particularly the younger generation”?
The question is quickly answered by having a gander at the slick new advert that has gone out with the new branding. Which I’ve done and, with a tendency to be moved to tears, to have my heartstrings pulled, to be brainwashed by brilliant telly, I was feeling pretty veganistic while watching.
The animals are incarcerated (if they’re cows), about to be whizzed into a million pieces by a blade (if they’re bees), kept in a bleak and fetid crowd of thousands (if they’re chickens), soon to be run over (if they’re hedgehogs), swatted by a newspaper (if they’re a spider), locked in a suffocating car (if they’re a dog), boiled alive (if they’re a lobster), muzzled and brutalised at the track (if they’re a greyhound) or trod on (if they’re a snail).
It’s a stunning piece of propaganda where animals, many of whom are given the voices of children, are threatened by brutal humans – from evil restaurant-goers to b----rd lawnmowers – and in which they all plead, nay sing, that all they’re asking
The slick, new advert is a stunning piece of propaganda where animals are threatened by brutal humans
for “is a little respect” (you know the Aretha Franklin song).
As I say, I was coming over all vegan and then the voice of Chris Packham came on as a snail was rescued and I quickly came to my senses. And to the staggering realisation that having spent millions on a new, blue, modern and forward-facing look the RSPCA just couldn’t help themselves and with their first major advert paint a picture of their organisation, quite deliberately, as the bigoted, anti-meateating, anti-lawn-mowing, Left-wing, heads-in-the-clouds, preaching, hectoring, animal rights extremists that, over the years, we’ve all come to know (and hate).