Charity Mews: The Mayhew Help 73 Animals from Outreach Projects

Hi everyone,

Today we are back with some more insights on the hard work of The Mayhew Animal Home.

Thanks to their efforts many pets were looked after in this cold (and dangerous time for vulnerable animals) of the year.

The Mayhew Help 73 Animals from Outreach Projects

The Mayhew Help 73 Animals from Outreach Projects

The Mayhew Animal Home recently dedicated time and resources to help 73 dogs and cats from our community outreach projects and welfare cases.

For two weeks, The Mayhew’s Vet Team have been committed to our Animal Welfare Officers’ outreach initiatives by focusing and providing preventative veterinary care to the animals from those projects, including neutering, vaccinations, flea and worming treatments, and microchipping.

Our Animal Welfare Officers and Vet Team helped 73 animals in need including:

  • Three dogs belonging to homeless people
  • Three dogs that have come from illegal breeders – neutered the dogs, which will prevent further sale of puppies to pet shops
  • Three Pick & Snip dog welfare cases – including a dog being used to breed for money
  • 17 Trap, Neuter and Return cases – from three feral colonies
  • 44 Pick & Snip cats – we collected the pets, health checked and neutered them as well as de-fleaing, worming and vaccinating them
  • Three ‘on going vulnerable owner’ welfare cases

community-outreach

Every day our Animal Welfare Officers work in communities across London reaching out to and assisting pet owners, the homeless, the elderly and vulnerable. For those pets that need urgent and routine preventative veterinary care and treatment, they are brought to our on-site Community Vet Clinic where our team of vets and vet nurses are on-hand to treat, neuter and care for them.

For the past two and a half years our Animal Welfare Officers have looked after 90-year-old Valerie’s two cats, Harry and Bobby. Her two cats were suffering from a serious flea anaemia condition which caused baldness and severe discomfort. Eventually Valerie, who is house-bound and disabled, contacted us and our Animal Welfare Officers immediately visited her to offer help and advice. Since then our Officers regularly visit Valerie, pick up her two cats and bring them to our Community Vet Clinic where they are given health checks, worming and de-fleaing and the necessary preventative care to ensure they remain in tip-top health. After treatment they are returned to Valerie on the same day.

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The Mayhew also works with several organisations including The Salvation Army and Spitalfields Crypt Trust, which offer support to homeless people in London. Our Officers are on hand to support and provide advice for homeless dog owners including free general health checks, microchipping and delivering the dogs food and coats.

One of the homeless’ dogs we helped during the two weeks is a Staffy dog called Toffee who lives with his owner at a Salvation Army hostel in East London, where our Animal Welfare Officers regularly visit and offer assistance. We brought him into our Vet Clinic for neutering, flea and worming treatment and a health check.

We also neutered a cat that had come into us as a stray and had gone missing for four days, most probably because she was unneutered and looking for a mate. We reunited the cat with her grateful owner and offered to neuter the cat as part of our free Pick & Snip service, which is unique to The Mayhew and we are the only charity to run this service. The project aims to help and encourage people who have been unable to neuter their cat due to cost, disability, apathy or transport availability. As the cat was eight-months-old, the owner incorrectly thought that she was too young to be neutered. Our Animal Welfare Officers advised her that cats can be neutered from four months of age to stop them having litters at such a young age.

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Our Officers also run a Trap, Neuter and Return (TNR) programme for feral cats in London to help control and contain the cat population. During the fortnight, our Officers brought in 17 feral cats from three colonies to our Vet Clinic for a health check and neutering. Our work to neuter cats that live in feral colonies is vital to stem the numbers of kittens born and adding to the already huge feral population in London. In just seven years, one female cat and her offspring can produce 370,000 kittens, so neutering is essential to ensure that the cat population is proactively controlled. It is also vital that they are neutered and health checked to prevent further breeding and spreading of diseases.

The Mayhew’s Animal Welfare Manager, Zoe Edwards, said: “At The Mayhew we strive to tackle the companion animal welfare crisis from every possible angle. That’s why we provide ongoing support to pet owners in difficulty, respond to animal welfare issues out in the community and deliver a range of initiatives including Trap, Neuter, Return and the Pick & Snip schemes. We feel educating the public on animal welfare and the importance of responsible pet ownership is vital to ensuring that animals are not left abandoned or neglected.”

“The Vet Team worked extremely hard to help us make an impact on helping some of the animals from our community projects by neutering and treating them for sickness and injury – we can’t thank them enough for doing such an amazing job.”

Our Head Vet, Dr. Ursula Goetz, added: “Neutering is one of the hallmarks of responsible pet ownership. Neutering also improves your pets’ health by reducing or eliminating risks of certain cancers and other diseases. They are also less likely to develop unwanted behaviours such as roaming, spraying and fighting with other dogs or cats, that’s why it is so important to get your cat or dog neutered.”

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“Over those two weeks we were dedicated to our Animal Welfare Officers’ community outreach projects and welfare cases, to help as many animals as possible as quickly as possible. This just goes to show how important the community outreach projects are and how many animals in need we can help and neuter from those projects alone. We treated and helped 73 dogs and cats in those two weeks, which is a great achievement and huge success.”

We are an independent charity that receives no lottery or government funding. We rely entirely on public donations. Our Animal Welfare Officers’ and Vet Team help thousands of animals every year through our community and education projects and initiatives such as Trap, Neuter, Return and Pick & Snip schemes. You could help us do so much more by considering a donation to help them continue with their vital work and help more animals escape a life of neglect, abandonment and cruelty.

For #GivingTuesday this year, you can text to donate to support The Mayhew and all the work that we do, simply text TEXT29 £3, £5 or £10 to 70070.

Alternatively you can make a donation online by visiting our website www.themayhew.org/donate or calling 020 8206 5870. 

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35 thoughts on “Charity Mews: The Mayhew Help 73 Animals from Outreach Projects

  1. Lavinia Ross says:

    I wish there were more facilities like Mayhew. It is wonderful to read about what they are doing for animals in their community.

    Wishing you all the best this Holiday Season, Marc.

  2. Pingback: Charity Mews: The Mayhew Help 73 Animals from Outreach Projects — Katzenworld | My Health Selections

  3. angela1313 says:

    Helping the elderly and indigent keep their pets is a truly special service. The mental health benefits of animal companionship is well known and these groups need a lift more than many. This is an outstanding organization.

  4. Diana says:

    Love the stories of the people who are homeless or in need, that have pets. That could be an article in itself. They too have pets that are loved. How wonderful that they too could be helped.

    It draws my attention to what I believe to be a health care crisis with animals.
    I see the same issues with people unable to get health care for their health issues because of the rising costs of insurance and health care, unaffordable to the majority of us. In a system that has a billion dollar business on sickness and illness.

    I see the same problem in pet health care.
    Unaffordable to many.
    Most people cannot afford the thousands of dollars of critical care, let alone the regular maintence care that is required for our pets. With vet visit cost alone costing most people’s pay that takes several hours or even days to earn.
    (Remember the average person/family today earns less than $40-50k/yr.)

    Even responsible pet owners avoid certain costs and health care for their pets, because it is unattainable. OR, delay care because of the astronomical costs that keep rising in the pet health care business.

    Again, thriving on sickness and illness.

    Costs should be going into preventative medicine, not an ongoing feed into the sickness business.

    Didn’t mean this to be a rant, but it is all around us, the animals and people in need of health care that are unable to afford it.

    • Marc-André says:

      Unfortunately you are very right on these issues in many countries. And even here in the UK many pet insurances are going up in price or start having clauses that makes them not as good as they used to be. Luckily there are still some very good pet insurances around out here like Agria that are about ensuring pets can get the care they deserve.

        • Crystal Stewart says:

          I don’t know to much about Pet Insurance maybe because it was never offered with the other insurances. Diana, you say we don’t have that here. Where’s here? My former boss had pet insurance. When she took her dogs places with her, she would actually buckle them up. I have never heard good things about pet insurance. Maybe we don’t here about Pet Insurance because of the price like Marc-Andre says.

  5. Robert Walsh says:

    The Vet Team worked extremely hard to help us make an impact on helping some of the animals from our community projects by neutering and treating them for sickness and injury

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