Living with pet hates: The cat-in-the-bin saga is the thin end of the animal cruelty wedge

Published on Saturday 28 August 2010 09:50

SENIOR inspector Billy Linton climbs into his sleek black van and checks his BlackBerry for the first job of the day. Parked outside the Scottish SPCA Glasgow Animal Rescue and Rehoming Centre on a sunny Friday morning, the sound of barking dogs is unmistakable.

• Some of the dogs at the Scottish SPCA Animal Rescue and Rehoming Centre in Glasgow. Pic: Ian Rutherfiod

Yet Linton, with the practised air of a man who spends more than his fair share of time in the company of canines, ignores the racket to read the details of his assignment. His jaw tenses. "It's a possible case of cat cruelty," he says, starting the engine.

Cat cruelty is something the British public has become rather familiar with recently. Last week Mary Bale, a 45 year old woman from Coventry, was caught on film picking up a cat by the scruff of the neck, putting it in a wheelie bin, and closing the lid. It was trapped there for 15 hours before being rescued.

The footage was posted by the cat's owners on YouTube, and the resulting furore turned Bale into a national hate figure overnight. She fled her home, was given police protection, and several social networking pages dubbing her 'the cat bin lady' were set up demanding she be prosecuted. The matter is now in the hands of the RSPCA, which will investigate the case alongside local police officers. Bale meanwhile has described the incident as "a split second of misjudgement that has got completely out of control".

Split second or not, Bale's actions have highlighted the grubby underbelly of a nation that prides itself on being full of animal lovers. Indeed, for all the public outrage, Bale is far from the only person who will be investigated for cruelty to animals this week. Just ask Inspector Linton. As a senior area inspector for the SSPCA he deals with between five and ten cases of possible animal mistreatment in any working day. Last year, he and the other 60 or so Scottish SPCA inspectors across Scotland handled a total of 41,257 rescues and incidents, which resulted in 197 cases lodged with the procurator fiscal, and ten life bans on owning animals.

In his six years with the association Linton has seen it all, from abandoned kittens to neglected dogs, beaten horses to underfed pythons. His job is to assess situations and take the necessary action, whether it be providing some advice about animal care, or taking the animal away for emergency veterinary treatment.

Driving to his first call-out, Linton recalls one horrific case in Glasgow in which he was called out to a house where some animals had been abandoned.

"Two cats and a dog had been left in the house for four days and it was a mess," he says."There was faeces everywhere, they had no food, and the only drinking water they had was out the toilet. Then we went into the bedroom and found two anacondas, two Californian king snakes, and a lizard. The owners had disappeared."

All of the animals were eventually rehomed, and the owners prosecuted for animal abandonment. But theirs is far from an isolated case. Last year the Scottish SPCA rehomed 6,092 dogs, cats, rabbits and other animals, and cared for 14,259 animals in total. Some were runaways, many were strays. Others had suffered unimaginable abuse.

Bale's actions - throwing a cat in a bin - are not, it turns out, even original. Linton's colleague, Senior Inspector Nicki Scott, tells a harrowing story about a puppy who was thrown down the rubbish chute of a multi-storey flat.

Fortunately the puppy's life was saved, and the dog, a Border collie, was eventually adopted by a member of staff at the Cardonald rehoming centre. The person who threw the dog away received three months in prison.

Back on the road, Linton pulls up at the pet shop where the possible case of cat cruelty has been reported. Someone has phoned the animal hotline claiming two tiny kittens are being kept in a small cage next to an open door with no food or water, and that they have dirty noses, indicating some sort of infection. Linton has a good look at the kittens, examining them thoroughly and pointing out that one does indeed have some nasal discharge, and are being kept too close to the door. The pet shop owner is defensive, telling Linton that the kittens have just been fed, and that he took them from the owners because they had threatened to throw the kittens in the river.

Linton offers the owner some advice on treatment, asks the owner to move the cage and tells him that he must get the kittens to a vet before they can be sold. Meanwhile the two tiny creatures play happily together, oblivious to the discussion taking place around them.

Back in the van Linton marks the case as "advised". He will come back to check that the necessary care has happened, and keep an eye on the kittens' progress. Then it's straight on to the next job. Someone has complained that two dogs are being kept in a shed for 24 hours a day and are constantly barking. Arriving, it becomes clear that a police raid has recently taken place on the site and the dogs - an Akita and an American Bulldog - were being used as guard dogs. Linton can hear the dogs barking inside the shed, but the doors are locked and there is no one around. He eventually tracks down a number for the owner and arranges to meet him there that evening, when the owner will be coming to feed the dogs.

"The chances are, given that they're guard dogs with a job to do, that they're probably being well looked after," says Linton. "But I can't close any case until I've seen the animal myself.If I didn't do that, I couldn't live with myself."

Back outside, there's time for a quick look at Linton's kit - an impressive arsenal of animal wrangling tools. Open up the back of an SSPCA inspector's van and you'll find mobile kennels and bavariums, boxes of dog food ("if we can't get access somewhere and we can see a dog is hungry we'll open the letterbox and empty the food in" he explains), climbing gear for accessing remote wild birds' nests, and something called a swan bag, a fold-out piece of equipment used for transporting the birds that Linton dubs "the hard men of the animal kingdom."

Although cats and dogs take up the bulk of Linton's time, he deals with everything from birds of prey to farm animals. A former keeper at Glasgow Zoo, he also has a background handling exotic animals and is often called in to deal with unusual creatures across the country. Last year, he travelled to Orkney to collect seven marmoset monkeys following the arrest of Jack Campbell, the primate collector dubbed the "monkey man", who was eventually found guilty of the murder of his neighbour Bob Rose on the island of Sanday. And just last week, Linton found himself abseiling down a 100ft cliff face to rescue a peregrine falcon whose feet had become bound up in twine.

But by far the most disturbing piece of Linton's kit is his camera. Flicking through the digital images are pictures of unimaginable suffering that he has taken for evidence that may be used in court: dogs so thin their ribs and spines stick out; cats trapped in rooms with dirty hypodermic needles; 12-ft snakes bundled into tiny, airless boxes; horses with bloody eye infections; a Lhasa Apso dog whose backside was so densely covered in its own faeces and urine that it had suffered ammonia burns.

Happily, many of these animals can be successfully treated. At the Cardonald rehoming centre, the charity's head vet Ian Futter, who sees more than 8,000 animals a year on the centre's veterinary treatment table, says that many make a remarkable recovery. "Quite often it's the ones who look the worst that can come out the best," he says. "In cases of neglect when they've suffered something like a skin infection, if you give them a bit of TLC and can treat their medical problems, they often turn the corner quite quickly."

"That's the thing that gets me about animals," says Linton quietly. "They get kicked by someone, yet two minutes later that same person can sit down and call their name, and the animal will still come and give them affection."

The Scottish SPCA's homes are often full to bursting. Just last week, a man arrived at the Cardonald centre with a cat he said he couldn't keep. Staff advised him they couldn't take the animal that day as they were full, but if he could keep it a few more days and come back, they would find it a space.Later that day an employee found the cat, still in its cardboard carrier, left outside the centre gates.

The BlackBerry bleeps into life again and Linton is off to another job. Police have reported that a dog is being kept in a cement-floored room for 12 hours a day with no access to food or water and want an inspector to investigate.

The dog is hyperactive, running over the furniture and constantly jumping up on people. The owner, who has recently started a new job, admits to keeping the dog in the room when at work, but says it always has access to food and water. Linton gives some advice on care for the dog, foremost being the suggestion that it should have a long walk every day to get exercise, and needs to go to obedience classes. The owner is polite and grateful, but Linton says not everyone is so friendly.

"I was threatened with a hatchet on a job once," he says. "People can get very upset if you say you're going to take their animal away. It's very difficult for them to admit to themselves that they've been mistreating an animal and quite often they don't even realise that's what they're doing."

Perhaps that is why Bale, Britain's newest hate figure, has struggled to come to terms with the furore surrounding her own actions. And in one interview she commented that she couldn't understand the hoopla, remarking, "it's only a cat".

Back in the van on his way back to the centre, Linton says that's why inspectors like him believe they perform such an important role. "Animals can't speak up for themselves," he says. "That's what I'm here for. I'm here to give an animal a voice."